Word: lyttleton
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Physicist Raymond A. Lyttleton of Cambridge University proposes a return to the wrinkle theory of mountain building-but with a difference. The earth was cool and solid when it was formed, says Lyttleton; then radioactivity gradually heated its rocky material. A few billion years ago, the earth's central core got hot enough to change from a plastic solid to a true liquid. Under the enormous pressure that exists near the center of the earth, liquid rock is more compressible than solid rock. So when the core liquefied, it was squeezed into a smaller amount of space, allowing...
...Lyttleton figures that the earth's compressible liquid core, which can be studied by means of earthquake waves, has caused the earth to shrink about 400 miles in diameter. Some 20 million square miles of crust have been tucked away in mountainous folds and wrinkles. How long this process will continue, Lyttleton does not know. But mountains are still rising, and Lyttleton estimates that if the entire earth were to liquefy, it would lose another 50 miles of diameter...
...moon and Mars, Lyttleton calculates, are too small to have liquid cores, and this may be why neither of them has mountain ranges. But Venus is about the same size as the earth, is probably made of much the same material, and it may have a shrinking liquid core. As man's space probes continue to study the distant planet, they may discover that it has a pattern of wrinkled, earth-type mountains hidden under its cloud deck...