From: nev@[somewhere].com
\nSubject: alt.pave-the-earth
\nTo: nev@[somewhere].com
\nDate: Wed Jul 1 11:05:01 1998 -0700<\/p>\n
Let us imagine the Moon has almost magically been lowered gently to a
\nkissing contact with the Earth, in the centre of the Pacific, on the
\nEquator. Then let the controlling forces let go, and let’s watch the
\nresults from a safe distance….<\/p>\n
Loose material on the limbs of the Moon, like Moondust, rocks, Apollo
\nspacecraft, and even whole mountains will experience a gravitational
\nattraction sideways towards the Earth of 62% of g at Earth’s surface.
\nMeanwhile, Moon gravity remains at 1\/6 g sideways into the Moon. The
\nnett effect is that everything not glued down will fall off the sides
\nand underneath of the Moon, but being gently focussed inwards as it
\ndrops. It will take over seven minutes just to fall from a height of
\n1738 km (the Moon’s radius), dodging the occasional satellite in low
\norbit that will smack into the debris cloud. At impact, downwards
\nvelocity will be over 5km\/sec. While not of totally cosmic
\nproportions, this is a significant re-entry speed. Small debris will
\ntend to burn up in the atmosphere, yet so much debris will be falling
\nthat the atmosphere will be compressed and displaced. Small primary
\nimpact craters will result from the impact of bodies larger than 10m
\nor so.<\/p>\n
Not just the loose material will fall. The sideways (shear) force will
\nbe enough to tear off the Moon’s crust and Mantle. The strength of
\nrock is almost irrelevant given the forces involved. If we imagine the
\nMoon as a cylinder, for a moment (and it will rapidly flatten
\ndownwards towards the Earth into some sort of squashed pear-shaped
\nblob), it has a cross sectional area of pi * radius^2 or 3.02 * 10^12
\nsquare metres. Its Mass is some 7.35*10^22 kg. Correcting for the
\ndecay of Earth’s gravity field, there would be a force of 1.5*10^10
\nkgf per square metre (15 million tonnes), or 15 tonnes per square cm
\n(atmospheric pressure is around 1kg per square cm). Hydraulic presses
\non Earth do wonderful things to steel at those sort of pressures.<\/p>\n
It won’t just be the Moon that deforms. The Earth will be indented by
\nthis mass, “locally”. Outside of the dent, a bulge or bow wave will be
\nthrust up. This wave will propogate out at seismic wave speeds in the
\nMantle of around 8 km\/sec, forcing the seabed up to meet the falling
\ndebris, adding to the collision speed. The atmosphere and oceans will
\nbe blasted out sideways, as a hypersonic shock wave develops in a
\ntorus round the merge point.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the oceans of the world
\nwill experience the Mother of all Tides. To first Order, the centre of
\ngravity of the Earth-Moon system will be displaced towards the Moon by
\nthe ratio of masses i.e. 1\/81 of their separation (8000 km) =
\n100km. The equipotential surface of the joint body will therefore be
\n100km above sea level in the Pacific, and 100km below it at the
\nantipodal point (about the middle of Africa). The seas will pour
\nbodily sideways in a cataclysmic tidal wave, mounting up into
\nkilometres high tsunami that will rush bodily inland. Central America
\nwill be overwhelmed like a broken straw, and the Atlantic will surge
\nacross the USA all the way to the Rockies. Of course, this would take
\nmany minutes, or perhaps a few hours.<\/p>\n
The tidal wave wouldn’t get that far before the outgoing shock wave
\narrives from the Pacific, like a a huge “plop” as a stone falls into a
\npond. The surface wave (literally, a wave of the Earth’s suface, and
\ncrust, and mantle….) would be tens to hundreds of km in amplitude,
\ntotally disrupting the crust. Every volcano on Earth would erupt
\ncataclysmically as their magma chambers were torn open and exposed to
\nthe surface, but they would be the merest fart in comparison to the
\neffect of the wave itself.<\/p>\n
As the Moon was sucked into the Earth, a huge molten droplet could be
\nthrown back upwards, like those beautiful “milkdrop in a cup of
\ncoffee” photos. This would “only” be 500km in radius and probably
\nwouldn’t make escape velocity, but it would splash nicely when it came
\nback down again. Smaller pieces in the 1-100km range would be blasted
\nsideways and upwards in ballistic trajectories to fall back in
\nsecondary impacts right around the globe. A debris cloud would orbit
\nthe Earth, but would rapidly be winnowed as lumps going one way met
\nthose going the other. Most of the debris would fall back to Earth on
\na time scale of years to centuries, but the Earth’s dust rings would
\nbe a beautiful sight for any visiting spacefarers.<\/p>\n
The Earth itself would be in turmoil. It would wobble like a jelly for
\ndays, and ring like a bell for months or years. The Oceans would boil,
\nand the atmosphere could be significantly lost to space. Life would be
\nwiped clean from the planet.<\/p>\n
Perhaps (if there is any justice) the last human to be blasted with
\nincandescent gas would be our friend AP who might possibly say “It
\nwasn’t supposed to do that!”<\/p>\n
On a longer timescale, the site of the merging would be a boiling hell
\nof lava 5000km across for millenia. The entire tectonic and convection
\nsystem of the Earth would be disrupted. Remember that the Moon is made
\nof relatively low density rock, like Anorthosite (rich in feldspars,
\nlike Earthly granite is, but much more so). The Moon is probably made
\nof much of the primordial crust of the Earth, blasted off in a major
\nimpact billenia ago. Finally it would have returned. The Moon has
\nenough volume to spread out in a layer around 50km thick across the
\nwhole Earth – More than double the current volume of the Earth’s
\ncrust.<\/p>\n
Like Venus, some 500Ma past, the entire surface of the Earth would be
\nrecycled. The plate tectonic process would start again almost from
\nscratch and begin to sort mixed up crust from mantle, aided by the
\nenergy input to the Earth that would raise its global temperate a fair
\nbit towards the liquidus (total melting point). There would be enough
\nenergy liberated by this collision to raise the temperature of the
\nentire volume of the Earth by over 100 degrees Centigrade. Fluid
\nmagmas like the precambrian komatiites would gush out of every crack
\nand fissure in the shattered Earth, flooding its surface with basalts.
\nGradually, the remnants of the crust would clot together like scum on
\na boiling pot and the continents would begin again as felsic islands
\nsurrounded by ferociously active greenstone belts and mobile zones.<\/p>\n
Who knows, perhaps in about 2 or 3 billion years that organic soup
\ncould start again and give rise to new generations of geologists and
\nastronomers to wonder at the heavens and discover the History of the
\nEarth, but it would be a different planet than now:- Slightly larger,
\nwith no Moon, no Tides, Thick crust like Mars, but active volcanism
\nlike Venus.<\/p>\n
– Nick Hoffman, Geophysicist Extraordinaire<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
From: nev@[somewhere].com Subject: alt.pave-the-earth To: nev@[somewhere].com Date: Wed Jul 1 11:05:01 1998 -0700 Let us imagine the Moon has almost magically been lowered gently to a kissing contact with the Earth, in the centre of the Pacific, on the Equator. Then let the controlling forces let go, and let’s watch the results from a safe … Continue reading “Here’s one for the Velikofsky fans…”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}