Today we will play a detective to solve a question that confuses many geologists, why is the earth less than 1.1 billion years of records? A century ago, the indigenous Hopi people of North America passed on this period of history from generation to generation, the hopi civilization has experienced four worlds, the first world is called Tokpela, destroyed by the fire, the second world is called Topka (topka) destroyed by the ice disaster, the third world is called Kasskara, destroyed by the super war between prehistoric civilizations, and the fourth world is our current world.
Speaking of which, would you think we were going to tell the story of the Hopi people today? Actually not, but it contains the answer to our story today, which will be revealed later, and we will tell today's story first.
In 1869, geologist Powell led a team of ten people to explore the Grand Canyon. Soon after the expedition entered the Grand Canyon, the Chicago Tribune made a headline that Powell's team was killed in the canyon, and the entire army was destroyed, and none of them survived. Everyone sighed, because Powell was called a one-armed man, a legend. He lost his right arm in the Civil War, but was the bravest explorer. Everyone admired it, and he led the team to explore the landscape in the Midwest, and got first-hand information that all geologists at that time did not have. This time the disaster is really too much for everyone to regret. Who knew that three months later, Powell with long hair suddenly appeared in front of the public, it turned out that the death was just a oolong, the media misreported, Powell and his team were safe and sound, and everyone was relieved.
But Powell, who had completed his expedition, was less excited. He looked confused because of a puzzle he had encountered during the expedition that he could not solve. This is not only his personal confusion, but also the confusion of all geologists more than 150 years later, let us turn the time back to July 1869.
Orwell was standing on the banks of the Colorado River, and he looked up at the towering cliffs, and he saw a large patch of hard crystalline rock, mostly granite and schist, arranged in a vertical direction. Powell found that on top of these crystalline rock formations, one layer is a 305-meter-thick red sandstone belt. These sandstones do not look unusual, and like sandstones elsewhere, they are stacked horizontally layer by layer. Powell took a look at it, and his geologist's intuition told him that the formation was not normal, so he and his team began to measure the thickness of the crystalline rock formation, and when he measured it, he knew that something was wrong. Because according to estimates, this part of the rock should have been three kilometers thick, but after the actual measurement, it was found that it was only 150 meters, which was more than 2,000 meters less. This requires an explanation of the knowledge of geology, which has four basic principles, called superposition, proto-horizontality, lateral continuity, intersection and cutting relationships. It sounds unpredictable, but it can be explained by the following big vernacular.
The rocks that make up the earth's surface, the part of the earth's crust, are layered on top of each other, and the ages are closely linked, like the rings of trees, one layer pressed against the other. The old rock formations are below. The young rock formations are on top, and the chronology should be very clear, but the rock formations in Colorado are very strange. Powell judged that the crystalline rock formations below were far older than the red sandstone layers above. But the problem is in the two words far away from the ancient. Because between these two layers is missing more than 2,000 meters of rock layers that should have existed, it is reasonable to say that there should be a rock layer that is old between the bottom layer and the surface layer, but in fact there is none, just like the memory of the earth's history has lost a large piece of it out of thin air. Powell was very confused, could it be that this supposed rock formation disappeared out of thin air, and the phenomenon of the earth's amnesia was only found in the Grand Canyon of North America? After consulting the data, he found that this phenomenon had actually been discovered as early as the 18th century.
James Hutton, the father of modern geology, discovered a similar phenomenon on the cliffs of the British coast, and he proposed the term Hutton non-integration to explain this phenomenon. Simply put, the sediment of the rock layer breaks in the normal geological process, and the two superimposed rock layers of the old and new confuse the normal layering, so that the age of the rock is abnormally different. Because of millions of years of geological movement, it is certainly not a uniform step-by-step process, there are many random and accidental events, this place is presented, the place is uplifted with new mountains, and there will be a situation that will confuse the rock formations. Although this theory can partially solve Powell's confusion, he is still too rough, and there are many specific confusions that cannot be explained.
Because in Powell's view, the age span of the two rock formations on the cliffs of the Grand Canyon is too large, how big is it? He didn't know, because in his time, the types and ageing of rocks were not very mature. But in Powell's experience, the gap is certainly not small, just like a person who rubs from ten years old to 40 years old at once, and there is no intermediate process at all. Powell could only borrow Hutton's concept and give this strange phenomenon a name, called stratigraphic large-angle non-integration, leaving the problem for posterity to solve.
More than 100 years later, geologists in the 20th century have been able to use radioactive element dating to determine the age of rocks. They found that Powell's speculation was not wrong, that the crystalline rock he observed was indeed very old, the youngest of which was almost 1.7 billion years old, while this red sandstone layer was very young, and the oldest part of this part was only 550 million years old, 17:5.5, which means that the middle difference was. More than a billion years old rock formations do not. What drives geologists even more maddened is that this large-scale non-integration is not only present in the Grand Canyon, but is spread across the globe. Thus, modern geologists have proposed various hypotheses to explain the doubt left by Powell.
There are three more popular ones, first, Snowball says, second, Supercontinent Death says, and third, the combined effect of multiple events says. Looking at the first type of snowball, this hypothesis is established on the premise that the earth is a large snowball full of glaciers at a certain time, and geologists assume that the glaciers at that time can be divided into two kinds, one called wet glaciers, which will flow, and the other called cold glaciers, which are immovable. Wet glaciers nibble at the ground due to gravity as they flow, like a giant pear turning the ground over, forming deep valleys and fjords, like the Alaskan coastline.
In 2018, the team led by Professor Keller of Dartmouth College believed that the snowball theory was possible because from 717 million years ago to 580 million years ago, called the Precambrian Ice Age, the wet glaciers of this era had the ability to cut the surface and remove layers of rock three to five kilometers thick. So this snowball model seems to explain the amnesia of the earth, but the rock formations that should exist cannot find this phenomenon. But here is a problem, we mentioned earlier, the oldest age of the formation of new sandstone layers is also 550 million years ago, but 580 million years ago, the snowball handling ended, there are more than 30 million years of rock formation blanks, so where did the more than 30 million years of rock formations without glaciers go? This big pit snowball hypothesis can't be filled. Let's look at the second hypothesis, the supercontinent death theory.
This theory assumes that 1 billion years ago, there was a supercontinent on Earth called Rodinia, which included almost all of the continental plates on Earth today. According to current research, most of the thermal energy from the Earth's interior is released through mountain ranges on the seabed, also known as ocean ridges.
What if there was only one supercontinent? There are very few ocean ridges, and it is difficult to release heat from the Earth's interior. So the Rhodinia supercontinent was like sitting on a very hot stove. So under the continuous impact of heat, the earth's crust began to rise, and in some places it could rise by six to eight kilometers, which is the orogeny movement. Then the supercontinent began to break, about 750 million years ago, completely splitting into huge plates. The Earth's crust erased 11 years of rock formation records during rapid uplift. One of the biggest pits is whether earth really has such a supercontinent?
If existing geological archaeology does not provide evidence in this regard, there is a third hypothesis. The comprehensive effect of multiple events says that this is actually a combination of hypothesis one and hypothesis, which is caused by the alternating action of glaciers and plate movements, glaciers go down, plate movements move up, and some rock formations are cut down. These three hypotheses, no matter how big, are all based on the internal forces of the earth as the cause, and they all hold the sword to debate the view, that is, in the hundreds of millions of years of geological history, gradually and gradually formed this strange phenomenon of the earth's poetry, so they can all be counted as one type of view, and there is another kind of view and it is opposite.
That is the theory of cataclysms. This is a non-mainstream view that strange things happen overnight, caused by some sudden force. Note that this one-night period is not measured by geological age, and if it is measured in hundreds of millions of years overnight, there may also be hundreds of thousands of years. And the overnight we are talking about here is really what is usually understood as overnight.
Returning to the story of Elder Hopi that we mentioned at the beginning, let's talk about the brain hole of the rock formation caused by ancient wars. There is a legend of the North American Hopi people about the destruction of the Second World, where two gods who rule the universe are Aho and Ato, who are involved in a civil war and fight for control of the world. The war was fought in the dark, and the consequences were so severe that the rotation of the earth was chaotic, the originally warm continent was thrown into the cold and uninhabited area, everything was frozen, the mountains sank to the bottom of the sea, the sea spread to the land, and all humans had to burrow into the ground to take refuge. After the end of the war, the gods who ruled the poles of the earth stabilized the two levels, lifted the frozen state of the surface, and the sheltered Hopi talents poured out of the ground to open the civilization of the Third World. Actually about this ancient war.
It is also found in ancient Chinese books. We record an ancient war in China's Qishu Shan Hai Jing that destroyed the world and the earth. This war is recorded in the Shanhai Jing and Huainan Zi, and it is about the great war between the Gonggong clan and the Emperor Huan. The outcome of the great war is summed up in such a sentence, the pillar of heaven is broken, the earth is maintained, the sky tilts to the northwest, the sun, moon, and stars move, the earth is dissatisfied with the southeast, and the water and dust return. The sky tilts to the northwest, that is, people feel that the stars as a whole move in the northwest direction, and the dissatisfaction with the southeast means that the flood suddenly arrived and flooded the land in the southeast, which is a portrayal of the overall catastrophe that may occur in the short time of the earth's environment. The co-workers coincide with the Battle of the Bulge and the legend of the Hopi people, and the overall displacement of the stars is actually a manifestation of the overall movement of the crust under people's feet.
If you are wandering in Wuhan, Hubei Province, look up at the stars. Thoughts flew, suddenly the ground under your feet was like a skateboard, sigh, the long rudder slid away from the position where you stood, from today's Wuhan to the position of Xiamen, Fujian, you will feel that the stars have long legs run away, from the current position as a whole to the northwest position. In order to facilitate understanding, we still have to explain a theory here, called the polar shift theory.
This theory was proposed by Professor Hapgood of the United States in the 1960s, who believed that about 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, the Earth's crust once shifted in its entirety across the Arctic, from the Norwegian Sea to hudson Bay in canada. Simply put, it is such a shell that the earth's crust as a whole is complete, and it has moved over a distance relative to the internal structure of the earth, the sky tilts to the northwest, and the sun, moon, and stars move. It is the description of this polar shift phenomenon. To use a simple analogy, our earth is an orange, not an apple, and the apple skin grows with the flesh, but what about oranges? The skin is the skin, the shout is the shout, are two systems, the skin and the sac are separated from each other. The same is true of the earth, the crust is the orange peel, and the internal structure below the crust is the orange. Orange peel is linked to the fruit by some fine fibers. The Earth has a similar structure, this super large orange, which is constantly rotating. When a strong external force destroys part of the fiber connection, the orange peel will move in an overall way relative to the orange, the shell is not so tight, it will loosen and run, but he will not run too far, because he will be dragged by the remaining fibers. When the position of the shell moves in a southeasterly direction, the people on the ground will feel the stars in the sky moving in a northwesterly direction. Of course, in the process of polar shifting, the crust of the earth cannot be as neat as the orange peel, and the material of the crust will not be as uniform as the orange peel.
In the process of rapid movement, the plates will have different moving speeds because of different material densities and so on, so that the various crust plates will squeeze and collide with each other, then in this process, the rock layers will be misaligned, and the rock layers in some places may be pushed away, and the rock layers in other places will even be completely crushed and no longer exist. When the crust was stopped stabilizing, the rock formations that make up the crust had been reconfigured. Those misplaced parts, the parts that were crushed and disappeared, are the records of the lost memory of the earth that later puzzled geologists.
What's more, the polar shift has happened more than once. Professor Hapgood speculates four times, 130,000 years ago, 80,000 years ago, 60,000 years ago and 12,000 to 20,000 years ago. The genes triggered by the co-working war can be speculated to have occurred 60,000 years ago, and the polar shift that led to the extinction of mammoths is likely to occur 12,000 to 20,000 years ago, the most recent. To sum up, this brain hole is talking about the super war that occurred in ancient times, resulting in the overall displacement of the earth's crust, that is, the polar shift also spawned disasters such as the Great Flood, and ultimately caused the large-angle non-integration of the rock formations we see today.