Like with flip-flops and balances, the transition is enhanced
by positive feedback, and quickly leads to the extreme situations that are,
again, stable and permanent until triggered back on again. For instance
if the seas warm up, the solubility of CO2
is decreased, and its atmospheric content increases, tending to further
increase earth s temperature, and vice-versa.
 Moreover, an ice cover effectively reflects
sunlight back towards outer space, reducing the amount of solar heat absorbed
by the earth. Its temperature consequently drops, and the glaciers further
increase, until they cover all the temperate regions of earth. In the absence
of Life, we have the two extremes instanced by our two neighboring planets,
Venus and Mars. As we said above, Venus is as hot as hell, whereas Mars
is completely frozen up, as if to vividly exemplify to us all the two extremes
of lifeless conditions.
The Cause of the Ice Ages
The causes of the Ice Ages and of the periodic
advance and retreat of the continental glaciers is not well known. But,
to believe the myths, the end of the Pleistocene Ice Age was due to the
cataclysmic explosion of Mt. Atlas, the one which wiped the twin Atlantises
out of the map.
Mount Atlas "the Pillar of Heaven" that
decorated Lemurian Atlantis was an immense volcanic peak in the region
that now corresponds to the island arc of Indonesia. To be more precise,
this volcano was the terrible Krakatoa, even today still alive and very
active, despite its monumental explosion in Atlantean times. After its
colossal explosion, the Krakatoa volcano sunk away underseas, becoming the
giant caldera that now forms Sunda s Strait between Java and Sumatra.
This giant caldera fully 150 km across
is the "Fiery Submarine Mare" (Vadava-mukha) that we commented
above. The giant explosion of the Holy Mountain is attested not only by
the worldwide myths that recount the end of Paradise (Atlantis). Similar
cataclysms in this remote region of the world are also testified by the
tektite belt and the volcanic ash layer that covers most of the South Indian
Ocean, Australia, Indonesia and Southeast Asia.1
The ashes and dust liberated by the gigantic
explosion were carried away by the winds, and covered the glaciers of North
Asia and North America with a dark veil of carbonized matter. The result
was an increased absorption of sunlight and a quick melting away of the
glaciers that covered the continents beyond the Tropical Regions.
Thermal Runaway and the Quaternary
Extinctions
The process of glacier melting was far
from uniform, as many geologists of the Darwinian school tend to think.
The meltwater of the glaciers quickly flowed into the seas, creating huge
stresses between the overloaded sea bottom and the alleviated continents.
Earth s crust cracked and rifted at many places, originating volcanoes,
earthquakes and tsunamis of unprecedented proportions. And the violent
process continued, impelled by its own momentum, until it was finally complete
and the earth had quit the Ice Age. In this terrible event the same one
that the myths call the Flood some 70% of the species of great mammals
became extinct.
This self-sustaining, degeneratively increasing
process is what physicists call "positive feedback", and is identical to
the one that causes the transitions of electronic flip-flops in electronic
computers and such. It also corresponds to another physical process called
"thermal runaway", which happens, for instance, on a global scale in the
Hothouse Effect. Increased temperature of the earth tends to liberate the
CO2 (carbonic gas) dissolved in seawater
to the atmosphere, since its solubility decreases with temperature.
The extra atmospheric CO2 further tends to
increase global warming, liberating further amounts of CO2,
and so on until all of it is liberated to the atmosphere, and the earth
becomes overheated. This is possibly what happened on sizzling Venus, perhaps billions
of years ago. And it may well be the case that Venus also had Life, as Mars apparently did too, as we are starting to learn.
Geologists call the widespread mortality that took place at the end of the Pleistocene by the name
of Quaternary Extinctions.
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