Q. You stated in your book that the mass increase of the Expanding Earth was due to cosmic material hitting the Earth. The most common estimate I have found is 30,000 tonnes of cosmic dust per year. Are you really trying to base the entire Expanding Earth “Theory” on such a small mass?
A. No, I’m not basing it on such a small mass. No one is too sure what the exact amount of yearly accretion of cosmic dust is and common estimates can vary widely from 5 to 300 tonnes per day. [1]
Cosmic material comes in waves over the year, so we see ‘meteoroid showers’ at certain times of the year. I believe that the cosmic accretion rate could vary even more over millions of years. There could be ‘cosmic storms’ that occur over geological time, so the amount of material hitting the Earth is much more than we presently recognize. The total amount of cosmic material must be vastly greater spread over geological time.
It’s important to recognize that even this period of intense cosmic accretment would only amount to less than 0.1 mm of cosmic dust per day. Even this rate would be dwarfed by rainfall.
We know that galactic rotation must move the Earth and Sun into regions of dense areas of cosmic material similar to the Horsehead Nebula over geological time, so there could easily be several asteroid hits per year at such times adding vast amounts of new cosmic material to the Earth.
This is all discussed in much greater detail in Chapter 5 of my book, Dinosaurs and the Expanding Earth. The Wikipedia web site also has a lot of background information on meteoroid showers, near-Earth objects, Eros asteroid, Galactic rotation, and the Horsehead nebula which might be of interest.
Further Reading
- Getting a Handle on How Much Cosmic Dust Hits Earth by Nancy Atkinson here
- Screenshot and link to Wikipedia entry for Expanding Earth here and here
- Screenshots and link to Donald R. Prothero’s opinion here and here
- Screenshots and link to Timothy Casey - Consulting Geologist here and here
- Screenshots and link to Andrew Alden - Geology Guide here and here
- Link to Cosmic Dust on Wikipedia here
- Link to YouTube video showing a simple experiment to demonstrate the effects of cosmic accretion here
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Created 17 Sept 13
Updated 06 Feb 18
