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Today there is no internally consistent theory for the origin of our planet. Instead, we have a collage of contradictory concepts, none of which adequately accounts for global geological history from the earliest periods. It is now evident that we are compelled to return to first principles to test the accommodation of present knowledge within their constraints.
Foreword by C. Warren Hunt (Calgary, Albrta, 1993):
It is my distinct privilege to have the opportunity to edit this landmark volume. I regard it as the most important treatise on Earth science fundamentals in the two hundred fifty years or so since Lomonosov, Lyell, and others first startled the world by discovering the rudiments of geology. Beginning with first principles and modem observations, V. N. Larin builds an edifice of entirely “new geology.”
My interest and involvement arose from the observational side of the science. Independently I had settled on the concept of a primordiaily hydridic Earth, because internal hydrogen was essential [and the only possible chemical progenitor] for the violent endogeny that I had observed in the field. I first found strong support for my deduction in a brilliant paper by Rudolf Gottfried, an east German geoscientist. His paper, which asserted the essential need for hydride systematics to explain the Earth’s geospherical differentiation, appeared in a volume devoted to informed, skeptical treatment of plate tectonics theory. My perceptions utilizing the fundamental science set forth by Gottfried were then published in two books. A contributing author to the second book, E.A. Skobelin of Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, sent me a copy of a 1980 book by another Russian, V.N. Larin, in which the idea of a primordially hydridic Earth was followed logically back to fundamental principles of the origin of the entire solar system. With the help of a Russian-speaking, Bulgarian geologist, Valentin Ivanov, I recognized that Larin broke new ground far beyond Gottfried’s deductions or my own thinking.
This small volume expands on Larin’s earlier book, presenting explanations based on hydride endogeny for the cosmochemical accretion of our planet, its early degassing, the initial formation of Archean granitic crust, Phanerozoic geosynclines, and Meso-Cenozoic oceans. Enigmas of element and isotope distribution are neatly resolved for the first time. Mascons on the Moon and past and present magnetism on the inner planets are explained. The benefits of intensive laboratory experimentation in the USSR and Russia since the earlier publication are made available to western scientists in this small volume. To accomplish this, the author’s formerly scanty knowledge of English has blossomed, as he and I have toured geological sites in Canada and wrestled over sentence after sentence to find the words to express nuances of profound scientific insight with fidelity.
Whereas I and co-authors Collins and Skobelin+ had related endogeny to gaseous phenomena, Collins and I showed that the hydrides of silicon transform mafic rock to granite. This enlarges continents and generates volcanism, hotspots, and earthquakes. Whereas Collins demonstrated a new concept of the origins of metal ores, Skobelin described a new theory on the origin of diamonds, and I proposed new concepts for the origin of coal, and hydrocarbons, all of our concepts were developed from field observations; and [perhaps predictably] all of us have been vigorously opposed and the value of our observational data discounted.
Larin performs the signal service of linking all of these phenomena within irrefutable principles of science as parameters of hydrogen effusion. He shows with eloquence that all are, inescapably, the corollaries of the unique behavior of hydrides, which must, therefore, result from core degassing of our primordially hydrogen-rich Earth. His concept is, indeed, new geology, a grand and unified theory of the Earth, new geology that is fully as revolutionary against the trenchant dogma of our day as Copernican astronomy was against that of two thousand years of the Ptolemies, Roman authority, and medieval Christianity. With this book, geoscience is freed from stale dogma and will never return.
Significant help is gratefully acknowledged by the editor for critique and review by Maurice Kamen-Kaye, Paul D. Lowman, Jr, and Lorence G. Collins.
