Despite years of work by scientists to discover the origin of the Moon, a promising new Moon theory has emerged. Peter Coleman, a published scientific author whose work features in publications like New Scientist, Weather, Eos Transactions, and the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar Terrestrial Physics, is now proposing a Moon origin theory that has the potential to radically overhaul the current Earth-Science paradigm.

Coleman has the basic idea that the Moon exploded whole like a spinning elastic cannon ball from the Earth through the present day Philippine Sea plate zone. The spin axis aligned along the long NS diameter of the plate. Coleman believes that the hypothesis may also be linked to the origin of the Earth and its continents and oceans.

Interestingly the Philippine Sea plate has a northern to southern triple point distance, measured as a chord, that is surprising close to the diameter of the Moon at 4376 km. This plate is completely surrounded by subduction zones and it's origin is enigmatic. Attempts have been made to force fit it into the standard plate tectonics paradigm. Some researchers think that it rotated into its present position.

Coleman speculates that the Philippine Sea Plate was once an enormous hole out of which the Moon exited, and left a strewen field, or trail, of previously unexplained glassy tektites.

The wide field ranges from SE Asia through to Australia, Tasmania and Antarctica but misses New Zealand. He considers that tektites are the Rosetta stones of the Moon's origin since they were connected with the Moon's birth. They are like Moon rocks in the sense of the very low water content yet are so similar to terrestrial rocks in elemental analysis. The Australasian tektite field is largest tektite field in the world and its maximum width is of the order of the diameter of the Moon. The curving distribution pattern reproduced in John O'Keefe's 1976 classic book 'Tektites and their Origin', seems to originate from the Philippine Sea Plate when extrapolated back to SE Asia.

Scientists currently think that a meteor hit the ground somewhere in SE Asia. Candidate sites include; the Gulf of Tonkin or the lake, Tonle Sap located in Cambodia. The weakness of this theory is that after extensive searching no credible source crater has yet been found. Nickel inclusions and shock forms of quartz have been found in tektites, but these could equally be formed from the explosion ejection of the Moon by throwing out rocks at the edges such as the Philippine Trench as it erupted through the lithosphere. This might explain the layered Muong Nong tektites found in Cambodia and Thailand and the Philippines which is a distance of over 2000 kilometers. As the Moon rose it's surface would have ablated low water glass tektites that would have fell back to Earth. Coleman thinks most tektites were generated from preexisting crust before the Moon broke through, but were subjected to a massive explosive shock wave. That is why there was a paradoxical situation of the tektites seemingly originating from the Moon, yet oddly having a meteoritic signature associated with impact and shock waves.

The Moon's exit hole would have been like a weeping wound and released enormous quantities of basalt (the so-called 'LIPs' or large igneous provinces) thus explaining why this area on the North West Pacific is thought by scientists, as the birth site of the whole Pacific Ocean,dated at 200 million years ago. It is possible that if the Moon crust was temporarily cooled the Moon may have survived the incredible tidal Roche forces, at about 2.9 Earth radii, that would have torn a molten Moon to pieces. The only way to get a solid outer lithosphere prior to running the Roche force gauntlet would be for the Moon to form and cool insitu, possibly with the help of the Ocean water inflow. The Moon would have been tidally distorted as it exited but somehow survived the intense gravitational forces. Other material blasted from the hole in the mantle may have battered the Moon with craters and produced breccia and may go some way to explaining the so-called 'great bombardment'.

Arguably fission theories began with George Darwin, the son of the famous Charles Darwin. In 1879 his theory of the molten Moon fission theory was published . The theory postulated the existence of a solar tidal resonance that fissioned off the Moon at the equator as the Earth spun much faster than the standard 24 hours, with a period of 4 hours. Owen Fisher, a geologist, speculated in an 1882 letter to Nature that perhaps the Earth's Ocean floor was the visible scar left following Darwinian fission. But it was the astronomer Pickering who specifically suggested the Pacific as moon's birth place. But with erosion and plate tectonic recycling of plates by subduction, such a Moon scar was thought not possible. But what if the same explosion that sent the Moon into orbit generated the 'plate' system and the subduction trenches? Contrary to the usual conception of subduction, in an increasingly problematic plate tectonics theory, the Moon exit hypothesis holds an alternative; namely oceanic slab infill at a lithospheric weakness, where the weakness was caused by the original global explosion.

This means that oceanic slabs need not be continually subducting under continents in what are called Wilson cycles. If there was no recycling of ocean floor then what is laid down now is the original ocean floor. So this logic leads to the implication that the oldest original ocean floor in the North western Pacific is only 200 million years old.

Although Darwin's theory held prominence for many years, it had flaws, such as being unable to explain the high Earth-Moon momentum, and led to the Moon being thought of as a captured satellite. Urey, a Nobel prize chemist, proposed his own capture theory and hoped the Moon would give a vital clue as to the primordial composition of the early solar system.

One of the major objectives of the Apollo mission, pushed by Urey, was to finally nail down the Moon's origin. The problem was that studies of Moon rocks opened up more questions than answers. The Moon has an identical oxygen isotope ratio with Earth's rocks and effectively refutes Urey's scenario.

Then on to the stage came the big impact theory independently proposed by Hartmann and Cameron in the early 1970s. The idea first came to Hartmann from reflection on the so-called 'great bombardment' that was said to have taken place as a Mars-sized object ('Theia') knocked off with a glancing blow, the Earth's mantle causing a molten ocean. Theia's iron core merged with the Earth's iron core thus explaining the lack of iron in the Moon. There are currently several problems with the big impact theory. Where did the hypothetical Theia come from and what was the credible mechanism to generate identical oxygen isotopes? Unfortunately there are now more and more ad-hoc auxiliary hypotheses to keep the main hypothesis afloat.

Coleman's explosive fission theory not only challenges the current big 'whack' theory but also explains why there is a tectonic plate system in the first place. The Moon ejection explosive event literally cracked the lithosphere like an egg shell and produced lineament weaknesses such as faults and trenches which are now seen as part of the geological 'smoking gun'. The catastrophic explosion would have recoiled the Earth rotation axis to its present 23.5 degree obliquity or tilt. This sudden change would have been accompanied by a dramatic climate change. The ocean tides would have commenced and the Moon would have stabilized the Earth against further changes in obliquity.

Coleman speculates that the ferroan (iron) anorthosite of the lunar highlands could have been cooked up by the explosion in the lower mantle and the so-called enigmatic D” layer may be connected with material left behind after Moon formation.

As the Moon left it had a hot liquid interior and highly viscous elastic exterior to escape Earth. But this mantle magma of the Moon would erupt later to produce the Maria of the near side. The explosive shock wave would have propagated through the Moon from the South Aitken basin. This consistent with shock wave scenario proposed by a lunar specialist, called Paul Schultz.

The Moon genesis explosion would have created many signatures such as the uplift of the Himalayas, the huge elevated plateau of Tibet and the impression that India apparently collided with Eurasia, as suggested first by Dewey and Bird in 1970. The hypothesis might explain other signatures such as the largest negative geoid anomaly in the world, centred just below India, the presence of Indian basalts in the Western Philippine Plate, the presence of back-arc basins, the Beijing water anomaly and the 'bulls-eye' configuration of SE Asia. If the explosive force in the angular direction of the Philippine plate was weaker it would have produced a small continent but instead it sent the Moon into orbit. The Moon is thus a failed continent.

It maybe no coincidence that the North-South orientated Parece Vela basin or 'seam' has the largest detachment oceanic core complex in the world, called 'Godzilla', a 125 kilometer long by 57 kilometers wide window into the mantle. Godzilla may be a mafic ( mantle) intrusion produced at the time of the explosion. Such intrusions may also be lodged in the Moon's mantle and through the crust and may explain the Moon's enigmatic mascons (mass concentrations).

The theory could finally explain the origin of highest mountain Everest and the deepest part of the Ocean i.e. Challenger Deep in the Marianna trench and why they are located in the same corner of the globe. According to the theory the Moon explosion 'focus' may have been vertically below a point in the Indian Ocean coinciding with the negative geoid south of the Indian Peninsula with the Moon thrust at an angle through the Philippine plate. This incidentally, near what geologists think is the The explosion brought about a dramatic change in direction of the Hawaiian-Emperor seamount chain as well as generating the worlds greatest concentration of seamounts radiating southeast from the Marianna trench.

If the Moon came out of the deep interior of the Earth it would have left a deep hole that would have filled in, but not totally as the magma cooled. It would have left a tell- tale scar and that even now global plate movements would tend to be faster near the hole and slide towards the once deep abyss. Therefore large ocean floor slips and tsunamis would be more likely in the general vicinity of where the Moon took off. The hypothesis hints at a predictive earthquake theory and provides a reason why distant earthquakes seem connected, even though some earthquake specialists say otherwise. The so-called 'ring of fire' of the pacific rim where most of the world's volcanoes congregate is connected with the strong nature of the explosion in the area surrounding the Moon' exit location-like throwing a large rock to crack through thin ice on a lake. Therefore it would not be surprising that a clustering of earthquakes occurs along subduction zones close to the Philippine plate.

The Moon is currently travelling on an elliptical orbit at a average distance of 384,401 kilometers or 30.5 earth diameters. The hypothesis suggest that this orbit is a direct result of being shot into orbit by an explosion. This scenario might act as a starting point to investigate its highly complicated orbital motion and puzzling inclination of 5.1 degrees to the ecliptic (the plane of the Earth's orbit around the Sun). If the Moon was thrust into orbit from the latitude of a point inside the Philippine Sea Plate, the plane of the orbit would hardly be equatorial, as in Darwin's rotational fission mechanism. A 5.1 degree inclination would put the Moon at a declination (as measured from Earth), of 18.4 degrees (23.5 minus 5.1). However the Moon rotates or precesses and the declination varies between 18.4 and 28.5 degrees every 18.6 years.

The minimum declination is at least consistent with the latitude of the speculated 'epicentre'.

This point is at 18 degrees latitude, 139 degrees east longitude on the Philippine Plate which is close to Godzilla at 16 degrees latitude and 139 degrees east.

The barycentre or centre of mass of the Earth-Moon 'double planet' system is centred at 1707 kilometers below the Earth's surface which puts it deeper than half way into the Mantle.

According to simple physics of centre of mass explosions which assume the constancy of momentum such a point would ideally remain unchanged. That is provided there were no external forces and the point was stationary with respect to the proto-earth. The location of this barycentre is apparently consistent with ejection from deep within the mantle and is consistent with the hypothesis.

One major hurdle is reconciling the current geological time-scale with this Moon origin scenario. The only way around this impasse, at present, is that this pervasive global explosive event may have reset geological clocks. Yet even though this seemingly iron-clad constraint rules against the hypothesis, Coleman thinks it is definitely worth pursuing because it appears to account for a number of Earth and lunar phenomenon. For example the same explosive shock wave that sent the Moon into orbit could also account for a host of geological anomalies including: orphiolites (mantle rocks embedded in the crust), cryptoexplosive craters eg the Bushveld complex, the global K-T (cretaceous-tertiary) iridium layer, the enrichment of certain elements in the mantle, undersea plateaus, certain antipodal relationships on the Earth, the presence of volatiles, like the suspected gaseous emission (transient lunar phenomenon, TLP) and water on the Moon.

ENDS

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