Did Earth have a ring before the Cambrian Expolosion and did the rapidly expanding Earth catch the ring?

I encountered a link to a very interesting popular article "Did Earth have a ring like Saturnus?" (see this) telling about the article "Evidence suggesting that earth had a ring in the Ordovician" of Tomkins et al published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters (see this).

The proposal is that the ring would have formed as a large asteroid was caught by the Earth. The tidal forces of Earth would have destroyed the asteroid so that it became a ring along the equator of the Earth. The ring created a shadow. If it formed along the equator, it could have initiated global cooling about 465 years ago: the so-called Hirnantian Icehouse followed 20 million years later. There are as many as 21 meteor strikes along the equator and this is very implausible if the meteors would have arrived from random directions.

This is a highly interesting finding from the point of view of the Expanding Earth hypothesis inspired by TGD. About 524 million years ago the so-called Cambrian Explosion occurred. Highly evolved multicellular life forms suddenly emerged. A possible explanation of this mystery could be a fast expansion of the Earth: radius would have increased by about factor 2: these fast expansions could be the TGD counterpart of smooth cosmic expansion. This would have led to the bursting of underground oceans containing the multicellular life to the surface of the Earth. It is not difficult to invent objections against the idea but the new physics predicted by TGD allows to circumvent them and the model explains a large number of anomalies to the evolution of Earth. For the TGD view of the Expanding Earth Hypothesis see for instance this and this .

The ring would have formed about 60 million years later and existed for a time measured 10 million years as a natural unit. Could one think that Earth had already before this time a ring and the Expanding Earth caught the ring? This could explain why the ring was along the equator, something not obvious if the ring was formed by the asteroid rotating around the Earth. This would have produced the 21 meteor strikes along the equator, a phenomenon which is extremely implausible if the meteors did not originate from the same source. The expansion of the Earth would have gradually increased the width of the shadow and the collision with the ring would have generated dust in the atmosphere and caused an additional shadowing effect causing the cooling of the climate.

See the article Expanding Earth Hypothesis and Pre-Cambrian Earth or the chapter with the same title. For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

For the lists of articles (most of them published in journals founded by Huping Hu) and books about TGD see this.