Earth Losing its Balance Half a Billion Years Ago

Discussion in 'General Science & Technology' started by tamkinrules, May 26, 2009.

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  1. tamkinrules how troublesome... Registered Senior Member

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    Hey, this is something cool I found in this website. It says that half a billion years ago, the earth's evolution cycle was 20 times faster because of this. I don't completely understand it. There are also a bunch of other articles on that page, feel free to talk about those too.Here it is.

    PS: I would more like it if you talk about the whole earth losing its balance thing since I'm more interested in that. ^_^
     
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  3. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    I doubt it. Dawkins doubts the idea of a Cambrian explosion too.
     
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  5. Oli Heute der Enteteich... Registered Senior Member

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    Any site that uses Edgar Cayce as reference material doesn't deserve any credence.
    And anyone who takes such a site to be worthwhile deserves little more.
     
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  7. guthrie paradox generator Registered Senior Member

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    The earth can't really lose its balance, because it isn't balancing on something.
     
  8. Tnerb Banned Banned

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    The earth never lost its balance. Show evidence now plz ty.
     
  9. Enmos Valued Senior Member

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    Eh ?

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    Source ?
     
  10. D H Some other guy Valued Senior Member

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    Every once in a while site that use Edgar Cayce as reference material do deserve some credence. Or rather, some sites that use Edgar Cayce as reference material will occasionally glom onto a valid scientific hypothesis that suits their twisted ideas if certain aspects of the hypothesis are ignored and if one ignores the fact that it is a hypothesis, not a theory.

    The paper in question: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/277/5325/541
    Kirschvink claims evidence for an "inertial interchange true polar wander event" that made the lithosphere and mantle rotate "about 90 degrees in response to an unstable distribution of the planet's moment of inertia."

    A more recent lay article on a similar hypothesized event:
    http://www.physorg.com/news75725492.html


    My take: This is not quite accepted science, but it is anything but lunatic fringe science. That the people working on it come from very prestigious universities (e.g., Caltech, Princeton) and are publishing in the most prestigious journals of all (i.e., Science, Nature, PNAS) and the top journals in geology lends more than a bit of credence to these hypothesized events.

    It's important to remember that what is very fast to a paleogeologist is painstakingly slow to a snail: 4 or so degrees per million years. That's only about 3 or so times as fast as the polar motion that we *know* is occurring now. A plot of the current mean polar motion and polhody since 1900:

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    Polar motion is scientific fact, not hypothesis, not theory. The difference between what is happening now and what happened during those events is that the motion during those events was 3 or so times the current mean motion, and the motion during those events kept on going and going and going. There is no reason to think that the current polar motion will keep on following the current trend for another 14,999,900 years.
     
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