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.