Was there an "explosion"?

A recent paper by Caltech professor Kirschvink and his collaborators Ripperdan and Evans, which made the sensational claim that about half a billion years ago, our planet underwent a true somersault in outer space, has attracted extraordinary attention. According to the authors, during this cataclysm, our planet turned by as much as 90 degrees relative to its axis, as a result of which the main continents of the Earth changed their former location - at the poles - to the current one.

Of course, scientific and popular science journals of the world immediately notified their readers about the new sensational hypothesis. But what is surprising - all the messages about it went under headings like: "The turning Earth explains the Cambrian riddle", or "Tumbling of the planet - the causes of the Cambrian explosion." Indeed, at the end of their article, the authors directly linked the results of their research with the great evolutionary leap that took place on Earth the same half a billion years ago. They wrote that the ancient planetary cataclysm discovered by them could well become the initial impetus that entailed this mysterious leap.

Let me also remind you of another publication devoted to the Cambrian "biological Big Bang": an article by three other American scientists, this time biologists - Valentin, Yablonsky and Erwin. And although the title of the article was strictly scientific: "The Origin of the Body Plan of Multicellular Organisms," the subtitle left no doubt that this work, too, was directly related to the Cambrian riddle. "Recently discovered fossils and a new understanding of the process of development of the organism," the authors wrote, "open up unexpected possibilities for explaining the mystery of the explosive emergence of new species at the beginning of the Cambrian era."

What reasons give rise to these incessantly renewed attempts to explain an ordinary, it would seem, evolutionary leap, as the Cambrian explosion seems to an uninitiated person? After all, the history of evolution also knows other, no less catastrophic and no less mysterious events - for example, the total and almost simultaneous extinction of dinosaurs that occurred 65 million years ago, or the so-called Great Death ("Perm catastrophe", as it is also called) - a massive and the rapid extinction of living organisms in the Earth's oceans in the Permian era, 245 million years ago, when about 95 percent of all then marine fauna died "at once". Why do they not attract such intense and unceasing attention? Why is it that the Cambrian explosion has been causing the most acute and unrelenting controversy for over one hundred and fifty years, almost from the very moment of its discovery?

The answer is that among all the many mysteries of the biological past of the Earth, the Cambrian explosion occupies a special place. Unlike all other disasters, invariably associated with the extinction of certain living species, this explosion led to the rapid emergence of many new biological forms.

This birth of new forms was quite sudden. There is no evidence that it was preceded by a long accumulation of gradual changes and complications.

Further, this incomprehensible emergence of new forms did not extend over the entire Cambrian epoch, or at least a significant part of it, but occurred almost simultaneously, over the course of some three to five million years. On the geological time scale, this is an absolutely insignificant period - it is only one thousandth of the total duration of evolution, which makes us call this evolutionary leap a "biological explosion". The consequences of this explosion had a unique significance for the evolution of life on our planet - they divided the history of this evolution into two unequal parts. If the pre-Cambrian era was the time of the sole domination of unicellular organisms, then the post-Cambrian became the era of multicellular forms. During the Cambrian explosion, for the first time in the history of evolution, multicellular organisms of the modern type arose, all the main characteristics of those bodily "plans" according to which these organisms are still being built were formed, the prerequisites were laid for the future exit of these organisms from the seas to land and their conquest of the entire surface of the Earth .

Here's what it looked like, based on current scientific understanding. The earth, according to modern estimates, was formed about four and a half billion years ago. The first single-celled organisms in its oceans appeared about three and a half to four billion years ago. In other words, life on Earth arose almost immediately after the conditions necessary for this arose - the cooling of the planet, the formation of the earth's crust and oceans. Nevertheless, having taken this first, most important step, evolution for some reason slowed down for as much as three billion years. It was as if there was some invisible barrier in front of her, which she could not overcome. All this time, it was limited only to the change and improvement of already existing species - microscopic bacteria and protozoan algae.

And then for shortest time, let me remind you - in three to five million years, a "new life" arises: a prototype and forerunner of modern life.

So what happened then - 530 - 540 million years ago?

The uniqueness and mystery of the features of the Cambrian Explosion - that's what has attracted the unremitting attention of biologists over the past hundred and fifty years.

The complexity of the problem lies, however, not only in this mystery of the Cambrian "biological Big Bang" and the reasons that gave rise to it. An equally important impetus to the sharp and ongoing debate around it is the fact that the problem of the Cambrian explosion is also directly related to the Darwinian theory of evolution. More precisely, it simply contradicts it. Darwin himself was the first to realize this. He was also the first to suggest a possible way out of this contradiction. However, the hypothesis proposed by Darwin did not satisfy many of his followers, and as a result, evolutionary biologists were divided into two warring camps, the dispute between which has been going on for a century and a half. Let's try to sort out this controversy.

The discoverer of the Cambrian Explosion was Robert Murchison, an English aristocrat who, under the influence of his ambitious wife, decided to go into science. Studying the fossils of ancient eras found in the respective deposits, he found that the layers of these deposits are separated by a sharp boundary. Below this limit, they are extremely poor in biological remains and show the ubiquity of only the simplest single-celled organisms - bacteria and algae, and then, starting from the Cambrian era, about 550 million years ago, suddenly acquire an unprecedented wealth of new biological forms. Being a believer and sharing the conviction of the great Linnaeus that "there are exactly as many species as they were originally created by the Creator," Murchison regarded the phenomenon he discovered as direct evidence of the intervention of God's hand in the development of life. It is clear that such a creationist (from the word creation - creation) explanation was incompatible with the idea of ​​the natural evolution of biological forms.

Murchison published the results of his research in the thirties of the last century. A few decades later, Darwin's famous work "The Origin of Species" was published, in which for the first time the theory of the development of life on Earth, based on ideas of inherited changes and natural selection, was consistently presented and argued in detail. Of course, Darwin did not accept creationism. But he immediately saw that the Cambrian explosion was a stumbling block for his theory in another - no less important - aspect.

The fact is that, according to Darwin, evolution had to occur gradually, smoothly and continuously, that is, as they say today, gradually. In his book, he quite unambiguously wrote: Natural selection every day and hourly, it subjects to the strictest meticulous examination all the changes taking place in the world, even the smallest ones, rejecting what is bad, preserving and improving what is good ... We do not notice these slow changes in their gradual formation and notice them only when The course of time measures out huge intervals of entire historical epochs.

It is clear that Darwinian gradualism was incompatible with the presence of such a sharp, short-term and rapid phenomenon as the Cambrian explosion. Gradualism rests on the belief, beautifully formulated by the famous popularizer of Darwinism, T. H. Huxley: "Nature does not tolerate leaps." The contradiction with Murchison's data worried Darwin so much that in the preface to the latest edition of his book, he specifically noted "At the present time this phenomenon (the Cambrian explosion. - R.N. ) remains inexplicable, and it can truly be regarded as a convincing argument against the views developed in this book.

As already mentioned, Darwin tried to find a way out of the situation. Perhaps, he suggested, the Cambrian Explosion was not really a real "explosion"; perhaps, in fact, it was preceded by a long period of gradual accumulation of evolutionary changes and the formation of new biological forms; but Murchison simply failed to detect these antecedent, intermediate forms. This explanation made it possible to preserve that continuous and smooth nature of evolution, which Darwin postulated on the basis of the empirical data he collected and which, in his eyes, was the core feature of the entire evolutionary process.

Some evolutionary biologists disagreed with Darwin's interpretation of the Cambrian riddle. (Already Huxley, in his letter to Darwin on the eve of the publication of The Origin of Species, warned: "You needlessly took on a completely unnecessary difficulty by accepting that nature does not tolerate leaps.") These Darwinists could not accept Darwinian gradualism at all. It seemed to them not so much derived from empirical facts (after all, it contradicted Murchison's facts!), but introduced into biology from outside.

Not so long ago, the famous modern biologist and popularizer of Darwinism, Stephen J. Gould, suggested in this connection that Darwin borrowed his unshakable faith in gradualism from his predecessor, the famous founder of modern geology, Charles Lyell, who was his close colleague and personal mentor (Darwin made his first scientific steps in geology). For Lyell himself, Gould argues, gradualism was more than just an empirical scientific principle. It seemed to him the necessary basis for a truly scientific understanding and approach. According to Lyell, the assertion that individual stages of development can be separated by sharp, catastrophic leaps implicitly revives faith in supernatural miracles and God's intervention in history, in other words, returns human thought to pre-scientific, religious times. (The same Gould observes that this resolute opposition to leaps, catastrophes, and revolutions was partly also a reflection of the general spirit of the Victorian era, with its belief in smooth, gradual, and unstoppable progress.)

Let us recall, however, that already in the time of Lyell and Darwin there was another point of view, which was most energetically developed by the French naturalist Georges Cuvier and which today is called "catastrophism". According to this concept, the geological (and, as a result, biological) history of the Earth did not unfold smoothly, but, on the contrary, was replete with leaps and breaks of a catastrophic nature, which, however, had nothing to do with supernatural miracles or God's intervention, but were amenable to quite natural , rational explanation. The Cambrian explosion fit perfectly into this concept, and it was this circumstance that prompted many evolutionists to challenge Darwin's hypothesis, acknowledge the reality of the Cambrian Leap, and move to the positions of "catastrophism".

It so happened that the Cambrian riddle from the very beginning divided the evolutionary Darwinists into two opposing camps, with different understandings of the course of biological evolution. On one side of the watershed were convinced "gradualists", on the other - equally convinced "catastrophists". (The third camp, opposing both the "gradualists" and the "catastrophists" in their complete denial of evolution in general, is made up of modern "creationists").

Proponents of Darwinian gradualism offer various possible explanations for the absence of Precambrian intermediate forms. Some argue that the biological forms preceding the Cambrian did not survive because they did not have a skeleton or outer shell and were soft, jelly-like (which, by the way, is mostly true). Others explain the absence of transitional forms in Pre-Cambrian deposits by purely physical reasons, arguing that Pre-Cambrian rocks were subjected to such intense heat and pressure that no biological remains were preserved in them (which is not entirely true). Still others put forward the assumption that pre-Cambrian life developed in lakes, and the Cambrian explosion is simply a consequence of the rapid and rapid migration of biological forms already formed in these lakes into the seas and oceans (this hypothesis was developed in a peculiar way in the work of Kirshvink and colleagues mentioned above). All these hypotheses are united by the desire to show that the transition from pre-Cambrian to post-Cambrian forms was major and continuous, only traces of it, for one reason or another, have not yet been found or have not been preserved at all.

Indeed, not so long ago, researchers managed to discover the first types of multicellular organisms that immediately preceded the Cambrian. They were found in sediments near the Australian settlement of Ediacara and therefore received the name "Ediacaran". Almost until very recently, until the eighties, Ediacaran organisms were interpreted in the spirit of Darwinian gradualism - as an intermediate link in the history of gradual complication, or the evolution of biological forms from pre-Cambrian to post-Cambrian.

But about fifteen years ago, a closer examination of these remains showed that, in fact, they have no connection with modern biological forms. Perhaps they generally represented some special, dead-end branch of biological evolution, which did not give any continuation. Some biologists believe that this branch of life was destroyed in some kind of catastrophe that preceded the Cambrian explosion. In the course of the further story, we still have to return to the mysterious Ediacaran fauna.

Of course, it is impossible to exclude that the hopes of Darwin and other "gradualists" will still be justified and some other deposits will be found with the same richness of biological forms as on the Burgess shelf or in China, but only these deposits will be pre-Cambrian, and the forms are intermediate, preceding the Cambrian. In this case, the Darwinian theory of evolution will be preserved along with all its gradualism, gradualism and smoothness of development. But so far nothing of the kind has been discovered, and on this basis, "catastrophic" biologists are increasingly insisting on the need to revise Darwin's theory. According to them, the Cambrian explosion (as well as other similar abrupt phenomena, such as the rapid death of all dinosaurs or the "Perm catastrophe" mentioned above) dictates the inevitability of such an expansion of the theory of evolution, which would allow not only smooth, but also "explosive" change in biological diversity, not only gradualness, but also "jumps" and "catastrophes" in development biological world. This protracted controversy has gained particular urgency since the early 1970s, when the already mentioned Stephen Gould and his colleague, paleontologist Nick Eldridge, proposed a radical version of such an extension of Darwinism - the so-called "dotted equilibrium" theory.

We will return to this latest development of evolutionary theory and the controversy around it, but first we should perhaps finish our interrupted story about what reasons those who consider it an evolutionary reality explain the Cambrian Explosion today, what physicochemical or biological hypotheses are put forward today to explain the Cambrian riddle. After all, a lot of such hypotheses have been proposed over the past decades, and the recent works of Kirshvink and Valentin mentioned at the beginning of the article are only the latest in time in this long series. Each of these hypotheses is a kind of "logic-fueled time machine" that allows one to look into the distant past of the Earth. Let's use this fantastic vehicle and in the next article we will go to the Cambrian era - to the last hallucigenies and the first trilobites.

The mystery of the "biological Big Bang" - the sudden and simultaneous appearance of all modern biological types in the Cambrian era - continues to intrigue many researchers. Two of the newest hypotheses - "oxygen" and "earth somersault" - explain this jump in evolution by a sharp change in physico-chemical conditions on the entire planet. In contrast, biologists put forward other assumptions that link the Cambrian explosion with dramatic ecological or genetic shifts.

Planet somersault?

di hypotheses proposed to explain the Cambrian riddle, the so-called oxygen one was considered the most serious until recently. It is based on the assumption that the Cambrian explosion was caused by a dramatic change in the chemical composition of the earth's atmosphere and oceans that preceded it.

Physico-chemical conditions affect the rate of biological evolution - this has long been known. Many biologists are convinced that the unusually slow change of biological forms during the first three billion years of their existence was due to a lack of free oxygen.

There was no oxygen at all in the earth's primary atmosphere, because it immediately reacted with other elements and remained bound in the earth's thickness and atmosphere in the form of oxides. But with the advent of the first single-celled algae - about half a billion - a billion years after the formation of the Earth - the process of photosynthesis began, in which carbon dioxide (absorbed by algae from the air) and water, with the assistance of sunlight, were converted into free oxygen and organic substances. However, even here oxygen was "unlucky" - it was greedily captured by iron dissolved in ocean water. The resulting iron oxides slowly settled to the ocean floor, leaving the chemical cycle; the world, as one of the geochemists put it, was continually rusting; and free oxygen was not added to it.

In the absence of free oxygen, organisms were forced to remain anaerobic. This meant that the processing of products in them, metabolism, or metabolism took place without the participation of oxygen - slowly and inefficiently. This, according to biologists, hindered the evolution of the first organisms. The situation changed somewhat only from the moment when the iron dissolved in the oceans was saturated with oxygen and the concentration of this gas in the atmosphere, thanks to the same photosynthesis, finally began to gradually increase. This made possible the appearance of the first aerobic organisms. They were still single-celled, but their metabolism was much more efficient, and therefore they multiplied faster and populated the oceans more densely. So passed the first 3.5 billion years, by the end of which the oxygen content in the atmosphere reached, as it is believed, about one percent. At this point, evolution took the next important step - the first multicellular organisms appeared. And then, half a billion years later, the Cambrian explosion came and at once laid the foundation for all the complex diversity of modern life.

It can be said that the history of biological evolution has been - in a certain sense - the history of oxygen. So, wasn't the Cambrian "jump in evolution" the result of a spasmodic increase in free oxygen in the atmosphere?

It was this assumption that was made in 1965 by two American physicists, Berkner and Marshall. They reasoned as follows. Complex multicellular organisms need a large amount of oxygen, and in two of its forms at once - firstly, in the form of free oxygen necessary for respiration (that is, for metabolism) and the construction of collagen, this most important element of the body structure; and secondly, in the form of an ozone layer, necessary for protection from harmful solar ultraviolet radiation. Since such organisms did not appear until the Cambrian era, it means that their appearance was delayed by the lack of the necessary oxygen concentration in the atmosphere. On this basis, it can be assumed that it was in the Cambrian era that such quantities first appeared. This unique event—the crossing of the "oxygen frontier," the abrupt increase in the level of oxygen in the atmosphere to its current 21 percent—was, according to Berkner and Marshall, the main cause of the Cambrian explosion.

At first, this "oxygen hypothesis" did not have sufficient confirmation. But literally in recent years (1994 - 1996) the situation has changed dramatically. The reason for this was the discovery of the American researcher Knoll. Studying the ratio of two carbon isotopes, C-12 and C-13, in the rocks of the Precambrian and Cambrian times, Knoll received irrefutable evidence that at the very beginning of the Cambrian era this ratio changed dramatically - the C-12 isotope "at once" became less than before . And such a "carbon leap" must necessarily be accompanied by a corresponding "oxygen leap", which exactly corresponds to the Berkner-Marshall assumption.

After the work of Knoll, the presence of an "oxygen jump" in the Cambrian period is recognized by most scientists. But it remains unclear: what could be the reason for the "non-return" of the S-12 to environment, which led to this "oxygen jump"?

Another hypothesis was proposed by the American geologist Moore in 1993. According to Moore, the reason for the decline of C-12 was sharp tectonic shifts, such as the movement of the continents, which occurred on the very eve of the Cambrian era. Such shifts, says Moore, could lead to the fragmentation of the oceans into smaller and moreover closed bodies of water - seas and lakes, and this should have reduced the intensity of water circulation. As a result, the organic remains of the algae, along with their carbon, remained on the sea floor and did not rise to the surface, where they could be decomposed by bacteria. Thus, carbon was released from the circulation, allowing the oxygen synthesized by algae to quickly accumulate in the atmosphere.

Moore's "tectonic hypothesis" also at first had no actual confirmation. But three years later, she received a completely unexpected, one might even say - sensational development. In the middle of the past year, the scientific and then mass press was suddenly filled with headlines like: "Earth somersault explains the mystery of the Cambrian explosion!" The most surprising thing is that the notorious "somersault" (or "somersault", as it was also called) was not some kind of journalistic exaggeration. As follows from the texts, it was a very serious (albeit radical) scientific hypothesis that explained the Cambrian mystery precisely by those "tectonic shifts" that we just talked about, only on a much grander scale - something like a one-time shift of the entire earth's crust . Truly a "tumble"!

His work made it possible to build a clear picture of the geological changes that took place on Earth at the beginning of the Cambrian era - 550 - 500 million years ago. This picture turned out to be quite unexpected and truly sensational. This is how, according to Kirshvink, the geological events of that time unfolded.

Shortly before the beginning of the Cambrian era, the split of the most ancient supercontinent, which consisted of most of the modern continents, ended (paleogeologists gave this supercontinent the name Rodinia). Almost immediately after this, the separated mainland masses began to regroup, uniting into a new supercontinent - Gondwana. At the last stages of the formation of Gondwana, a sharp imbalance arose in the distribution of continental masses relative to the earth's axis. The earthly "top" lost its stability. A rotating body is most stable when the masses that form it are concentrated on the equator (which gives it the maximum moment of inertia) or distributed more or less uniformly relative to it; meanwhile, Gondwana was located too close to the pole.

Restoring the stability of the Earth required a rapid redistribution of continental masses. Therefore, the entire solid shell of the planet began to slide down the mantle as a whole, until it shifted ninety degrees relative to the axis of rotation. As shown by Kirschvink's data, the continental plates of Australia and America, which were previously in the region of the poles, made this turn and movement towards the equator in some fifteen million years - a period of negligible geological scales (three ten-thousandths of the total age of the Earth). It was a real "somersault" of the entire planet. Its result was that its axis of rotation, while maintaining its former direction in space, now rotated 90 degrees relative to the solid shell. The rotation of the earth's top again became stable.

According to Kirschvink's paleomagnetic data collected in the rocks of America and Australia, both of these continental plates (comprising almost two-thirds of the entire earth's crust) made their movement relative to the earth's axis almost simultaneously, between 534 and 518 million years ago. Such grandiose geological events are extremely rare. In any case, over the past two hundred million years, since the end of the Permian era, they certainly have not occurred even once. Kirschvink, however, does not exclude that something similar to the geological cataclysm described by him could repeat itself in the interval between the Cambrian and Permian epochs.

Unusual as Kirschvink's picture is, it is very solidly substantiated by the author's data, and besides, it immediately received a number of independent confirmations, so that geologists as a whole expressed their readiness to accept it. But this picture also interested biologists. As already mentioned at the very beginning, according to the authors, it was this "somersault" of the planet that could be the main cause of the Cambrian biological explosion. "The rapid movement of the continents," says Ripperdan, one of Kirshvink's co-authors, "could not but lead to the closure of some and the formation of other water basins - these were the only habitats of life at that time, to a change in the then ocean currents, to abrupt climate changes and to other equally catastrophic All these catastrophes were supposed to give an impetus to the rise of new forms of life, adapted to changing conditions.But it was precisely such a rapid emergence of new forms that was characteristic of the "Cambrian explosion".

According to Kirschvink himself, the rapid changes in the ocean area, caused by the sliding of the continents, should have led to fairly frequent and abrupt changes in ocean currents. "Each such change was global in nature," he says. "It destroyed established regional ecosystems into smaller areas. In these small areas, new forms of life were more likely to survive than in large regions. Our data indicate that such changes in currents occurred then, almost every million years or so. Over a million years, evolution managed to select the best of the survivors of the last cycle and create new regional systems. But then this process began again, and so one and a half to two dozen times during the entire cataclysm. This the best conditions for the emergence of great biological diversity, especially since all this happened shortly after the appearance of those genes that control the main stages of the embryonic development of multicellular organisms.

Let's take a look at the last sentence. At first glance - the view of an uninitiated person - it sounds rather mysterious: what are these "genes that control the main stages of embryonic development", and what do they have to do with the Cambrian explosion? There were, however, people who heard in this phrase the long-awaited recognition of those radical biological ideas that they put forward over the past two years, hoping to attract the attention of the scientific world to them. And not just a recognition, but also a completely transparent hint at the possibility of combining these ideas with the equally radical geological ideas of the "planetary somersault" within the framework of the new physico-biological theory of the Cambrian explosion.

It is to the story of these biological explanations of the Cambrian riddle that we dedicate the final part of our essay.

The first of the "purely biological" hypotheses put forward to explain the Cambrian explosion was the "reaper hypothesis" formulated in 1973 by the American Stephen Stanley. Stanley proceeded from the "thinning principle" well known in ecology. It has been observed that the introduction of predatory fish into an artificial pond leads to a rapid increase in zooplankton diversity in that pond. And vice versa, it is enough to remove the sea urchins that feed on them from the accumulation of various algae, as this diversity begins to decrease. In other words, the "thinning" of an ecological niche by a "reaper-predator" that feeds on its inhabitants is necessary to maintain or expand its biological diversity.

At first glance, this seems counterintuitive. It seems that such a "reaper", exterminating the population of a niche, will reduce the number of species inhabiting it, and even bring some of the smallest species to nothing. But, as we see, reality refutes this intuitive reasoning. And that's why. In any niche inhabited by so-called primary producers (that is, organisms that obtain their food directly - from photosynthesis, and not by eating others), one or more species inevitably become "monopolists" - they capture all the living space and nutrients of the niche and do not allow other species to develop. The "reaper" that appeared under these conditions will most likely feed on these dominant species (if only because they are able to provide it with the largest amount of food) and, therefore, will primarily reduce their biomass. But thanks to this, he will clear a part of the living space and thereby make room for new species. And this will lead to an increase in the biological diversity of the entire niche. The same principle, as can be seen from the examples above, operates in other ecological systems. Stanley, on the other hand, applied the "thinning principle" to explain the mystery of the Cambrian explosion.

It is easy to see that this explosion fits perfectly into this scheme. In the pre-Cambrian era, the earth's oceans were almost exclusively inhabited by unicellular bacteria and algae of a few few species. For billions of years no one "thinned" them, and therefore they did not have the opportunity to evolve quickly. If some single-celled herbivorous "predator" suddenly appeared in such an environment, it would necessarily - according to the "thinning principle" - cause the rapid emergence of new species. This, in turn, should have led to the emergence of new, more specialized "reapers", clearing the place for the next new species, so that the diversity of biological forms would begin to grow like a snowball - and this is the situation of the Cambrian explosion.

Thus, according to Stanley, the "trigger" of the Cambrian explosion was the accidental appearance of a certain "predator" in the environment of the simplest unicellular organisms of the pre-Cambrian era. And the fact that this explosion had the character of a sharp jump does not present any special mystery. Exactly the same character has the development of many biological systems in the presence of a sufficiently free living space and a sufficiently plentiful amount of food. If, for example, a small colony of bacteria is planted on a nutrient medium in a laboratory Petri dish, it will multiply according to the same "avalanche" law, and this spasmodic reproduction will stop only when all available space is filled and nutrients are exhausted. The Cambrian oceans were such a natural "Petri dish" for new biological species. When they filled these oceans, the conditions for the jump disappeared and never happened again, which explains, according to Stanley, the uniqueness of the Cambrian explosion.

A completely different biological explanation for the Cambrian explosion was proposed in 1994-1997 by American biologists Valentin, Erwin and Yablonsky. In their opinion, this explosion occurred due to the fact that some primitive pre-Cambrian organisms, as a result of random genetic changes, had the ability to dramatically expand the range of possible bodily structures. Indeed, one of key features Cambrian evolutionary leap. There was just such a sudden appearance of many biological forms with completely new bodily characteristics. Some of these new organisms have developed distinct heads and tails, others have distinct segments and abdomens, still others have limbs, some have armor, some have antennae or gills, and so on. In total, researchers count as many as 37 new bodily plans that arose - and, moreover, almost simultaneously - in that era of violent evolutionary activity. And all the basic principles of the bodily architecture of modern organisms originated precisely then.

At what here, however, genes? The idea of ​​the connection of this "architectural leap" with the genes of the authors of the new hypothesis was prompted by recent achievements so-called developmental biology. It was already known earlier that in the course of the embryonic development of any multicellular organism, its cells undergo specialization - from some, for example, legs are obtained, from others, say, muscles, gills or eyes. It was also known that commands for cell specialization are given by certain genes. But in recent years, it has been established that in order for development to proceed according to a certain plan - for example, an eye does not grow where a leg should be - it is necessary that these genes "turn on" in a certain sequence, one after another, at the right time, and control such a systematic inclusion of special, so-called regulatory genes. Their most studied variety is the genes of the "hox" group. They were first discovered while studying Drosophila.

It was found that the genes of this group regulate the process of laying the most basic and most general principles bodily structure of the body. Eight genes of this group, present in Drosophila, are located in one of the chromosomes one after another, sequentially. They work in the same sequential way: the first gene gives the command to build the head, the second one orders the construction of the next segment of the body along its axis, and so on, up to the tail. When the researchers artificially changed the sequence of these genes, they got flies that, for example, had legs growing out of their heads.

The genes of the hox group have also been studied in frogs. This study showed that although frogs and fruit frogs are on two different branches of the evolutionary tree (these branches differ in the way the embryo develops a mouth), six of their hox genes are strikingly similar. For example, one of them in Drosophila differs from its counterpart in the frog only in "sign": in Drosophila it regulates the appearance of the abdomen, and in the frog it regulates the back. If you transplant it from Drosophila to a frog, then the course of development will not be disturbed at all, only the frog's back and abdomen will change places. Apparently, this difference arose as a result of mutation. By counting how many of these mutational differences accumulated in similar hox genes during the separate existence of mice and frogs, and knowing the average number of mutations that occur every hundred years, the researchers determined how long ago the common ancestor of frogs and fruit flies lived. This time turned out to be alarmingly close to the time of the Cambrian explosion - about 565 million years.

As we said, Drosophila has only eight hox genes; in mammals, for example, there are as many as 38 of them. But it was found that all these 38 genes are only slightly modified duplicates of the eight primary ones. As for these eight primary genes themselves, they turned out to be very similar in all modern types of organisms - from mammals to insects. As in the case of the frog and Drosophila, this similarity made it possible to calculate exactly when these eight initial hox genes first appeared, which determined (and still determine) the most general principles of the bodily structure of all modern organisms (the specific differences in this structure and the shape of their bodies are say, between Marilyn Monroe and the Drosophila fly - generated by the difference in the regulatory genes of other groups that appeared later, in the course of subsequent evolution).

These calculations led to the same results as comparing these genes in frogs and fruit flies. It turned out that the primary genes of the hox group, which are similar in all modern organisms, date back to the common ancestors of these organisms that arose about 565 million years ago, that is, in the era immediately preceding the Cambrian evolutionary explosion. As we already know, those body plans that have survived to this day in the form of the most general principles of the bodily architecture of modern organisms arose in the Cambrian era. And now we see that the regulatory genes responsible for such general plans, appeared shortly before. It is quite natural to assume that it was the emergence of the first complete group of hox genes (consisting of eight primary genes) that played the role of a trigger for that unique explosion of forms that we call the Cambrian explosion.

At first, Valentin and his co-authors argued that history developed as follows: for the time being, only the simplest organisms existed, in which the entire hox group was exhausted by a single gene, in the pre-Cambrian era the first multicellular organisms arose, in which the number of these genes gradually increased to five. six (in flatworms); and in the Cambrian epoch this number increased abruptly to eight, and this was enough to produce an astonishing variety of forms.

A later version of their theory looks much more complicated. Now they believe that the appearance of the entire necessary set of regulatory genes occurred already in the Precambrian era, 565 million years ago. But for all the biological fundamentality of this event, it was, nevertheless, only a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for the Cambrian explosion. It is possible that even with one of those genes, its first owner, some kind of flatworm, did not have an eye, but only an "eye potency" - a kind of light-sensitive spot on the head.

Organisms are not mechanical toys that just need to be pushed to get an automatic response; rather, it took a complex combination of different conditions for the possibility to become a reality and for a jump in evolution to take place, similar to the Cambrian explosion.

In other words, something additional must have happened in the Cambrian era, which played the role of a “trigger” for putting these genes into action, that is, for creating a variety of forms and types, which is so characteristic of that time. Valentin and his colleagues do not specify what could be such an "additional trigger". They only write that "suggestions range from a surge in atmospheric oxygen above some critical level to an ecological 'arms race' in which the evolutionary interaction of predators and prey could give rise to a range of different new species."

In these words it is easy to recognize allusions to the Berkner-Marshall "oxygen hypothesis" and Stanley's "predator-reaper hypothesis". On the other hand, Kirschvink, the creator of the "Earth somersault hypothesis", believes that his explanation of the Cambrian explosion by the simultaneous sliding of all the earth's continents can also be combined with the theory of the "jump of regulatory genes" proposed by Valentin, Yablonsky and Erwin. Therefore, summing up, we can say that the latest theories of the Cambrian explosion tend to combine several different hypotheses and thereby explain this unique and mysterious phenomenon not by any one cause, but by the interaction of several different factors, both physicochemical and biological in nature.

On this we could draw a line under the story of the mysteries of the Cambrian explosion and attempts to explain them. But there is one more unsolved problem in our list of these mysteries.

As we have said, the Cambrian evolutionary leap presents a fundamental difficulty for Darwin's "orthodox" theory, in which evolution is considered to be necessarily "smooth" and "continuous". To circumvent this difficulty, some biologists generally deny the reality of the Cambrian explosion, while others propose to introduce rather radical changes in "orthodox Darwinism." In recent years, each side has put forward new arguments in its favor, and this sharply aggravated the dispute over the foundations of Darwinism. This dispute certainly deserves a separate story.

This article opens a series of publications covering the author's vision of the topic "Pole Shift" on the example of the Dzhanibekov effect. The author takes the liberty to contribute to the disclosure of the topic and invite the readers of the site to get acquainted

• with what physical causes cause the phenomenon
• with how you can determine the position of the past geographic pole
• with the author's reconstruction of a planetary catastrophe

and other interesting finds... Happy reading!

Dzhanibekov effect

During his fifth flight to spaceship"Soyuz T-13" and the Salyut-7 orbital station (June 6 - September 26, 1985) Vladimir Dzhanibekov drew attention to the seemingly inexplicable effect from the point of view of modern mechanics and aerodynamics, which manifested itself in the behavior of the most ordinary nut, more precisely nuts "with ears" (lambs), which fixed the metal tapes that secure the bags for packing things when transporting goods into space.

Unloading another transport ship, Vladimir Dzhanibekov tapped one ear of the "lamb" with his finger. Usually he flew away, and the astronaut calmly caught him and put him in his pocket. But this time, Vladimir Alexandrovich did not catch the nut, which, to his great surprise, having flown about 40 centimeters, suddenly turned over on its axis, after which it flew further, still rotating. After flying another 40 centimeters, she turned over again. This seemed so strange to the astronaut that he twisted the "lamb" back and again hit it with his finger. The result was the same!

Being unusually intrigued by such a strange behavior of the “lamb”, Vladimir Dzhanibekov repeated the experiment with another “lamb”. He also turned over in flight, however, after a slightly greater distance (43 centimeters). The plasticine ball launched by the astronaut behaved in a similar way. He, too, having flown some distance, turned over around his axis.

The discovered effect, called the "Dzhanibekov effect", began to be carefully studied and found out that the objects under study, rotating in weightlessness, made a 180-degree flip ("somersault") at strictly defined intervals.

At the same time, the center of mass of these bodies continued to move uniformly and rectilinearly, in full accordance with Newton's first law. And the direction of rotation, "twist", after the "somersault" remained the same (as it should be according to the law of conservation of angular momentum). It turned out that relative to the outside world, the body retains rotation around the same axis (and in the same direction) in which it rotated before the somersault, but the "poles" changed places!

This is clearly seen in the example of the "Dzhanibekov nut" (an ordinary wing nut).

If you look FROM THE CENTER OF MASS, then the "lugs" of the nut first rotate in one direction, and after the "tumble" in the other.

If you look from the POSITION OF THE EXTERNAL OBSERVER, then the rotation of the body, as a whole object, remains the same all the time - the axis of rotation and the direction of rotation are unchanged.

And here's what's interesting: for an imaginary observer located on the surface of an object, a kind of complete ! The conditional "northern hemisphere" will become "southern", and "southern" - "northern"!

There are certain parallels between the movement of "Dzhanibekov's nut" and the movement of the planet Earth. And the question is born: "What if not only the nut, but also our planet somersaults?" Maybe once every 20 thousand years, maybe more often...

And how can you not remember catastrophic pole shift hypothesis, formulated back in the middle of the 20th century by Hugh Brown and supported by the scientific works of Charles Hapgood ("The Earth's Shifting Crust", 1958 and "Path of the Pole", 1970) and Immanuel Velikovsky ("Collision of the Worlds", 1950)?

These researchers studied the traces of past disasters, and tried to answer the question "Why did they occur on such a large scale and had such consequences, as if the Earth turned over, changed the geographical poles?"

Unfortunately, they failed to put forward convincing reasons for the "Earth upheavals". Outlining the hypothesis, they suggested that the cause of the "tumble" is the uneven growth of the ice "cap" at the poles of the planet. The scientific community considered this explanation frivolous and recorded the theory as marginal.

However, the "Dzhanibekov effect" forced a new attitude to this theory. Scientists can no longer rule out that the same physical force that makes the nut tumble can also turn our planet... And the traces of past planetary catastrophes clearly testify to the scale of this phenomenon.

Now, my reader, our task is to deal with the physics of the revolution.

Chinese spinning top

The Chinese top (Thomson's top) is a toy, shaped like a truncated ball, in the center of the slice of which the axis is located. If this top is strongly spun, setting it on a flat surface, then one can observe an effect that seems to violate the laws of physics. Accelerating, the top, contrary to all expectations, tips over on its side and continues to turn further until it gets on the axis, on which it will then continue to rotate.

Below is a photograph where physicists observe an obvious violation of the laws of classical mechanics. Turning over, the top does the work of raising its center of mass.

The yellow dot is the center of mass.

The red line is the top's rotation axis.

The blue line denotes a plane perpendicular to the axis of rotation of the top and passing through the center of mass. This plane divides the top into two halves - spherical (lower) and cut (upper).

Let's call this plane - PCM (plane of the center of mass).

Light blue circles are a symbolic designation of the kinetic energy of rotation. The upper circle is the energy of the accumulated moment of inertia of that half of the top, which is located above the PCM. The lower circle is the energy of that half, which is located below the MCP. The author carried out a rough quantitative assessment of the difference in the kinetic energy of the upper and lower halves of the Thomson top (in the version of a plastic toy) - it turned out to be about 3%.

Why are they different? This is due to the fact that the shape of the two halves is different, respectively, and the moments of inertia will be different. We take into account that the material of the toy is homogeneous, so the moment of inertia depends only on the shape of the object and the direction of the axis of rotation.

So what do we see in the diagram above?

We see some energy asymmetry relative to the center of mass. An energy "dumbbell" with "weights" of different power at the ends (light blue circles on the diagram) will obviously create some UNBALANCE.

But nature does not tolerate disharmony! The asymmetry of the "dumbbell" in one direction along the axis of rotation after the flip is compensated by the asymmetry in the other direction along the same axis. That is, the balance is achieved by a periodic change in state over time - a rotating body places a more powerful "weight" of the energy "dumbbell" either on one or the other side of the center of mass.

Such an effect appears only for those rotating bodies that have a difference between the moments of inertia of two parts - conditionally "upper" and "lower", separated by a plane passing through the center of mass and perpendicular to the axis of rotation.

As experiments in Earth's orbit show, even an ordinary box of things can become an object for demonstrating the effect.

Having discovered that the mathematical apparatus from the field of quantum mechanics (designed to describe the phenomena of the microcosm, the behavior of elementary particles) is well suited to describe the "Dzhanibekov effect", scientists even came up with a special name for abrupt changes in the macrocosm - "pseudo-quantum processes".

Periodicity of coups

Empirical (experimental) data collected in orbit show that the main factor determining the duration of the period between "tumbles" is the difference between the kinetic energies of the "upper" and "lower" halves of the object. The greater the energy difference, the shorter the period between body flips.

If the difference in the moment of inertia (which becomes the accumulated energy after the spinning top) is very small, then such a body will rotate stably for a very long time. But such stability will not last forever. At some point there will be a revolution.

If we talk about the planets, including the planet Earth, then we can confidently say that they are definitely not ideal geometric spheres consisting of ideally homogeneous matter. This means that the moment of inertia of the conditional "upper" or "lower" halves of the planet, even if in hundredths or thousandths of a percent, differ. And this is quite enough for it to lead to a revolution of the planet about the axis of rotation and a change of poles.

Features of the planet Earth

The first thing that comes to mind in connection with the above is that the shape of the Earth is clearly far from a perfect ball and is a geoid. In order to show the elevation differences on our planet with more contrast, an animated drawing was developed with a multiplied scale of the elevation difference (see below).

In reality, the relief of the Earth is much smoother, but the fact that the shape of the planet is not ideal is obvious.

Accordingly, we should expect that the imperfection of the form, as well as the heterogeneity of the internal substance of the planet (the presence of cavities, dense and porous lithospheric layers, etc.) will necessarily lead to the fact that the "upper" and "lower" parts of the planet will have some difference in the moment of inertia. And this means that the "revolutions of the Earth", as Immanuel Velikovsky called them, is not an invention, but a very real physical phenomenon.

Water on the surface of the planet

Now we need to consider one very important factor, which distinguishes the Earth from Thomson's top and Dzhanibekov's nut. This factor is water. The oceans occupy about three-quarters of the planet's surface and contain so much water that if all of it is evenly distributed over the surface, you get a layer more than 2.7 km thick. The mass of water is 1/4000 of the mass of the planet, but despite such a seemingly insignificant fraction, water plays a very significant role in what happens on the planet during a revolution...

Let's imagine that the moment has come when the planet makes a "somersault". The solid part of the planet will begin to move along a trajectory leading to a change of poles. What will happen to the water on the Earth's surface? Water does not have a strong connection with the surface, it can flow wherever the resultant of physical forces is directed. Therefore, according to the well-known laws of conservation of momentum and angular momentum, it will try to maintain the direction of movement that was carried out before the "tumble".

What does it mean? And this means that all the oceans, all the seas, all the lakes will begin to move. Water will begin to move with acceleration relative to a solid surface ...

At each moment of time during the process of changing the poles, water bodies, no matter where they are on the globe, will almost always be affected by two inertial components:

Take a look at the picture below. It shows the magnitude of linear velocities at different latitudes (for clarity, several points on the surface of the globe are selected).

Linear speeds differ because the radius of rotation at different geographical latitudes- different. It turns out that if a point on the planet's surface "moves" closer to the equator, then it increases its linear velocity, and if it moves away from the equator, it decreases. But water is not firmly bound to a solid surface! She retains the linear speed that she had before the "tumble"!

Due to the difference in the linear velocities of water and the solid surface of the Earth (lithosphere), a tsunami effect is obtained. The mass of ocean water moves relative to the surface in an incredibly powerful stream. See what a clear mark the past pole shift has left. This is the Drake Passage, it is located between South America and Antarctica. The flow is impressive! He dragged the remnants of the pre-existing isthmus for two thousand kilometers.

On the old map of the world, it is perfectly clear that there is no Drake Passage in 1531 yet... Or it is still unknown, and the cartographer draws a map according to old information.

The value of the inertial components depends on the location of the point of interest to us, as well as on the trajectory of the "somersault" and on what time stage of the reversal we are at. After the end of the flip, the value of the inertial components will become zero, and the movement of water will gradually be extinguished due to the viscosity of the liquid, due to the forces of friction and gravity.

It should be said that on the surface of the globe during the "pole shift" there are two zones in which both inertial components will be minimal. It can be said that these two places are the safest from the point of view of the threat from the flood wave. Their peculiarity is that they will not have inertial forces that force the water to move in any direction.

Unfortunately, there is no way to predict the location of these zones in advance. The only thing that can be said is that the centers of these zones are located at the intersection of the Earth's equators - one that was before the "tumble" and the other that became after it.

Water flow dynamics under the influence of inertial components

The figure below is a schematic representation of the movement of a body of water under the influence of a pole shift. In the first picture on the left we see diurnal rotation Lands (green arrow), conditional lake (blue circle - water, orange circle - shores). The two green triangles represent two geostationary satellites. Since the movement of the lithosphere does not affect their location, we will use them as landmarks to estimate the distances and directions of movement.

The pink arrows show the direction of the south pole movement (directed along the shift path). The shores of the lake move (relative to the axis of rotation of the planet) together with the lithosphere, and water, under the influence of inertia forces, first tries to maintain its position and moves along the shear trajectory, and then, under the influence of the second inertial component, gradually turns its movement in the direction of the planet's rotation.

This is most noticeable if we compare the position on the diagram of the blue circle (water body) and green triangles (geostationary satellites).

Below on the map we can see traces of a water-mudflow flow, the direction of which is gradually reversed under the influence of the second inertial component.

There are traces of other streams on this map as well. We will explore them in the next parts of the series.

Damping effect of the oceans

It should be said that the water masses of the oceans not only bear destruction from catastrophic tsunami flows. But they are the cause of another effect - the effect of damping, which slows down the revolution of the planet.

If our planet had only land and did not have oceans, it would pass in exactly the same way as the "Dzhanibekov's nut" and the Chinese spinning top - the poles would change places.

But, when during the overturn the water starts to move along the surface, it introduces a change in the energy component of the rotation, namely, the distribution of the moment of inertia. Although the mass of surface water is only 1/4000 of the planet's mass, its moment of inertia is about 1/500 of the planet's total moment of inertia.

This is enough to extinguish the energy of the reversal before the poles turn 180 degrees. As a result, on planet Earth, shift poles, instead of a complete revolution, - " shifts poles".

Atmospheric Phenomena During the Pole Shift

The main effect of the "somersault" of the planet, which manifests itself in the atmosphere, is a powerful electrification, an increase in static electricity, an increase in the difference in electrical potentials between the layers of the atmosphere and the surface of the planet.

In addition, a lot of different gases come out from the depths of the planet, including hydrogen degassing, which is greatly enhanced by the stress of the lithosphere. Hydrogen under the conditions of electric discharges intensively interacts with the oxygen of the atmosphere, water is formed in volumes that are many times higher than the climatic norm.

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Methodical materials, articles

Cambrian paradox Somersault of the planet (article two)

The continental plates of Australia and America, which were previously in the region of the poles, turned and moved towards the equator in some 15 million years - a period of negligible geological scales. It was a real "somersault" of the entire planet.

The mystery of the "biological Big Bang" - the sudden and simultaneous appearance of all modern biological types in the Cambrian era - continues to intrigue many researchers. Two of the newest hypotheses "oxygen" and "earth somersault" explain this jump in evolution by a sharp change in physico-chemical conditions on the entire planet. In contrast, biologists put forward other assumptions that link the Cambrian explosion with dramatic ecological or genetic shifts.

Among the hypotheses proposed to explain the Cambrian riddle, the so-called oxygen hypothesis was considered the most serious until recently. It is based on the assumption that the Cambrian explosion was caused by a dramatic change in the chemical composition of the earth's atmosphere and oceans that preceded it.

Physico-chemical conditions affect the rate of biological evolution this has been known for a long time. Many biologists are convinced that the unusually slow change of biological forms during the first three billion years of their existence was due to a lack of free oxygen.

There was no oxygen at all in the earth's primary atmosphere, because it immediately reacted with other elements and remained bound in the earth's thickness and atmosphere in the form of oxides. But with the advent of the first single-celled algae, about half a billion to a billion years after the formation of the Earth, the process of photosynthesis began, in which carbon dioxide (absorbed by algae from the air) and water, with the help of sunlight, were converted into free oxygen and organic substances. However, even here oxygen was "unlucky" - it was greedily captured by iron dissolved in ocean water. The resulting iron oxides slowly settled to the ocean floor, leaving the chemical cycle, the world, as one of the geochemists put it, was constantly rusting, and free oxygen was not added to it.

In the absence of free oxygen, organisms were forced to remain anaerobic. This meant that the processing of products in them, metabolism, or metabolism took place without the participation of oxygen - slowly and inefficiently. This, according to biologists, hindered the evolution of the first organisms. The situation changed somewhat only from the moment when the iron dissolved in the oceans was saturated with oxygen and the concentration of this gas in the atmosphere, thanks to the same photosynthesis, finally began to gradually increase. This made possible the appearance of the first aerobic organisms. They were still single-celled, but their metabolism was much more efficient, and therefore they multiplied faster and populated the oceans more densely. So passed the first 3.5 billion years, by the end of which the oxygen content in the atmosphere reached, as it is believed, about one percent. At this point, evolution took the next important step the first multicellular organisms appeared. And then, half a billion years later, the Cambrian explosion came and at once laid the foundation for all the complex diversity of modern life.

It can be said that the history of biological evolution was in a sense the history of oxygen. So wasn't the Cambrian "jump in evolution" the result of a spasmodic increase in free oxygen in the atmosphere?

It was this assumption that was made in 1965 by two American physicists, Berkner and Marshall. They reasoned as follows. Complex multicellular organisms need a large amount of oxygen, and in two of its types at once firstly, in the form of free oxygen necessary for respiration (that is, for metabolism) and the construction of collagen, this most important element of the body structure, and secondly, in the ozone layer needed to protect against harmful solar ultraviolet radiation. Since such organisms did not appear until the Cambrian era, it means that their appearance was delayed by the lack of the necessary oxygen concentration in the atmosphere. On this basis, it can be assumed that it was in the Cambrian era that such quantities first appeared. This unique event—the crossing of the "oxygen frontier," the abrupt increase in atmospheric oxygen levels to the current 21 percent—was, according to Berkner and Marshall, the main cause of the Cambrian explosion.

At first, this "oxygen hypothesis" did not have sufficient confirmation. But literally in recent years (1994 1996) the situation has changed dramatically. The reason for this was the discovery of the American researcher Knoll. Studying the ratio of two carbon isotopes, C-12 and C-13, in the rocks of the Precambrian and Cambrian times, Knoll received irrefutable evidence that at the very beginning of the Cambrian epoch this ratio changed dramatically C-12 isotope “at once” became less than before . And such a "carbon leap" must necessarily be accompanied by a corresponding "oxygen leap", which exactly corresponds to the assumption of Berkner Marshall.

After the work of Knoll, the presence of an "oxygen jump" in the Cambrian period is recognized by most scientists. But it remains unclear: what could be the reason for the “non-return” of C-12 into the environment, which led to this “oxygen jump”?

Another hypothesis was proposed by the American geologist Moore in 1993. According to Moore, the reason for the decline of C-12 was sharp tectonic shifts, such as the movement of the continents, which occurred on the very eve of the Cambrian era. Such shifts, says Moore, could lead to the fragmentation of the oceans into smaller and moreover closed bodies of water seas and lakes, and this should have reduced the intensity of water circulation. As a result, the organic remains of the algae, along with their carbon, remained on the sea floor and did not rise to the surface, where they could be decomposed by bacteria. Thus, carbon was released from the circulation, allowing the oxygen synthesized by algae to quickly accumulate in the atmosphere.

Moore's "tectonic hypothesis" also at first had no actual confirmation. But three years later, it received a completely unexpected, one might even say sensational development. In the middle of last year, the scientific, and then the mass press, was suddenly filled with headlines like: “Earth somersault explains the mystery of the Cambrian explosion!” The most surprising thing is that the notorious “somersault” (or “somersault”, as it was also called) was not some kind of journalistic exaggeration. As follows from the texts, it was a very serious (albeit radical) scientific hypothesis that explained the Cambrian mystery precisely by those “tectonic shifts” that we have just talked about, only on a much grander scale something like a one-time shift of the entire earth's crust . Truly a "tumble"!

His work made it possible to build a clear picture of the geological changes that took place on the Earth at the beginning of the Cambrian epoch 550 500 million years ago. This picture turned out to be quite unexpected and truly sensational. This is how, according to Kirshvink, the geological events of that time unfolded.

Shortly before the beginning of the Cambrian era, the split of the most ancient supercontinent, which consisted of most of the modern continents, ended (paleogeologists gave this supercontinent the name Rodinia). Almost immediately after this, the separated mainland masses began to regroup, uniting into a new supercontinent, Gondwana. At the last stages of the formation of Gondwana, a sharp imbalance arose in the distribution of continental masses relative to the earth's axis. The earthly "top" lost stability. A rotating body is most stable when the masses that form it are concentrated on the equator (which gives it the maximum moment of inertia) or more or less evenly distributed relative to it, meanwhile Gondwana was located too close to the pole.

Restoring the stability of the Earth required a rapid redistribution of continental masses. Therefore, the entire solid shell of the planet began to slide down the mantle as a whole, until it shifted ninety degrees relative to the axis of rotation. As shown by Kirschvink's data, the continental plates of Australia and America, which were previously located in the region of the poles, made this turn and movement towards the equator in some fifteen million years an insignificant period on a geological scale (three ten-thousandths of the total age of the Earth). It was a real "somersault" of the entire planet. Its result was that its axis of rotation, while maintaining its former direction in space, now rotated 90 degrees relative to the solid shell. The rotation of the earth's top again became stable.

According to Kirschvink's paleomagnetic data collected in the rocks of America and Australia, both of these continental plates (comprising almost two-thirds of the entire earth's crust) made their movement relative to the earth's axis almost simultaneously, between 534 and 518 million years ago. Such grandiose geological events are extremely rare. In any case, over the past two hundred million years, since the end of the Permian era, they certainly have not occurred even once. Kirschvink, however, does not exclude that something similar to the geological cataclysm described by him could repeat itself in the interval between the Cambrian and Permian epochs.

Unusual as Kirschvink's picture is, it is very solidly substantiated by the author's data, and besides, it immediately received a number of independent confirmations, so that geologists as a whole expressed their readiness to accept it. But this picture also interested biologists. As already mentioned at the very beginning, according to the authors, it was this “somersault” of the planet that could be the main cause of the Cambrian biological explosion. “The rapid movement of the continents,” says Ripperdan, one of Kirshvink’s co-authors, “could not but lead to the closure of some and the formation of other water basins of these then only habitats, to a change in ocean currents of that time, to abrupt climate changes and to other equally catastrophic phenomena. All these catastrophes were supposed to give impetus to the rise of new forms of life, adapted to the changed conditions. But it was precisely such a rapid emergence of new forms that was characteristic of the "Cambrian explosion".

According to Kirschvink himself, the rapid changes in the ocean area caused by the sliding of the continents should have led to fairly frequent and abrupt changes ocean currents. “Each such change was global,” he says. It destroyed the existing regional ecosystems into smaller areas. In these small areas, new forms of life were more likely to survive than in large regions. Our data suggest that such current changes occurred then almost every million years or so. Over a million years, evolution has managed to select the best of the survivors of the last cycle and create new regional systems. But then this process began again, and so one and a half to two dozen times during the entire cataclysm. These are the best conditions for the emergence of great biological diversity, especially since all this happened shortly after the appearance of those genes that control the main stages of the embryonic development of multicellular organisms.

Let's take a look at the last sentence. At first glance - the eye of the uninitiated - it sounds rather mysterious: what are these "genes that control the main stages of embryonic development", and what do they have to do with the Cambrian explosion? There were, however, people who heard in this phrase the long-awaited recognition of those radical biological ideas that they put forward over the past two years, hoping to attract the attention of the scientific world to them. And not just recognition, but also a completely transparent hint at the possibility of combining these ideas with the equally radical geological ideas of the “planetary somersault” within the framework of the new physico-biological theory of the Cambrian explosion.

It is to the story of these biological explanations of the Cambrian riddle that we dedicate the final part of our essay.

The first of the "purely biological" hypotheses put forward to explain the Cambrian explosion was the "reaper hypothesis" formulated in 1973 by the American Stephen Stanley. Stanley proceeded from the "thinning principle" well known in ecology. It has been observed that the introduction of predatory fish into an artificial pond leads to a rapid increase in zooplankton diversity in that pond. And vice versa, it is enough to remove the sea urchins that feed on them from the accumulation of various algae, as this diversity begins to decrease. In other words, the “thinning” of an ecological niche by a “reaper-predator” that feeds on its inhabitants is necessary to maintain or expand its biological diversity.

At first glance, this seems counterintuitive. It seems that such a "reaper", exterminating the population of a niche, will reduce the number of species inhabiting it, and even nullify some of the smallest ones. But, as we see, reality refutes this intuitive reasoning. And that's why. In any niche inhabited by so-called primary producers (that is, organisms that get their food directly from photosynthesis, and not by eating others), one or more species inevitably become "monopolists" - they capture all the living space and nutrients of the niche and do not allow other species to develop. The “reaper” that appeared under these conditions will most likely feed on these dominant species (if only because they are able to provide it with the largest amount of food) and, therefore, will primarily reduce their biomass. But thanks to this, he will clear a part of the living space and thereby make room for new species. And this will lead to an increase in the biological diversity of the entire niche. The same principle, as can be seen from the examples above, operates in other ecological systems. Stanley, on the other hand, applied the "thinning principle" to explain the mystery of the Cambrian explosion.

It is easy to see that this explosion fits perfectly into this scheme. In the pre-Cambrian era, the earth's oceans were almost exclusively inhabited by unicellular bacteria and algae of a few few species. For billions of years no one "thinned" them, and therefore they did not have the opportunity to evolve quickly. If any one-celled herbivorous "predator" were suddenly to appear in such an environment, it would certainly have to - by the "thinning principle" - cause the rapid emergence of new species. This, in turn, should have led to the emergence of new, more specialized "reapers", clearing the place for the next new species, so that the diversity of biological forms would begin to grow like a snowball and this is the situation of the Cambrian explosion.

Thus, according to Stanley, the "trigger" of the Cambrian explosion was the accidental appearance of a certain "predator" in the environment of the simplest unicellular organisms of the pre-Cambrian era. And the fact that this explosion had the character of a sharp jump does not present any special mystery. Exactly the same character has the development of many biological systems in the presence of a sufficiently free living space and a sufficiently plentiful amount of food. If, for example, a small colony of bacteria is planted on a nutrient medium in a laboratory Petri dish, it will multiply according to the same “avalanche” law, and this spasmodic reproduction will stop only when all available space is filled and nutrients are exhausted. The Cambrian oceans were such a natural "Petri dish" for new biological species. When they filled these oceans, the conditions for the jump disappeared and never happened again, which explains, according to Stanley, the uniqueness of the Cambrian explosion.

A completely different biological explanation for the Cambrian explosion was proposed in 1994 1997 by American biologists Valentin, Erwin and Yablonsky. In their opinion, this explosion occurred due to the fact that some primitive pre-Cambrian organisms, as a result of random genetic changes, had the ability to dramatically expand the range of possible bodily structures. Indeed, one of the most important features of the Cambrian evolutionary leap was just such a sudden appearance of many biological forms with completely new bodily characteristics. Some of these new organisms have developed distinct heads and tails, others have distinct segments and abdomens, still others have limbs, some have clad in shells, some have antennae or gills, and so on. In total, researchers count as many as 37 new bodily planes that arose and, moreover, almost simultaneously in that era of violent evolutionary activity. And all the basic principles of the bodily architecture of modern organisms originated precisely then.

At what here, however, genes? The idea of ​​the connection of this "architectural leap" with the genes of the authors of the new hypothesis was prompted by the latest achievements of the so-called developmental biology. It was already known that in the course of the embryonic development of any multicellular organism, its cells undergo specialization from some, for example, legs are obtained, from others, say, muscles, gills or eyes. It was also known that commands for cell specialization are given by certain genes. But in recent years, it has been established that in order for development to proceed according to a certain plan for example, the eye does not grow where the leg should be, it is necessary that these genes “turn on” in a certain sequence, one after the other, at the right time, and control such a systematic inclusion of special, so-called regulatory genes. Their most studied variety is the genes of the "hox" group. They were first discovered while studying Drosophila.

It was found that the genes of this group regulate the process of laying the most basic and most general principles of the bodily structure of the body. Eight genes of this group, present in Drosophila, are located in one of the chromosomes one after another, sequentially. They work in the same sequential way: the first gene gives the command to build the head, the second one orders the construction of the next segment of the body along its axis, and so on, up to the tail. When the researchers artificially changed the sequence of these genes, they got flies that, for example, had legs growing out of their heads.

The genes of the hox group have also been studied in frogs. This study showed that although frogs and fruit frogs are on two different branches of the evolutionary tree (these branches differ in the way the embryo develops a mouth), six of their hox genes are strikingly similar. For example, one of them in Drosophila differs from its counterpart in the frog only in “sign”: in Drosophila it regulates the appearance of the abdomen, and in the frog it regulates the back. If you transplant it from Drosophila to a frog, then the course of development will not be disturbed at all, only the frog's back and abdomen will change places. Apparently, this difference arose as a result of mutation. By counting how many of these mutational differences accumulated in similar hox genes during the separate existence of mice and frogs, and knowing the average number of mutations that occur every hundred years, the researchers determined how long ago the common ancestor of frogs and fruit flies lived. This time turned out to be alarmingly close to the time of the Cambrian explosion, about 565 million years.

As we have already said, Drosophila has only eight hox genes, while mammals, for example, have as many as 38 of them. But it was found that all these 38 genes are only slightly modified duplicates of the eight primary ones. As for these eight primary genes themselves, they turned out to be very similar in all modern types of organisms, from mammals to insects. As in the case of the frog and Drosophila, this similarity made it possible to calculate when exactly these eight original hox genes first appeared, which determined (and still determine) the most general principles of the bodily structure of all modern organisms (specific differences in this structure and the shape of their bodies between, say, Marilyn Monroe and the Drosophila fly are generated by the difference in the regulatory genes of other groups that appeared later, in the course of subsequent evolution).

These calculations led to the same results as comparing these genes in frogs and fruit flies. It turned out that the primary genes of the hox group, which are similar in all modern organisms, date back to the common ancestors of these organisms that arose about 565 million years ago, that is, in the era immediately preceding the Cambrian evolutionary explosion. As we already know, those body plans that have survived to this day in the form of the most general principles of the bodily architecture of modern organisms arose in the Cambrian era. And now we see that the regulatory genes responsible for such general plans appeared shortly before that. It is quite natural to assume that it was the emergence of the first complete group of hox genes (consisting of eight primary genes) that played the role of a trigger for that unique explosion of forms that we call the Cambrian explosion.

At first, Valentin and his co-authors argued that history developed as follows: for the time being, only the simplest organisms existed, in which the entire hox group was exhausted by a single gene, in the pre-Cambrian era the first multicellular organisms arose, in which the number of these genes gradually increased to five. six (for flatworms), and in the Cambrian era this number jumped to eight, and this was enough for the emergence of an amazing variety of forms.

A later version of their theory looks much more complicated. Now they believe that the appearance of the entire necessary set of regulatory genes occurred already in the Precambrian era, 565 million years ago. But for all the biological fundamentality of this event, it was, nevertheless, only a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for the Cambrian explosion. It is quite possible that even with one of those genes, its first owner, some flatworm, did not have an eye, but only "eye potency" - a kind of light-sensitive spot on the head.

Organisms are not mechanical toys that just need to be pushed to get an automatic answer, rather it took a complex combination of various conditions for the possibility to become a reality and for a Cambrian-like evolutionary leap to take place.

In other words, something additional must have happened in the Cambrian era, which played the role of a “trigger” for putting these genes into action, that is, for creating a variety of different forms and types, which is so characteristic of that time. Valentin and his colleagues do not specify what could be such an "additional trigger". They only write that "suggestions range from a surge in atmospheric oxygen above some critical level to an ecological 'arms race' in which the evolutionary interplay of predators and prey could give rise to a range of different new species."

In these words it is easy to recognize allusions to Berkner-Marshall's "oxygen hypothesis" and Stanley's "predator-reaper hypothesis". On the other hand, Kirschvink, the creator of the “Earth somersault hypothesis”, believes that his explanation of the Cambrian explosion by the simultaneous sliding of all the earth’s continents can also be combined with the theory of the “jump of regulatory genes” proposed by Valentin, Yablonsky and Erwin. Therefore, summing up, we can say that the latest theories of the Cambrian explosion tend to combine several different hypotheses and thereby explain this unique and mysterious phenomenon not by any one reason, but by the interaction of several different factors, both physicochemical and biological nature.

On this we could draw a line under the story of the mysteries of the Cambrian explosion and attempts to explain them. But there is one more unsolved problem in our list of these mysteries.

As we have already said, the Cambrian evolutionary leap presents a fundamental difficulty for Darwin's "orthodox" theory, in which evolution is considered to be necessarily "smooth" and "continuous". To circumvent this difficulty, some biologists deny the reality of the Cambrian explosion altogether, while others propose rather radical changes to "orthodox Darwinism." In recent years, each side has put forward new arguments in its favor, and this sharply aggravated the dispute over the foundations of Darwinism. This dispute certainly deserves a separate story.

Rafail Nudelman

Back in 1985, immediately after Vladimir Dzhanibekov discovered his famous effect, there was an attempt to connect it with the reversal of the axis of our planet. A change in the position of the magnetic poles indicates a displacement of the core. The mathematical model of the process, the analysis of the situation in the historical myths and prophecies of the peoples of the Earth, portends an inevitable event when we will see the Sun rise in the West!

"Science reaches perfection only when it succeeds in using mathematics" Karl Marx

Dzhanibekov effect

In 1985, at the Salyut-7 station, while unloading a transport ship, Vladimir Dzhanibekov untwisted the fastening lamb with his finger, which fastened the tapes holding containers for packing things sent into space.

The lamb came off the hairpin, and to the astronaut's considerable amazement, having flown about 30 centimeters, it turned over 180 degrees, rotating in the same direction, but with a different pole, and after about 30 centimeters, the lamb again made a “somersault”. This phenomenon interested the astronaut so much that he fixed the nut into a plasticine ball and repeated the experiment with the same result!

After some confusion in scientific circles, it turned out that the Dzhanibekov effect can be perfectly explained with the help of classical mechanics. (The rotation of a nut can be analyzed using the Euler equations as a system of seven first-order differential equations).

Projections of angular velocity on own axes

Projections of angular velocity on own axes

It can be seen from the graphs that with a very slight perturbation of the angular velocity vector, a body twisted around an axis with a maximum moment of inertia will periodically change its orientation in space by 180 degrees like an avalanche.

The essence of the phenomenon is that a body with a displaced center of gravity, freely rotating in weightlessness, has different moments of inertia, impulses and initial velocities relative to different axes of rotation. When unwinding a plasticine ball with a nut, it is difficult to tighten it strictly along one axis. There will necessarily be a minimum impulse imparted to the body, directed relative to the other axis. Gradually, this momentum accumulates and outweighs the axial rotation of the body. Thus, the ball first rotates around one axis, then this axis flips into opposite side. A somersault occurs, but after the same time the axis turns over again, returning the body to its previous position. In space, where there is no friction, this cycle can be repeated many times.

Displacement of the Earth's center of gravity

The Earth's center of mass, or geocenter, is chosen as the origin in many coordinate systems because it is a very stable point in the Earth's body. This point is realized by observing satellites moving in a gravitational field. The geocenter is recommended as the origin for the earth reference system in (IERS, 1996) and (IERS, 2003) as the Earth's center of mass, including the oceans and atmosphere.

The analysis of satellite laser ranging observations confidently shows that the frame of reference, implemented in the coordinates of observation stations that are stationary relative to the earth's crust, is noticeably shifted relative to the center of mass of the earth.

Apparently not without reason, in 1997 the International Earth Rotation Service conducted a campaign to study the stability of the geocenter, which was attended by 42 researchers from 25 scientific groups using modern geophysical models and the results of processing laser measurements, GPS and DORIS.

Secular shifts in the position of the geocenter can be explained by the following reasons:

• sea ​​level change;
• changes in the ice sheet (in Greenland, Antarctica);
• tectonic displacements in the earth's crust (an increase in the volume of the earth).

The stability of the Geocenter is affected by the position of the core of our planet floating in the mantle! The inner core rotates at a different speed than the outer one. This creates a dynamo effect in the form of convection currents. As a result, this giant electromagnet generates the magnetic field (MF) of the planet. Therefore, according to the actual position of the axis of the magnetic dipole, one can judge the position of the Earth's core!

So, displacement of the core of our planet must be fixed by the difference between the magnetic axis and the rotation axis.

"At the beginning of the first systematic observations of the geomagnetic field (1829), it was noted that the Earth's magnetic dipole (respectively, the inner core) was shifted relative to the planet's rotation axis by 252 km towards the Pacific Ocean. According to 1965 data, this shift increased to 430 km, and continues to increase! At what distance from the center of the Earth is the magnetic dipole at the present time, it was not possible to find out, because for some reason this information is no longer published in open sources.

These phrases have been circulating the web for a decade! I offer readers a mathematical model that calculates the deviation of the planet's core from the Geocenter from the coordinates of the magnetic poles:

Corner a between two points A(μ1;λ1) And B(μ2;λ2) on the sphere (where μ And λ - latitude and longitude) is determined from the spherical cosine theorem:

a = arccos⁡(sin⁡(μ1)*sin⁡(μ2)+cos⁡(μ1)*cos⁡(μ 2)*cos⁡(λ1-λ2))

The distance of magnetic deviation from the geographic center of the Earth, (where R is the radius of the Earth):

H = R*√¯¯1-sin²(a/2)

If we take the coordinates of the magnetic poles from Wikipedia, then the distance between the axis of the magnetic dipole (and hence the core) and the Geocenter is growing and is currently about 1500 km (this is 24% of the radius of the Earth), which causes great concern!

The problem is in the accuracy and synchronism of obtaining the coordinates of the poles. Official data on the position of the Earth's magnetic poles. They give the result in 2015 - 1517 km, 2017 - 1548 km.

An alternative reason for such a significant shift may be that the magnetic axis is not straight, reflected in the work of Shmonov G.A. "Double-headed North and Multipoint South Magnetic Pole of the Earth"

Earth's magnetic poles and their true position

True magnetic poles- small areas in which the lines of force magnetic field absolutely vertical. They do not coincide with geomagnetic and do not lie on the very surface of the Earth, but under it. The coordinates of the magnetic poles at one time or another are calculated within the framework of various models of the geomagnetic field by finding all the coefficients in the Gaussian series by an interactive method.

Respectively, magnetic axis- a straight line passing through the magnetic poles, - does not pass through the center of the Earth and is not its diameter!

Precession of the north virtual magnetic pole for one hour at the height of the magnetic storm on March 17, 2013. According to the observatory "Novosibirsk"

Precession of the north virtual magnetic pole for one hour at the height of the magnetic storm on March 17, 2013. According to the observatory "Novosibirsk"

The positions of all poles are constantly shifting (even hourly!), especially during magnetic storms caused by streams of charged particles from the Sun.

As you can see, the daily displacement of the pole can be several hundred kilometers.

What affects the earth's magnetic field?

According to today's ideas, the Earth's magnetic field is a combination of several magnetic fields generated by various sources.

1. Main field. More than 90% of the total magnetic field is generated in the outer liquid core of the planet.
2. Magnetic anomalies of the earth's crust caused by the residual magnetization of rocks. They change very slowly.
3. External margins generated by currents in the ionosphere and magnetosphere of the Earth, transient.
4. Electric currents in the crust and outer mantle excited by rapid changes in external fields.
5. Influence of ocean currents.

Magnetic poles drift across the surface of our planet at a speed of about 40 km per year.

Movement of the Earth's north magnetic pole since the beginning of the 17th century. Red dots are observed positions, blue dots are calculated positions calculated using the GUFM (1590–1890) and IGRF-12 (1900–2020) models with a time step of 1 year. For 1890–1900, a smooth interpolation was made between the two models.

Dzhanibekov effect as applied to the Earth

Let us consider the conditions under which our planet could repeat the trajectory of the plasticine ball in Dzhanibekov's experiment.

Firstly, the center of gravity of the Earth (Geocenter) should significantly shift relative to the geographical center of the planet (based on the mathematical model, now it is about 1500 km, which is 24% of the radius, the conditions are ripe!).

Secondly, the "flip" occurs along the axis of motion of the ball (the inclination of the Earth's axis is 23.44° and is perpendicular to the axis of motion of the planet).

Third, from experience it is clear that the "tumble" is carried out in one revolution of the ball (in the case of the Earth - in a day)!

Not very accurate, in my opinion, modeling the Geoid "tumble" process

The motion of the planet is more like a spinning top than the Dzhanibekov effect. Also, the model does not take into account the stabilizing role of the Moon.

"But the effect of a regular cyclic reversal of the poles of a body rotating in weightlessness applies only to bodies with an unstable center of gravity, what does this have to do with our Earth?" asks the Attentive Reader.

Probably, each of us at least once tried to spin a raw or boiled egg on the table - the difference is immediately visible. Our Earth is a relatively small solid core floating in a thick layer of liquid magma and a thin layer of solid lithosphere three-quarters covered by oceans, which means again liquid. A kind of huge ball the size of a planet, mainly consisting of substances that are in the liquid phase, where there is simply nowhere to take a rigid center of gravity.

The inner core is shifting, most likely due to the moon

It is reasonable to consider not the Earth separately, but the Earth-Moon system, since by the mass ratio (1:81) it is unique in the Solar System. Under the influence of the Moon's gravity, the core of our planet periodically shifts from the axis of rotation and, as a result of centrifugal force acting on it, gradually moves away from the center of the Earth, overcoming the resistance of the viscous outer liquid core. There are no forces that would return the inner core to its original state. There is only one possibility to return to a state of stable equilibrium - the displacement of the Earth's axis of rotation.

Mention of the Sun rising in the West in ancient myths

IN Indian the myth "Strengthening the Earth" says that "... in those days the earth swayed, as if under the breath of the wind, like a lotus leaf, from side to side" and the gods had to strengthen it.

IN Syrian In the city of Ugarit (Ras Shamra), a text was found dedicated to the goddess Anat, who “destroyed the population of the Levant and reversed the two dawns and the movement of the stars.”

IN Mexican codices describe the "Sun in four movements". The luminary, which moves to the east, opposite to the modern Sun, they called Theotl Lixo. The ancient peoples of Mexico symbolically likened the change in the direction of the solar movement to a celestial ball game, which is accompanied by earthquakes on the planet. When the Earth flips, the northern stars become southern. This phenomenon is described in the codices as "the departure of four hundred southern stars."

Plato in his Politico writes:

"I'm talking about changing sunrise and sunset and other celestial bodies when, in those ancient times, they set where they now rise, and rose where they now set... At certain periods the earth has its present circular motion, and at other periods it rotates in the opposite direction... Of all the changes, which take place in the heavens, this reverse movement is the most significant ... At that time, there was a complete destruction of animals, and only a small part of people survived.

Another work of Plato ("Timaeus") speaks of the movement of the earth's axis of the Earth during a nightmarish cataclysm:

"Forward and backward, and again to the right and left, up and down, wandering in all six directions." people were formed like this: there was an immense terrible desert all around, a huge mass of land, all the animals died, only in some places herds of cattle and a tribe of goats accidentally survived. .II).

"The luminaries moving in the sky and around the Earth deviate from the path, and at long intervals everything that is on the Earth is destroyed by means of strong fire. Then the inhabitants of mountains, high and dry places die more than those who live near rivers and seas. As for us, then the Nile, which also protects us in other cases, is our savior in this trouble.When again the gods, to purify the earth, flood it with water, then those who live on the mountains, shepherds and boletes, are saved, and the people who live in your cities, are carried away by streams of water into the sea. But in this country, neither then nor at any other time, the water does not pour onto the fields from above, but, on the contrary, everything usually comes from below. (Plato, Timaeus, ch. 22D).

Earth's expansion along mid-ocean ridges

Earth's expansion along mid-ocean ridges

Here it is appropriate to recall the subcortical ocean (see the article "The Flood"). During the “tumble” of the Earth, most likely, there will be no displacement of the waters of the oceans, but there will be a process of “squeezing out”, under the action of centrifugal force, subcrustal waters and magma to the surface of the Earth!

The Chinese believed that "the new order of things came only after the stars began to move from east to west." The Jesuit missionary Martinius (XVII century), based on ancient chronicles, wrote the book “History of China”, which refers to the displacement of the Earth's axis: “The support of the sky collapsed. The earth was shaken to its very foundations. The sky began to fall towards the north. The sun, moon and stars have changed the way they move. The entire system of the universe is in disarray. The sun was in an eclipse and the planets changed their paths."

Karelian-Finnish The Kalevala epic tells that terrible shadows shrouded the Earth, and the Sun sometimes left its usual path.

At Herodotus there is a mention that before the flood the Sun came out of the West, and before the flood it came out of the East.

About the future harbinger of the Day of Judgment in Koran says:

"The hour will not come until the sun rises in the West, and when it rises and people see it, they will all believe, but then a person will not be good in faith if he did not believe before, did not deserve good (by doing righteous deeds) with his faith ". (Al-Bukhari, 11/352, Muslim, 2/194).

The fact that the phenomenon of the "somersault" of the planet is periodic is clear from the Dzhanibekov effect, and it is clear that the smaller the size, speed and mass of the body, the more likely it will happen!

As readers from the article "The Flood" remember, the Earth in antediluvian times was almost half the radius and its rotation speed was more than three times faster (7.2 hours a day)! Accordingly, in ancient times, the probability of the Earth "tumbling" was much greater than now! And as the Earth expands, the probability of a "coup" does not disappear completely, but decreases significantly!

How dangerous is a planetary upheaval?

The best answer to this question is an experiment in the vacuum of space! It is necessary to take a ball with a displaced center of gravity from a material wetted by water. Immerse it in a liquid that will envelop the ball with a drop and, with minimal acceleration, spin it (without spilling the liquid from the surface), and then release it into an airless space.

I think that in a vacuum chamber our model of the globe with oceans will "tumble in Janibekov's way" along with the liquid!

This will show whether there will be strong perturbations of the hydrosphere and atmosphere during the upheaval of our planet. And if instead of an eccentric of mass, a video camera is placed in a ball and released into space, we will see the movement of stars during the "tumble" of the Earth!

In 1976 Academician N.I. Korovyakov, with the help of modeling the conditions and processes occurring in the center of the Earth (hydrodynamic top), established a previously unknown regularity of the eccentric displacement of the inner core in the shell of our planet. He writes: "The dense earth's core does not stick out regally in the middle of the globe, nailed there by the authorities of geophysics, it travels in a magma melt along a pentagonal trajectory." In his opinion, the movement of the core and magma melt along the perimeter of the pentagon affect the movement of the continents, the growth of mountains, the drift of the Earth's magnetic poles. Movements cause earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, affect climate and ocean currents.

International Association of Authors of Scientific Discoveries and Russian Academy natural sciences confirmed the reliability of the discovery of world significance, and in 1997 issued a diploma to the scientist under No. 63. Years of experiments and calculations made it possible to establish that the inner core of the Earth, under the influence of the gravity of the Moon and the Sun, moves in magma along a kind of orbit - pentagonal trajectories(on the pentagram!).

Our ancestors undoubtedly possessed esoteric knowledge about the causes of cataclysms that occurred in the distant past. It is not for nothing that in the occult sciences they use a pentagram to protect against Satan, whose possessions are in the underworld. When he breaks free (leaves the limits of the pentagram), then the world will undergo terrible devastation.

What is the danger that threatens humanity in the "somersault" of the Earth?

The earth is a kind of gyroscope with three degrees of freedom. If the movement of the inner core towards the Earth's surface continues at the same pace as it is now, then after a certain time the center of mass of the planet will shift so much that the Earth will simply somersault in space, like a plasticine ball with a shifted center of gravity in Dzhanibekov's experiment, in order to take a more stable position its axis of rotation. A "somersault" can occur suddenly, under the influence of external factors, i.e. when adding lunar and solar tides, under the influence of galactic magnetic fields on the magnetic moment of the nucleus, or when flying near a massive cosmic body.

However, the Moon is also a stabilizing factor that makes the Earth resistant to “tumbles”.

The upheaval of the planet, judging by the myths, has already taken place in antiquity and, comprehending the prophecies, will invariably happen in the future! The prerequisite for this event is the displacement of the planet's core, which is fixed by the deviation of the magnetic dipole axis from the Earth's axis.

For all mankind it will be a test, but not fatal! At the moment of "somersault", under the action of centrifugal forces, volcanic activity will sharply increase, the level of the ocean will rise and the expansion of the Earth will increase. The perturbation of the magnetic field (with a change of poles) will lead to failures in radio communications and all electronics, from an increase in the radiation flux falling on the planet, part of the flora and fauna will die. On site polar star the Southern Cross will appear, and the Sun will rise in the West!

And I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the former heaven and the former earth had passed away. [Revelation of John the Evangelist, 21]