Was the moon expelled from the planet Earth?
Many impact theories have done the round. As land masses were defined, philosophers became aware of the correlated features of the Old and New World coastlines. From observation of coastal mountain formations and signs of structural upheaval in the Earth's crust emerged intuitive reasoning that these were the result of abnormal events. By the 16th Century, suggestions were being made that the continents had once been conjoined and were divided catastrophically. Theories about comet interference with the Earth and about Moon expulsion came and went throughout the 16th, 17th and 18th Centuries.
The anonymous Dutch author of The Moon Problem: Solved, writing in 1928 about his expansion theory, proposed an impact theory whereby a super-comet shot through the smaller planet Earth, entering below the land today called India. He visualised that about 4000 to 5000 years ago this super-comet caused such an explosive electrical and chemical reaction that the mass of matter expelled from the Earth formed, or reformed, the Moon. The tail, in combination with the existing atmosphere, caused such a sudden inundation that the water level rose about two to two and a half miles above the surface. The head of the super-comet left the Earth in exploded parts now named the comets of Halley (1758, etc.), Hartwich (1880), Tuttle (1862) and Tempel (1866).
The Dutch writer was preceded in this theory of comet interference by William Whiston, who offered a similar hypothesis in 1696, in A New Theory of the Earth. Whiston, whose orientation was directed by searching the origin in biblical Revelations, as was the work of many philosophers in that time, including his former colleague Sir Isaac Newton in his later years, and whose chair he had inherited, had no influence. The Darwinian period had begun.
One of the latest (and the first in a neo-catastrophic trend), is the proposition made by the Alvarez team (father and son physicists), which promotes the possibility that a meteor impact released iridium in the planet's environment, caused a change in temperature, killed the dinosaurs and forced a new era on the planet. Its reception by the academic world was mixed.
Although its development continues today, the catastrophe theory was earlier dismissed in favour, primarily, of the uniformitarian approach purported by Charles Lyell. His book Principles of Geology was the forerunner of the Darwinian period and endures to this day. According to Stephen J. Gould, who wrote an article in Discover headlined "An Asteroid to Die For", Lyell's authority in the 1830s was one reason that catastrophe and impact theories were abandoned. "The opportunity and the political mood of the times, the beginning of the Darwinian period which requested a slow and long scenario, and the rhetoric of the lawyer [Lyell], won over the pragmatic George Cuvier [a principal catastrophist] who worked by copious geologic evidence". To Gould, this reversal in accepted thought was as unbelievable as the Alvarez team's proposal of catastrophic impact. The impact theory itself was not inconceivable. Its proposal by uniformitarians, however, would have been regarded as heretical a few years earlier.
Experts assert that it has not been proven that the Moon was expelled from the Earth. The defence is that the contrary has not been proven. The model presented here brings this craftsman into the debate between the catastrophists, believing that celestial body interference has accelerated certain Earth developments, and the uniformitarians, needing billions of years to accommodate the Darwinian process of natural selection.
The two schools of thought have been at logger-heads. (The disputes are chronicled in Carey's The Expanding Earth) Yet, the trend is changing, the resistance increasing, for long-time fervent opponents of impact theories. Drowned in the flow of Darwinian rhetoric, the ideas of earlier expansionists are beginning to resurface. In scientific papers, more voices are now being heard of possible impact events which better explain observed facts.
Compare the features of the model in the final stage of deflation, here, with those of the Map of the Circum-Pacific Region.
The Ring of Fire and the Pacific Basin are fully revealed on the deflated globe as the effects of a gigantic catastrophe. Combined, they offer convincing evidence of Moon expulsion and have inspired some speculation. It can be logically deduced that they developed simultaneously; the event that created the Basin violently thrust the surrounding land sideways, forming the high mountains. (Had the surrounding mountains been levelled, the Basin would be smaller.) The existence of one formation only endorses the other. Perhaps, as well, the impact that expelled the Moon also caused a backlash that cracked the crust of the smaller Earth, creating the continental divisions.
Expulsion and expansion may also explain the existence of the trenches in the Pacific Ocean floor and be the cause of the many earthquakes in this region.
