Radial Shrinkage

The earth and all the inhabitants thereof are dissolved: I bear up the pillars of it. Selah.

(Psalms 75:3) KJV

If geological features like Pilot Mountain, North Carolina are remnants of “the pillars of the earth,” it means that the mantle was once above the top of them and we can calculate the Earth’s original radius.

In the early days of Geology people would do arcane things like measure the amount of crustal material that was overlain, subducted or upthrust into mountain ranges and conclude that there’s too much of it. Why’s there so much extra crustal material to account for? This is known as circumferential shortening and it used to vex Geologists of yesteryear. Some proposed radial shrinkage, that the radius of the Earth must have shrunk, but no one was ever able to satisfactorily explain why the Earth underwent radial shrinkage and the issue faded out of view.

The rationale for calculating radial shrinkage and circumferential shortening has been derived from some interesting deductive speculation:

• IF the earth’s mantle (tebel) rested upon the pillars of the earth,
  • AND remnants of them now protrude through the crust and mantle,
• HAS the earth has undergone radial shrinkage in the past?

This means that if there are remnants of the pillars of the earth then their summit represents the minimum radius of the inner surface of the original mantle. The image today features Pilot Mountain, North Carolina. Could Pilot Mountain, and other geological features around the world like the pillars in Monument Valley, Utah, be remnants of the pillars of the earth? This gives us a fascinating deductive question:

• IF the top of Pilot Mountain was the bottom of the earth’s mantle on the 3rd day,
• CAN we calculate the original radius of the earth?

This is what we call Hypothesis 8.