| It seems that scientists are convinced they understand Earth’s history and development. The Novagaea hypothesis might make them think again.
The Novagaea hypothesis holds that the material that is now distributed around the world as continental crust once formed a continuous layer over the entire globe.
It also recognises that this layer was disrupted very recently in the geological time-scale, so recently, in fact, that humans experienced the disruption, and mostly interpreted it as a supernatural event.
The experience deeply affected the human psyche, and the disruption entirely altered the character of the planet.
The observation that generated the Novagaea hypothesis is that the fragments of continental crust form a simple spherical jig-saw puzzle, that can be completed by modelling the continents in clay from a globe of the earth and then fitting the pieces together, (as I will show below), into a continuous spherical surface.
While exploring some interesting speculations (which, not being relevant here I will describe in a future post), I was led to consider the possibility that Antarctica once occupied the region between South America and Africa that is now occupied by the South Atlantic Ocean.
An inspection of a globe of the earth enabled me to visualise that if I ‘rolled’ Antarctica anticlockwise up the eastern coast of South America, the resulting combination might fit well against the west African coast.
I then did some sketches of how the three continents might have combined, and measured and compared the lengths of the coastlines involved. These encouraged me to attempt a three dimensional representation of the combination, and I purchased some modelling clay and a spherical balloon.
I modelled the shape of the three continents in clay using a twelve inch globe of the earth. I then inflated the balloon and put Antarctica on it.
Noting that an anticlockwise northward ‘roll’ of Antarctica would close the Weddell Sea and open the Ross Sea, I did so on my model.
Then I placed Africa beside Antarctica so the western lobe of Africa fitted into the Ross sea, and put South America on the balloon so that the easternmost tip of South America touched the lobe of Africa, and let the balloon down until the tip of south America touched the tip of Africa around Antarctica.
Here is a photograph of my model showing the three continents joined at this stage of the construction.
[photo of model]
Having determined the size at which these three continents neatly join together, I found a firm ball of the same size (and here I was lucky because an old moon globe that had hung from my ceiling for years was just the right size), and I transferred the assembly to the ball.
I then modelled North America in fitted it so that the west coast of North America lay adjacent to the north coast of South America, Columbia occupying the Gulf of Alaska and Los Angeles roughly adjacent to the entrance of the Amazon. The NW of Africa fitted into the Gulf of Mexico with the position of Florida corresponding to the Gulf of Sidra on the north African coast.
Western Europe is wedged between the east coast of North America and the southern Mediterranean shore of Africa.
Asia, with the northern Indonesian isles incorporated and the Bengal sea zipped up, occupy most of the remaining space. The north coast of North America lay adjacent to the NE coast of Asia, with the western termination of Alaska corresponding to the position of Japan. The SE Asian and Indian peninsulas are bounded by the west coast of South America (see diagram).
The remaining circular area neatly accepts the Australian continent in combination with Greenland.
I have described the model in a fair amount of detail so that the reader can easily build their own model. I have no doubt that some will have the energy to do so.
Down the western side of south America was a thin strip of land that in now broken into fragments that stretch across the Pacific. These are Central America, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Macquarie Island, and the south Indonesian Islands, with numerous Pacific Islands constituting even smaller fragments.
Apart from the distortion due to the greater curvature, the continents have retained their shape.
I have ‘christened’ the model Novagaea, since its concepts are similar to Wegener’s Pangaea, but with obvious important differences.
The implications of the fact that the continents fit together like a spherical jigsaw puzzle are enormous and wide-ranging, but I will reserve discussion of them for later postings on this topic, by which time (hopefully) some people will have constructed their own models.
I will just list some of the features of the model that have led me to believe that the model is a representation of the Earth at an earlier stage of the planet’s development.
In future postings I will discuss each of these in greater detail.
1) At the size of a sphere defined by the containment of Antarctica by South America and Africa, the rest of the continents complete a continuous spherical surface.
2)The arrangement of the continents on Novagaea is very similar in many respects to their arrangement on Earth.
3)The fissures that define the continents show global-scale continuity and order on the model of Novagaea.
4)The highest mountains on the continents of South America, North America, and Asia all occur in a small region of Novagaea‘s surface.
5)The rift valleys of Africa and Siberia (whose structural similarity had been commented on by Holmes) and the arc of North American lakes all form a neat circle on the sphere of Novagaea surrounding Australia.
The model is so simple that it is surprising that it has not been discovered before now.
It seems to me that the geologist’s ‘obsession’ (Holmes p.1227) with the parallelism of the opposing Atlantic shorelines has blinded scientists to any other possibilities.
Every attempt by scientists to reconstruct ‘the super-continent’ has begun with the assumption that Africa and South America joined directly.
I hope the model of Novagaea will break the spell.
PS if I can my avatar to work it will display an illustration of Novagaea that I processed from a photo of my model with photoshop. Any help with getting the avatar to work would be appreciated. |