Something's Rotten

As is said... Where might this decayed garbage be hiding? Somewhere, or we could say nearly everywhere, in the Great Lakes.

Today we're going to drag our selves back out of the infinite into the local view. That's simply because I'm interested  in the planet we live on, as well as ones our race may some day occupy.

Lets look at the corpse as it lies today. We have five lakes that comprise the largest body of fresh water on the planet. Three of the five lakes live inside a giant(!) stone bowl. This bowl is (from a suitable viewpoint) almost perfectly circular and hundreds of miles in diameter. That seems a might suspicious to me. Before we look a lot closer at that fact, let's give a glance at the rest of the crime scene.

Initially we have an immense salt bed. Immense like it contains 35 percent of the salt on Earth. We'll leave the obvious question of how salt, supposedly laid down in the world's biggest shallow bay happens to be that circular aside for a bit.
Now, over top of the salt deposits that form hundreds of feet thick we get a layer of limestone. Ok, you say, limestone is formed by marine deposits. That leaves aside the issue of why we suddenly have thousands of years of tiny marine life surviving in what might be said to be a giant salt pan. Anyway, we now have the salt bed with an overlay of soft rock of an unknown initial thickness.

Then the whole thing gets much cooler. Literally. We start suffering chills. Alternating periods of intense cold and what we would consider warmth. Maybe not 'heat', but warmth. That meant ice. Lots and lots of ice. Dirty ice, of course. Rivers of ice spreading out from the poles. The weight bearing down is numbers beyond human scales to the extent that it becomes meaningless, because we don't have a human scale that big. That weight is pushing the crust of the earth down.

Then it gets warm. Much warmer than the melting point of water. The ice sheet over a mile thick suddenly goes away in spectacular fashion. That gives plenty of fresh water to wash away those hundreds of feet of salt. 'But wait', you say, 'the salt didn't get washed away!'. True.

Here is where things stop following any sort of logical sense. Now we have even more fun. This circular patch in the middle of the limestone turns into something else- Dolostone. It's much harder than limestone, but limestone is the base material that gets "recrystalized" into Dolostone. Geologists don't say why or how it gets changed or why that change doesn't affect all of the limestone in that formation or why the Dolostone is perfectly circular.

Let's start thinking about that. If salt water (ground water in aquifers under this hard Dolostone layer) can change limestone left from marine deposition, then every ocean must have Dolostone flooring, right? ... They don't??? Hmm...

All right. Now, the shape. Perfect circle. What do we know that produces perfect circles?

Aha. Now we're getting somewhere. What's that you say? Craters? Why, yes, craters are perfect circles. And the size? Yes, we do know several craters of that scale and bigger, a couple on Earth. The dinosaur-killer made a crater 150 miles or so across. Is there any supporting evidence of the crime? Actually, yes. Notice we originally mentioned only three lakes. The other two, Superior and Ontario aren't at all like the other three. Those two were formed by the ice sheet grinding out immense valleys formed by Basalt. Yes, Basalt extruded by volcanic action. Rifts, according to geologists. These rifts radiate away from that giant stone bowl. Hmm again.

So... Giant metamorphic stone bowl, perfectly circular, with big-ass cracks in the Earth's crust radiating away from it.

Starts to add up, eh? Yes, ice is involved in trying to wipe out the evidence of the crime, but it's not involved in the original scene. So lets apply logic from the way we know the process works:

Salt gets laid down over millions of years in a very shallow salt lake, about the same time as coal beds are forming in nearby swamps. Finally the sea level rises and the limestone forms. This process uses up more eons, forming the cap over the salt.

Now comes the crime itself- an asteroid (ten mile diameter at a shallow angle? Or even a graze?) blasts a hot circular crater in the middle of a gigantic covered salt bed. There may even be a real hole hidden under things in the center. Who knows? No-one has looked. No-one believes there's anything to look for. Limestone in a wide area slumps into a puddle of melted rock, perfectly circular as craters usually are, forming a protective cap over the salt. That protects it from the ravages of the flood of meltwater that retreating glaciers release. Radiating cracks from the blow release rivers of Basalt from deep below the crust. The resulting 'nuclear winter' actually causes the glaciers to expand into ice sheets. The rest proceeds as normal: ice melts, releasing oceans of water, first digging, and then filling the lakes. The land underneath is still bouncing back from the last ice age- 1800 feet so far, according to a program I just watched. So we now can figure out where the material came from that created the continental shelf. Not to mention the water that has submerged the shelf to today's about 400 foot level.

I leave it you to decide whether or not logic upholds either of these theories. I find the accepted theory a bit shaky when you try to build a story of what happened. Just remember that their version didn't come together until mere decades ago, so it's not like something discovered by Einstein, much less Newton.