Are Planets "Living Super-Organisms"?
Japan's Maruyama Shigenori, one of the world's leading geophysicists, is provoking controversy with his bold hypothesis – a new fascinating theory on the lifecycle of the Earth's crust.
To explain why contintental plates drift on the surface of the Earth's molten mantle, Maruyama argues that continents actually have life cycles.
Old, cold plates on continental fringes sink to “plate graveyards” deep in the Earth’s mantle, and then rise again, creating volcanoes fueled by three-dimensional convection movements deep below the surface.Maruyama is taking the ideas of continental-drift pioneer Alfred Wegener to a new level.
Wegener was a German explorer and meteorologist who believed back in 1912 that the continents roamed about on the surface of the Earth -- an idea that was ridiculed by even his most supportive research colleagues as a "delirious vision" and "the wonderful dream of a great poet."
It wasn't until the 1960s that studies of the ocean floor finally provided irrefutable proof that Wegener had been right after all.
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