Hi All. I received this in my e-mail about a week ago. When I first read it my first thoughts were, this guy is out in left field. I read it again the other night and still thought he was in left field.

After reading it again I’m not so sure about the left field bit. At any rate it does give you something to think about. Take Care…Don in creepy town

Science & Technology 1/28/02

The wet planet
Was the modern world born when the oceans abruptly withdrew?

BY CHARLES W. PETIT

Call it the Great Unflood, a profound transformation of Earth a billion
years ago that saw continents emerge from the sea for the first time, giving
a start to the seasons and a boost to evolution. Conventional Earth history
has no place for such a-literal-watershed. But this month, an eminent
geologist named Eldridge Moores drew on years of work on ancient rocks to
argue that dry continents appeared suddenly on a planet previously 95
percent under water.

The idea might explain such mysteries as a rise in atmospheric oxygen and
the appearance of multicellular life, and some geologists are giving it a
sympathetic, if cautious, hearing. "It helps us think about the links among
different Earth systems," says Timothy Kusky of St. Louis University. But
others think Moores's tale is as mythical as the great Flood of Scripture.

Moores, a geology professor at the University of California-Davis, grew up
in a dusty gold-mining camp in Arizona that left him with a lifelong
curiosity about how rocks and the ores they bear got where they are. For 35
years he has been reading ancient chunks of warped and eroded oceanic crust
that got pushed ashore in continental collisions. Called ophiolites, these
formations can be miles thick and are home to many of the world's richest
copper, gold, and silver mines. Moores is convinced that the oldest
ophiolites, including some in Canada and Africa, came from ocean crust much
thicker than today's-thick enough to have held the sea's surface above all
but the highest mountains until late in Earth's 4.6 billion-year history.

In the wind. Then came a sea change, or so the ophiolites hint. A billion
years ago, "the sea floor thinned and sank," says Moores. Sea level could
have dropped more than 1,000 feet. In 100 million years or so the
supercontinent Rodinia emerged. Continental interiors, far from the moderat-
ing sea, would have brought big annual temperature swings and distinct
seasons. Strong new winds would have stirred the ocean, and nutrients would
have washed off the land. A burst of microscopic plant life would have
raised oxygen levels. The tumult may have been what spurred the evolution of
multicelled organisms. And thus, says Moores, the modern world was born.

Trained at Princeton and the California Institute of Technology, Moores is a
familiar character to readers of John McPhee's 1993 book, Assembling
California. He was among the first adherents of the revolutionary theory of
plate tectonics in the 1960s. Now geology's greatest organizing principle,
it portrays an Earth in constant flux as ocean crust grows outward from
volcanic rifts and slides back into the planet's depths, ferrying continents
to and fro.

But Moores thinks this mechanism shifted gears about a billion years ago.
His main clue: Earlier ophiolites include few or no rocks from the
underlying mantle, unlike later deposits. That tells him the ocean crust was
two to three times as thick as the 4 miles typical today, so thick that its
lowest layers were left behind when it was stuffed onto continents. Perhaps
the crust thinned when Earth's interior cooled past a threshold
temperature-Moores isn't sure. But the evidence is there, he says, and he
ties it together in this month's Geological Society of America Bulletin.

Not everybody is buying. "Eldridge has been flogging this dead horse for an
unconscionably long time," scoffs Kevin Burke of the University of Houston
and the Carnegie Institution of Washington, who thinks Moores is looking
selectively at very beat-up, hard-to-read rocks. Moores concedes he can't
prove his case yet. "This is kind of a hunch, part data and part intuition.
This is a detective story."

Even the doubters will be curious about how it turns out, says Kusky. "I'm
not sure it's right, but people will be talking about this paper for years."