Swapping the sunny side of tidally locked planet

For story reasons I need a situation with a planet around red dwarf, which already has had the equivalent of a Great Oxygenation Event. Simultaneously I also like the planet to be mostly without accessible fossil fuels.

In order to avoid a situation where algae produced oxygen from carbon dioxide, the carbon has magically disappeared. The most reasonable explanation, is that there are indeed fossil fuels but on the dark side, under a few kilometers of ice.

So far not bad. The tricky part starts how to explain such process.

• Tectonic drift seems to slow.
• Direct hit of some properly big object should rather sterilize whole planet.

The best idea that I can think is a result of some gravitational interaction (like in Nice model), which first put the planet on elliptical and no longer synchronous orbit, and when it become back synchronous and circular back the opposite side become light.

1) Would such process be realistic?

2) How long should it be? (a thousand years? million years?)

3) Should it also be great extinction event?

4) Which features should I include to make the rest of setting compatible (except from glacier shaped terrain?)

posted over 7 years ago

Shadow1024‭

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