Review—Implications—Conclusion
Whence came those strange, deep deposits of regolith which so suddenly and violently wreaked destruction on vast areas of fertile, well-watered, populous, hospitable lands? Is it fanciful to conclude they may have come from the sky above—from primordial atmospheric clouds? Certainly, the conception is not more fantastic than the popular planetesimal theory, according to which the Earth and other planets were formed in their entirety by infall of meteoric stones from space above.
Localized Deposits
Does not the conception also disclose a logical source of localized, separated, erratic deposits of mineral elements and compounds—of sulphur, graphite, sodium-chloride, gypsum, hematite and countless other sulphides, sulphates, chlorides, carbonates, nitrates, oxides, etc., etc.—localized deposits which it is difficult to believe could have been extracted and transported separately from igneous rock masses? It is logical to suppose that just as snow and rain fall today, intermittently and regionally, so also did precipitates from the primordial atmosphere fall. A fall of siliceous matter could cover some regions and skip others. A. subsequent fall of calcareous matter could cover the foregoing siliceous deposit or skip it and cover other areas. Other falling increments could be micaceous, ferruginous, carbonaceous, etc. All falls could be separate from or accompanied by water. Great sedimentary deposits of iron and copper and silver and cobalt ores could be precipitated upon plutonic beds of the Canadian Shield in the Lake Superior region and could skip contiguous areas to the north, south, east and west of that region. How else could those metallic sediments be deposited upon the outside of Earth’s Archean, plutonic, igneous crust? How else could Alaskan and Siberian placer gold dust and nuggets be deposited upon igneous bed rock at the very bottom of a deep accumulation of a superimposed regolith?
Cosmic Origin of Till
There would seem to be no reason to doubt that some mineral elements and compounds condensed and coalesced in Earth’s cooling primordial atmosphere into particles of every size, from impalpable dust to boulders of great size. Gravitative action, coupled with friction and revolution at high velocities in space above or in the upper reaches of the air, particularly if they were mixed with water, as they probably largely were, most assuredly would tend to form or wear the coalesced par-tides into rounded shapes just as effectively as would running surface water.
Hence is it not reasonable to suspect that some of the tremendous quantity of smoothly worn, rounded, even striated, “stones” and “boulders” of every size, copiously mixed both in unconsolidated material and indurated conglomerate strata, and widely distributed upon and within the supercrust, fell to Earth from the primitive atmosphere, usually, but not invariably, accompanied by water? Transportation and deposition of such immense quantities of surface, “drift” material throughout the world by the agency of glacial ice, as theorists predicate, seems open to doubt. Furthermore, the debris which is presently accumulating as the product of glacial erosion and ablation certainly is far different in physical characteristics from that of till. May there not be a tendency to attribute too much effect to the grinding and transporting “work of the glaciers.” After all, glaciers covered only one-third of land area. Accumulation of such large amounts of unconsolidated or indurated material at many locations through the agency of running surface water seems questionable because it necessitates assumptions not supported by definite evidence. Accumulation, by the agency of running surface water, of any sedimentary deposit, be it rock, gravel, sand, sulphur, gypsum, salt, phosphate or what not, necessarily is predicated on the assumption that previous rock masses existed at higher altitudes than those of the present deposits. Definite evidence that such higher rock masses ever existed in many areas on Earth is lacking.
Water in Primordial Atmosphere
Inasmuch as water constitutes one of the more plentiful mineral components of Earth and because it volatilizes at low temperature, we cannot doubt that it was a very prominent component of the primitive atmosphere. Because it mixes freely with and also readily dissolves many elements and compounds, it undoubtedly brought down with itself considerable quantities of sedimental crustal substances. However, in other instances, water surely came down separately, by itself. As said before, it requires little imagination to perceive that at times water descended in sudden, cataclysmic deluges of rain in tropical zones, or of snow and ice in temperate and polar regions.
Unquestionably, the increment of primitive atmosphere which descended to form the ice sheets still lingering on Earth was almost completely composed of water. Undoubtedly, too, the falling moisture which built the last glaciers, and/or that which man has recorded as Noah’s flood, was the very last increment of primordial atmosphere to descend. The story of Noah’s flood will be discussed later.
Origin of Coal
Among other geological mysteries which the theory throws new light upon, is the one concerning the true origin of coal. One need only read what any encyclopedia or any textbook says about the origin of coal to see clearly that no generally accepted theory therefor has yet been produced. The thought that carbon in coal emanated from Earth’s primordial atmosphere is the first and only alternative to the questionable vegetal theory. The latter is based on the supposition that beds of peatlike remains of leaves, stems and roots accumulated from dense vegetation growing in inland and sea-border swamps; that these vegetal remains were later submerged by crustal subsidence and thereafter buried by aqueous sedimentation of rock-making minerals, the weight and pressure of which, coupled with an imaginary chain of vague chemical reactions, converted the vegetal material into coal. The theory supposes that the sedi-mental cover material came from erosion of higher land surfaces, locations undetermined. The theory further supposes that after one coal bed was thus formed and covered with sedimentary rock, the area experienced crustal elevation or a pause in subsidence whereby another swamp was formed to encourage an ensuing dense vegetal growth, thus initiating a repetition of the cycle.
In Westphalia, there are 117 beds of coal, one above the other; in South Wales, 100 beds; in Nova Scotia, 76 beds; in Pennsylvania and other coal regions all over the globe there are multiple layers of coal, always with sedimental strata of clay, shale, limestone, etc., in between. These rock strata vary in thickness from a few inches to hundreds of feet. Coal strata vary from paper-thin to many feet in thickness. E. S. Moore in Coal cites seams at Morwell, Australia, 266, 227 and 166 feet in thickness. Some authorities say a coal seam of any thickness would require a bed of vegetation ten times as thick to produce it. Moore says the bed of vegetation would have to be twenty times the thickness of the coal seam.