One of the world's leading geophysicists, Maruyama Shigenori, is confident that all processes on Earth can be described using a set of universal formulas. The Scientific Center for Terrestrial Planetology, which he is creating, will conduct research in various directions, pursuing one goal - to prove that the Earth is a single living organism
The list of questions that Maruyama Shigenori wishes to find answers to is extensive. Where are the remains of the super-continent Pangea, from which the current continents were formed; how meteorites affect the Earth's chemical environment; is there a connection between climate and magnetic fields - that's just a small part of what falls into the field of interests of the Japanese.
Shigenori is confident that most modern sciences could make more impressive discoveries if the scientific community tried to accept the Earth as a single living organism, which is characterized by diseases, mood swings and its own path of development.
Shigenori calls for recognizing as a living being not only the Earth, but also all other planets. He is confident that by better studying the organism of our planet, it will be easier for astronomers to look for signs of life in distant space.
Shigenori is a follower of the German geologist Alfred Wegener, who stated back in 1912 that continents do not stand still, but move smoothly. The entire civilized world laughed at the ideas of the romantic scientist, until in the 60s of the last century his theory was not confirmed by studies of ocean shelves.
Developing Wegener's ideas, the Japanese geophysicist paints a picture of the world where excess parts of the continental shelf sink into the depths and begin to slowly drift in the upper layers of the Earth's core. Periodically, they are pushed outward, which leads to seismic processes.
It is now known that the continents float on the surface of the hot mantle of the earth like icebergs. Their "roots" go to a depth of 2,900 kilometers, where the ambient temperature never drops below 4,000 degrees Celsius.
Shigenori's theory is no better or worse than other assumptions about the behavior of the shelves, leading to volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. After all, if the external manifestations of seismic activity have long been well known to scientists, then the deep mechanisms of such processes remain unknown.
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Many scientists agree with their Japanese counterpart that such research can significantly affect the development of science. For example, by knowing more about the nature of shelf rocks, you can accurately predict the direction and speed of shock waves in earthquakes. Another area of application of Shigenori's formulas could be meteorology, which can study weather changes associated with the movement of continents.
And yet the Japanese geophysicist remains as much a romantic as his ideological predecessor, Alfred Wegeren. In an interview, Shigenori complained that people know very little about the structure of the earth's crust, and the deepest well in the world is only 12 kilometers deep. And he immediately suggested drilling the remaining 6300 kilometers to the Earth's core in the coming years in order to look there and find out - how does it all work?