Bible Science Forum

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Some Secular Astronomers Now Believe That Earth Once Had a Ring

A recent study suggested that the Earth once had an equatorial ring. The physical evidence is consistent with my biblical creation model, wherein I suggested the Earth initially had an equatorial ring of icy material. The presence of impact craters supports my model, positing that gravitational instability caused material to collapse onto the planet.

John Gideon Hartnett
3–5 minutes
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One aspect of my biblical creation model as described in the early chapters of my book “The Physics of Creation, The Creator’s Ultimate Design for Earth” is that the planet was created with disk of icy material in orbit essentially in the equatorial plane. See The Physics of Creation | Day 2.

In this article “It Turns Out Earth May Have Once Had a Ring” in Popular Mechanics (September 24, 2024) the author describes a study published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters suggesting that during an era known as the Ordovician period, the Earth may have once had rings.

I don’t accept the evolutionary timescale but the actual physical evidence was the detection of 21 asteroid impact craters “in an equatorial band at ≤30°, despite ∼70% of exposed, potentially crater-preserving crust lying outside this band.”

This evidence is consistent with my creation model. The Earth was created from water, quickly it turned to ice, which due to the rotational angular moment of the body, it turned into a disk.

A lot of that water ice is found in the “waters above” which make up most of the outer planets and Kuiper Belt objects. See The Physics of Creation | Day 4. The processes at play during the 2nd day of creation week meant that some of the water was converted to heavier elements, which find their way into the rocky planets and asteroids by the 4th day.

This situation initially left the Earth with a disk of the icy and rocky asteroid material in the form of an equatorial ring. But due to gravitational instability in the system it eventually collapsed and a lot rained down on the planet. The visible evidence still present as craters means even if the material was dropping out of orbit pre-Flood it must have continued towards the end of the Flood and after it. If the impacts all occurred pre-Flood all evidence would have been buried in deep sedimentary layers laid down by the Flood waters.

The physical evidence of impact craters within 30° of the equator, when stripped of the alleged long-age geological Earth history, is consistent with the biblical creation model I have proposed. In fact, I proposed some form of this model two decades ago. See page 77 in this 2003 article. There I wrote “Possibly God placed the ‘waters above’ outside the Earth but within the solar system … “. And I have developed on that idea since. The early chapters of my book “The Physics of Creation” give further detail to this.

I am still thinking about how this might have affected the rotational axis of the planet, but so far have come to believe that since the disk was axisymmetric it would have had little affect.

A change of about ~3.2° may have occurred in the past. Actually the polar axis swung down from the mean value – 1.6° and then recovered swinging +3.2° peaking at +1.6° above the mean obliquity before settling back down to the mean. See Can We Know the Year of Noah’s Flood? for a full explanation.

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2 responses to “Some Secular Astronomers Now Believe That Earth Once Had a Ring”

  1. Frank Hubeny Avatar
    Frank Hubeny

    I shared your post on the social media sites I frequent. I received a response from Max Peck on MeWe:

    Interesting idea, and would also explain why the ancient world was so fascinated with building zuggerats for watching the skies and building so many underground bunkers/tunnels to escape disaster; it was probably a regular occurrence for some of that icy debris to rain down and they were trying to track them and predict impacts.

    I responded, “I hadn’t thought of that before. When people looked into the sky long ago when this ring was present and when they experienced objects falling from the sky it must have had an effect on their behavior.”

    His response to that was:

    Yeah the ancient world tracked comets but the language used often indicated they were harbingers of doom. Even if it later became superstition, I suspect that negative association was originally based on some truth.

    One place to look for evidence of this ring might be in ancient folklore.

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    1. John Gideon Hartnett Avatar
      John Gideon Hartnett

      Frank,

      Have a look in ancient folklore for that sort of stuff!

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

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