Doing the math :1+2+3 ( = Earth Expansion )

Or, .. Crustal accommodation of Pangaean dilation
( Blog for website at http://users.indigo.net.au/don )

(Right click new-window all images for a larger figure )

Fig.1.  Earth Expansion - the trace of crustal accommodation to equatorial dilation of the Pangaean hemispheres.  Elements are:-

• The Earth as it is now (clearsketch), 
• Its smaller size during the Mesozoic (Centre-blue; movement picture reflecting growth to the present size,  Fig.4 here), 
• The loopy line configured in a (sort of) letter 'A' shape (numbers are shown in red in the text for ease of tracking); 
• The Yin -Yang button, representing the Indonesian 'bubble', the focus of mantle breakthrough in the region of Indonesia that initiated the Pacific; the displaced and dismembered 'little cockles' up the top, representing the swivelled-apart Russian Peninsula on the left and the Aleutian Arc on the right; 
• Opposed pivots of dilation (red dots on the equator) as the hemisphere facing out of the figure yawns open about the equatorial split.
• Red and black I-Ching bars as markers, .. reference points for tracing the break in the Pangaean equator as the Earth gets bigger as explained in the text.

[ Note the line of the Indian-Southern-Pacific spreading ridge is not on the figure, it is just 'underneath' (/behind) the bottom edge.

 There is a certain symmetry and continuity to crustal dilation described in the figure that belies Plate Tectonics' "independent motion of colliding plates".  On the right, the Americas swivelled apart on a common Pangaean equatorial margin that became the cordilleras (Numbers 1a, b above and Figs 1, 2 here).  On the left, from the Pacific to the Alps, is mirrorred the equivalent separation (Number 2), though not so dilated  (Fig.3a, same link).  In the middle, from the I-Ching button to the cockles, is the swivelling dilation that makes up the Western Pacific margin.   And round the back, hidden behind the blue, is the Mediterranean hinge anchoring the dilated hemispheres (Fig.2.).  Number 3 refers to 'movements' in the Indian-Southern Oceans.

Fig.2.  The Mediterranean hinge of Pacific dilation.  Continents retrofitted to show Pangaean perimeters are viewed from the eastern and western Pacific sides (constructed on Present-day - sized Earth.  Reduce the size of the Earth and its curvature by closing them to see the original Pangaean continents covering the entire Earth.

So, .. adding it all up :-

1+2+3  = Equatorial split and Indonesian breakthrough 

Forceful breakthrough of the mantle 'bubble' on the Pangaean equator in the Indonesian region was accompanied by a family of equatorial splits, generally soling in the mantle eastwards, and in the continental crust to the west.  Breakthrough was accompanied by gravitational collapse of the crust and a concommitant, generally anticlockwise swivelling dislocation, the locus of which is figuratively shown by the letter /contour 'A', with displacements 1, 2, and 3.  [ Note the use of the words 'displacement' or 'separation' or 'swivelling' rather than 'movement'.  They make no allusion to whether the movement is apparent (due to mantle growth between the displaced crustal elements) or real (actual dislocation from the substrate).  Most displacement probably includes both.  'Swivelling' is used to indicate the degree of angular displacement rather than any actual 'movement' involved.]

Numbers 1a and 1b  represent the kinetics of opposed scissored displacements of the zone of elevation east of the bubble to form the continents of North and South America (Figs 1, 2 as mentioned above)  Angular separation occurred to about 180 degrees, eventually 'unhinging' the Caribbean pivot to create the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea.  Unhinging postdates initiation of Atlantic spreading.  [ There is some indication that both Americas (i.e., the whole Pangaean equatorial zone east of the bubble) may have been displaced northwards prior to separation, because the trace of South American displacement includes the Marshall Islands which lie well north of the equator (/zone of elevation).]


The lines on the right (1a, b) represent the sweep of displacement of the western ends of the Americas (Alaska and the tip of South America).  Follow Alaska from the equator (top red bar), up the figure to the end of the line just round the back. And follow the tip of South America (bottom red bar) southwards, round to where the tip of South America is now [ then it jumps the Atlantic which is yet to open, and in which part-expression of South American displacement will be imprinted later] then continue it up the eastern side of Africa and follow it north along the dislocation of Madagascar from Africa as the Owen Fracture Zone, right up to where those little yellow arrows are on the blue image in the centre (Fig.4 again here.)

Number 2.  And so we have ended up on the Number 2 line, which is actually described by a suite of lineaments of which the two major ones are 1. the Owen Fracture Zone and 2. the lineament extending northeast of the east coast of India (yellow arrows just mentioned).  These define the main seismic zones of Asia and are the on-continent, master 'transforms' dislocating the Asian Region.  They are older than, but exactly equivalent to (and consanguineous with), the near-equatorial dislocation in the Atlantic between the Hump of Africa and the retrofitted northeastern coast of South America.

The displacement of the black bars symmetrically reflect those of the red bars in the triplication of Tibet (Fig.3a in the same above-link), and in the separation of Africa from India.

These are ancient structures as well as active at the present day.  The Owen Fracture Zone had its earliest expression in the Great Rift of Africa and the separation of Madagascar from Africa and Australia.  And of course, since faults have two sides, the side opposite to India and Africa is the western coast of both Australia and Antarctica, so the western margins of these continents are included as well.  It may come as a quirky realisation for some reading this page therefore, that the coastal plain of Western Australia (where I stay) is related to the same family of faults that initiated the Great Valley of Africa, separated Madagascar from that continent, and was once linearly continuous with what is today one of the most seismically active zones of Asia (= China lineament; see yellow arrows in Fig.4 of  that last link again.)  [And could still be again, except perhaps that it has substantially slipped from its prime (for seismicity) near-equatorial position.]


Number 3 ( The Indian - Southern Oceans. - The Australian- Antarctic 'space')

The arrow indicates the generalised trace of dislocation of Western Australia from India (check literature for no-problem confirmation ).  The intervening expression of this dislocation is complex, and reflected in the palinspastic repetitions of the Indian - Australian connection in the structure of the intervening Wharton Basin (Fig.3):-

Fig.3.  Palimpsests of the Indian Ocean.  1= west coast of India; 2 = east coast of India / west coast of Australia. 

• West Indian coastline = Laccadives /Maldives; Seychelles = Madagascar  = Ninetey East Ridge.
• East Indian coastline = Cocos - Christmas Island chain = West Australian coast (and the farther-out, un-named remnant of the continental shelf).

 A comparable 'flat' dislocation between Africa and Antarctica is suggested peripheral to the Rodriguez spreading ridge in the Southwest Indian Ocean.  Spreading could also be interpreted as including a component of rotation of the Southern hemisphere, indicated in the line of islands from Papua New Guinea through the Solomons to Fiju, where we see the remnants of the trace of the original circumglobal mountain belt strung out and deflected down to New Zealand and Antarctica by the sweep of South America about the Caribbean Pivot. The palinspastic equivalence of Papua New Guinea (crust) with the Solomons mantle substrate is striking, as is the x2 scale of the latter compared to the former (likewise the palimpsests of the Eastern Australian Continental margin of the Lord Howe Rise to New Zealand (Fig.4))

Fig.4. Remnants and palimpsests of the Pangaean equatorial zone are represented by Papua New Guinea (red) and its Solomons substrate (green), and the numerous rises of the Lord Howe Shelf as far as New Zealand.  The different curvature of the arrow here compared to that dislocating Australia from India suggests a connection to Earth rotation about its centre, rather than some surface pivot.  The southward deflection of the belt to New Zealand reflects arrow 1b in Fig.1

From India to New Zealand and across to Antarctica, and all along the Western Pacific oceanward of the back-arc basins, are inscribed palinspastic imprints of the crust-mantle interface that are related to the earliest spreading of the ocean floors scissoring the Americas, and that are unmentioned in Plate Tectonics.  Plate Tectonics purports to explain global geology in terms of corollary compressional and extensional domains and increasingly recognises "flat subduction" along the 'collisional' margins of the Pacific and the Himalayas, but ignores entirely the striking, larger-scale importance of extension on flat structures in the ocean basins even though extension clearly is a consequence of any deformation driven by "sinking slabs pulling on oceanic lithosphere".  Why does Plate Tectonics ignore it?  Because their location and configuration confounds the theory.

So now, .. a little prayer for Plate Tectonics as we put it to bed.  Put your hands together (as in prayer).  Now, open them from the bottom, keeping the tips of the fingers together, but let the thumbs separate, ..but (ooOps!) keep the edges of the hands together at the back.  So now they're cupped, in a prayer position.  See how you can go from the edge of the right hand (facing you) down and round and up the edge of the left hand?  Well that's the line (and the 'motion') describing the letter 'A' in the figure (see also).  The surface of the backs of the hands is = the surface of the Earth going round the back in the figure, between the numbers 1 and 2.  The sweep of the line is also (in Plate Tectonics' sense), 'movement' ('growth').

Now, .. that line marks the trace of a single transform fault (more or less) as it goes around the Earth, that reflects the 'movement' of the tip of South America away from the equator, and continues (across the Atlantic) up to Asia as the Owen Fracture Zone.  We can see it cuts across numerous so-called "independent" plates, and describes a fully integrated circuit.  It is only one, of course, of a whole suite of transforms that can loosely be said to reflect 'movement', but whichever word-option we prefer ('growth' or 'movement') there is clearly nothing 'small-circle' about the trace (according to Euler poles).

Fig.5. Google Earth trace of the 'A' in Fig.1 shows the consanguinity of Pangaean whole-Earth crustal rupture with mantle growth, which says that the age of deformation of the crust as we see it today is wholly commensurate with the growth of the ocean floor ( i.e., the crust was distended as the Pacific was extruded).  There is no room in space or time for any Panthalassa.  The Earth has got bigger.

The trace of growth of the ocean floors (transforms) globally converges either on the Indonesian bubble, or on the apex of the 'A'.  and therefore (in the mantle) reflects the migration of crustal dislocation from Indonesia to the Russian Peninsula.  Apart from the North-American leg of dislocation (1a in the figure), the whole lot is sitting on top of a mantle that has a spirality of structure that appears to be mirrorred by an anticlockwise configuration of dislocation in the continental crust, belonging to the northern hemisphere but encroaching on the southern hemisphere as well.  The apparent clockwise swivelling of North America about the Caribbean Pivot may be regarded as a consequence of being 'dragged' northwards by the rupture of the Indonesian bubble, but more realistically as northwards collapse off the equatorial zone).  And by the same token South American swivelling could be said to have been 'dragged' (or collapsed) southwards off the same, once-more oblate equatorial zone too.  So we could regard the bubble to be in three bits (like the dismemberment of the mountain belt to the west; 1.  A main central part (China, stays roughly in the original position), 2. A southern part - Indonesia dragged /collapsed southwards, and 3.  A northern part - the Russian Peninsula, Lena River Province,  slipped off the top.

The apparent torsions described are most economically regarded as progressive gravitational adjustment off an equatorial zone that was once more oblate, in a milieu of the Earth's spin. There is no real justification for regarding those 'torsions' as intrinsically related to mantle extrusion, unless there is evidence for the crust being fixed to the mantle, with the mantle spinning as it breaks through the crust (or the crust that is lagging).  But we see nothing of torsional displacements in the mantle comparable to what we see of the Pacific (or any other) continental margins - so, .. no comparable torsional dynamics in the mantle (just growth).

Now, .. if you still have those hands in prayer (opened at the front but together at the back), you can see where they keep trying to pull apart down the bottom at the wrist, the apex of an 'A' - shape there too, and a bit of light between the pinkies.  Right?  Well, that's the Atlantic opening up, and if you let it you can see how the right and left hands are drifting apart, but still hinged at the top (North Pole).   According to Plate Tectonics view (from the Atlantic coastlines) the trace of this opening is a small-circle movement about an Euler pole (Fig.3 here).  But I don't buy that gospel.  Taken in the wider context I think it's exactly like this I-Ching prayer movement, .. essentially great circles (Figs. 1a,c, here) with a spiral overprint that connects them to the Indian, Southern and Pacific Oceans in a singularity of  fully integrated continuity of displacement (Google Earth up and see). 


Which is where we came in on this question of an expanding Earth.

So that's what I reckon - the I-Ching of global morphotectonics provides us with a RIP(PING) little prayer for Plate Tectonics in which is encrypted a demo of the transition from forceful mantle extrusion on the Pangaean equator in the region of Indonesia (/China) creating the Pacific),  to passive accommodation centred on a pivot of dilation at the north Pole (creating the Atlantic).

Now, ..when all that has become known since Wegener's day is taken into account, that's an observation more than it is an idea or a hypothesis.  It is based on the obvious (morphotectonic) equivalent of Wegener's and others' 'Atlantic fits' but much more besides.  It takes into account the entire structure of the ocean floor and continental geology (Unesco) in a way that Plate Tectonics does not and cannot.  No chance though (thankfully) that there will be a war with heaps of funds looking for results for their justification, like led to the rise of the current gravy train of Plate Tectonics.  (Not unless our Kevin gets all gung-ho with China once he's topped Julia.)  The whole thing is only a smidgin off being as clear as the Atlantic fits anyway, so why would you bother (when it is so clear) going those extra yards?   


Well, nobody will need to bother.  We'll be overtaken by a veritable tsunami of research directed to exactly this end whether we like it or not.  It's the only place Plate Tectonics has left to go, if it is going to pull itself out of the mess it's in, which the younger generation won't put up with (let's hope).  It's just a matter of time.   Meanwhile, it's something at least to know Earth expansion is alive and well in China.  But it would be a pity if this research-op is ignored this side of the world because of concerted efforts of the gravy-trainers to dumb everything down to 'Bib-tonics' - the level of Plate Tectonics crumpling mountains up, when the clear evidence is that mountains form by flat land getting eroded down.


Brahma and Saraswati,
The Creator and Knowledge ride
the Big Bird born in the fire.
Going someplace.
Heading East by the look.
To China? 
It's where everything else
seems to be happening
these days.
(Wonder what it is though, ..
Dressed like that..)

[ See also - Debunking Plate Tectonics - at :-
http://www.platetectonicsbiglie.blogspot.com/ ]

Earth expansion - the Yin and the Yang of the I-Ching-Chang

 ( Blog for website at http://users.indigo.net.au/don/ )

Plate Tectonics is a story of the Earth's geological history viewed from the oceanic side of the land-sea divide, with sea-floor spreading compensated ( /'negated') by subduction.  Earth expansion is the story viewed from the continental side with sea-floor spreading uncompensated, in which so-called 'subduction' is seen as overriding the mantle from the continental side.   Sea-floor spreading coupled with overriding adds up to Earth expansion.  Here's how :- 

(Right-click/new window all images for bigger figures.)

1.  Close the mountain belt
(Why not?  ..it's pretty obvious the Pacific dilated it.  See also here.)

Fig.1 The circumglobal mountain belt.  (a)  The belt of elevation, dilated by the Pacific; red dots are pivots of dilation. (b)  Schematic representation; main elements of dislocation shown by black lines and the Yin-Yang symbol, which represents the breakthrough of the Indonesian 'bubble'.  Nested bends of Alaska and the southern tip of South America are separated across the proto-Pacific (blue); upper notched line will develop as the overthrust of the Front Ranges; lower notched line as the overthrust of the Southern Cordilleras over the Gran Chaco.  Black lines to the left of the circle are the dislocations that triplicate the zone of elevation west of the Pacific;  2.  Central disc = Mantle breakthrough; pivots of scissoring dilations in red.

The black and blue lines and those encrypted in the disc, are swivelling, flattish dislocations near-parallel to the crust-mantle interface - soled in the mantle to the right, soled in the continental crust to the left.  Dislocations will pivot about the red dots as shown, .. the Caribbean, and somewhere about the region of the Caspian Sea.


  2. Open it again (just for practice).

Fig.2.  Dilation of the Proto-Pacific east of the bubble.  Easiest to see is the way that the Americas (to the right of the bubble) swivelled open about the Caribbean pivot, eventually unhinging to accommodate north-south spreading of Atlantic opening.


3.  Now go west of the bubble.
The two black lines west of the bubble in Fig.1 represent major dislocations that repeated (i.e., extended) Asia in triplicate  from the equator to the Russian Peninsula.

a - Topography :-

b - Geology :-

c - Structure

Fig.3.  Dilation of the circumglobal mountain belt west of the Indonesian mantle breakthrough. Highlighting the triplicate partitions of the crust, represented by the Himalayan (lower), Mongolian (middle) and Lena River (Russian Peninsula; top) sectors; Blue hachured line in 'C'  = crustal collapse ( / "overriding").


Extensional dilation on 'flats' multiplies the width of the circumglobal mountain belt (which "is a belt of elevation more than it is a fold belt").  [ Note, .. this is the zone of "Far Field Tectonics" that the Plate Tectonics cowboys tell us is due to Little India (with horns on) barrelling northwards from the Indian Ocean spreading ridge and knocking the oriental back teeth out of the rest of Asia, .. aaaAaall the way to the Russian Peninsula. (Just like in Hollywood, Bollywood and Kung-Fu Cinema.)


4.   And now folks, .. the Bubble itself; the Yin and the Yang of the I-Ching-Chang.

This is it - the central dilation, ..the encrypted enigma, .. the jewel in the crown, .. the forceful breakthrough of the mantle in the Indonesian region that initiated Pacific extrusion and global expansion,

Fig.4.  Morphotectonics of Indonesian breakout and the Western Pacific. Large solid arrow indicates the general locus of yin-yang displacement.  Smaller arrows indicate kinetics of more local apparent displacement. Essential rotations are anticlockwise, commensurate with northern hemisphere coriolis. Note the dislocation of Australia from India, which also includes Antarctica from Africa, indicates the further outwards extents of coriolis capture related to Indonesian scissoring.  Dislocation of the Indonesian bubble encompasses almost a full hemisphere. Scissor-opening created the pull-apart basins of the Western Pacific, detaching China from Indonesia before splitting the upper Chinese element as the Russian Peninsula and the Aleutian arc. Smaller arrows show intermediate spreading. The Marianas remain as the fossil ridge related to yin-yang dislocation. The coloured circle in the left of the figure is the Caspian Pivot about which the triplicate in Fig.3 dilated. Small yellow block-arrows point to northeasterly striking global lineaments that extend the full circumference of the globe. Tibet (the "Roof of the World") is highlighted in red.


5.  ..And just for an Encore - the biggie of the Pacific.

Fig.5.  Pacific breakout parallel to the Indonesian bubble.  Ridge rotations are constructed on a present-day - sized Earth, showing the angular relationships of Pangaean times are maintained (= expansion).  See also.


Next, on a circumference larger than the Indonesian bubble and virtually out of view in Figure 4, the crust dilated on a breakout that was essentially parallel to those of Indonesia, China, and the Americas but lower in the crustal profile.  This split created the break separating India/Australia from Africa/Antarctica, and developed the spreading ridge that extends from the Red Sea through the Indian and Southern Oceans as the Southern Pacific, breaking through the older proto-Pacific floor, a remnant of which remains as the North Pacific. So as well as spreading occurring across the ridge (in the Indian Ocean), mantle growth was also occurring along the ridge, making it longer. 


This double breakout (1. the Indonesian Bubble and 2. the Pacific), with peripheral elements that encompass the entire globe, is the Big Cheese of global deformation (winking at us) that closes the continental landmass surrounding the Pacific, and nails the lid on the coffin of Plate Tectonics.  The ocean floors have grown, forcing the crust apart in the Pacific and dilating the Atlantic and other oceans with later passive gap-fill. 

Closing the ocean floors of the Atlantic, Indian and Southern Oceans substantially reduces the amount of the Earth's surface that was increased by the extrusion of the mantle.  Closing the Pacific eliminates it entirely, and shows that the continental crust once covered theEarth's surface completely in Pangaean times, i.e., no Panthalassa, no subduction, .. only the overriding and collapse by the peripheral, forcefully intruded (circum-Pacific) mantle, a dynamic that exists to the present day, much to the consternation of the peoples of the Pacific

From which we see that global geology is as much a story of dilation within the continental crust(which Plate Tectonics ignores), as it is of their spreading by the creation of the ocean floors.

And why the forcing?  That is the sixty-four thousand dollar question that remains to be answered, because it *is* of a scale that counters gravity - and has split the planet, .. first equatorially, and later on the longitudinal line of the Atlantic, and is explicitly implicated in the growth of the mantle - which is continuing to the present day.


[Note.  There is nothing in this construction that is inconsistent with the known facts. ]


[ See also - Debunking Plate Tectonics - at :-
http://www.platetectonicsbiglie.blogspot.com/ ]

" ..Stumblin' in .."

" ..and so it begins.." 

( Blog for website at http://users.indigo.net.au/don )

 Fig.1.  Earth expansion (symbolic representation) : where it all begins.  1. Pangaean equatorial zone of circumglobal elevation, split along the middle. Arrows represent the locus of pending separation which to the right will floor in the mantle and have much separation (= crustal displacement + mantle growth), and to the left will floor in continental crust and show less separation (= crustal displacement only); 2.  Circular breakout is a complex of swivelling crust-mantle detachments and mantle extrusion in the widest, most elevated part of 1 - what is now the Western Pacific; crustal elevation and mantle extrusion are causally linked.  Mantle extrusion and crustal collapse began centred in the present-day Indonesian region; the hinge of dilation (at the back) is the Mediterranean.


1.  The circumglobal mountain belt 'loop'.  This is a *mountain* belt more than it is a fold belt.  It is a zone of elevated topography that includes the major plateaus of the world. Much of the stratigraphy of the zone is as flat as the sea-floor on which the sedimentary layers making it up were originally laid down.  The folding that is present is commonly acknowledged to be due to gravitational collapse, reflecting gravitational instability of the zone.

Why would this zone, .. this belt of mostly flat stratigraphy (but sometime-folding collapse), be gravitationally unstable?  What is the nature of such a (circumglobal) 'uplift' that makes it unstable?.

Well, .. we can rule out "colliding plates" straight away on two grounds :-
1. It is illogical to think that the motion of "independent plates" as they are said to be, could get their act together to push up such a zone of continuous circumglobal elevation - and even if they could organise to do so, could do it without disturbing the flatness of the strata that make up most of it.
2.  Such 'pushing up' acts against gravity, which contradicts essential considerations of thermodynamics.  'Colliding plates' are supposedly driven by subduction,  which is in turn driven by convection (the loss of heat), which is essentially second-order to the force of gravity that got the heat distribution of the planet together to begin with (which is now losing it).  Nothing that arises as a consequence of gravity, particularly when it is two-or-three times removed in the 'using-up-energy' stakes, is going to disturb the first-order configuration that gravity has put together in the first place.  The only thing that *can* disturb it (that we know of) is the Earth's rotation - or something that acts to vary the effect of gravitational force, like the pull of the Moon.

The oblate shape of the Earth giving its equatorial bulge is commonly regarded as a disturbance due to the Earth's rotation (skater analogy).  If the rate of rotation changed so that the Earth became more spherical, then the waters of the oceans would move away from the bulge to leave it potentially high and dry ("potentially", because I don't know if there would be enough resulting depth-difference back then to actually expose the ocean floor.)  (Maybe, .. /probably?), .. But let's forget theory and just look at the empirical facts.  Two stand out.

1.  It's not just the belt of elevation that is above the water - the full thickness of stratigraphic sequence that was ever laid down on the continental crust is above water. [This in itself by the way(but particularly when coupled with 2) is proof of expansion.]

2. The watery world of today belongs to a different terrestrial domain than it did back then ( The stratigraphic sequence of the past belongs to continental crust, not the oceanic basins - see gravity maps of the world).  The geological evidence is that water used to be exclusively on continental crust. There are no landlocked ocean floors that failed to 'subduct'.  Nowadays, the waterly world ('seas'/'oceans' or whatever we like to call them) are almost exclusively *not* on continental crust at all.  Something happened to make all the water of continental seas (where it had been laying down sediments for most of the Earth's history) migrate to the ocean basins, which are universally young, floored by mantle, and are (comparatively speaking) virtually devoid of the thick sequences of sediments that characterise the continental crust.  [ This schism in terrestrial domains by the way is virtually not addressed in Plate Tectonics, .. probably because it would be silly to suggest there to have been some sort of topographic partition between the two, with one lot of water drying up and the other one not.  Plate Tectonics says some pretty daft things, but we have to credit it with being not that daft; there are a lot of clever people after all who would appear to support it.  So there is silence on this point - "The biggest lie of all, is the lie of omission".]

That is, the belt of elevation is only part of the story, .. the rest of the story relates to continental crust in general.  Something happened to elevate the crust above the watery waves.  The most logical explanation, given what we know of continental margins and the relationship to the mantle crust of the ocean floors is not that the land (and the mountain belt) was elevated, .. but that sea-level dropped - BIGTIME.  Not all at once of course, but over time (but nevertheless, pretty quickly, geologically speaking).

Thus we appear to have answered our question, "what could elevate a zone of crust the whole way round the world?".  It wasn't 'elevated' at all, .. it was left high and dry as the seas receded in response to the creation of the ocean floors in Mesozoic times.  And that belt of elevation (No. 1 in the above figure), that still shows a residual circumglobal continuity, and that once partitioned the Earth into a northern and southern hemisphere, must logically therefore be regarded as having once been essentially equatorial.

And what was the explanation for the "bigtime-drop", that exhumed *all* the sediments from the sea floors, (globally)?  Simply that the Earth's surface must have moved outwards from the core: as it moves out, surface area increases, and sea level drops.  The Earth must have got bigger.  There.  A rational first-order solution for a first-order question.

(What's that?  Did somebody say, "No mechanism!" ?  - Then Piss off and look for one!)

And so we can revisit aspects of theory and propose on account of 'circumglobicity', elevation and oblateness :-

• The mountain belt (of elevation) (that goes all around the world) represents an oblateness that no longer exists to the degree that it once did,
• The Earth has got less oblate (more spherical)
• The Earth has got bigger by the extents of the ocean floors

These three linked points derived from first-order considerations militate in favour of a combination that would appear to have something directly to do with the Earth's rotation.  There is good reason (from growth rings on corals and rythmites) to think that the Earth's rotation rate has indeed slowed, so there is some extra empirical support for 'high-and-dry', increasing sphericity, and bigness.

To readers who nevertheless have rumbling at the back of their mind, "What about subduction?", we have to repeat that bit about the length difference between spreading ridges and their original extents of breakthrough, which shows that the spreading ridges have got longer as well as wider, which means that they grow UP as well as sideways, .. which in turn means that the continents don't move away from the spreading ridges, .. the ridges move away from the continents.  Ergo, NooOoo subduction. And, in turn, that the Earth has got bigger.  So called 'subduction zones' are something else entirely -  to address which we shall have to contemplate the I-Ching (No.2 in the above figure).

But right now, I'm going to bed.  There's a good scratch, and some cosmological constants to consider   :-)


[  See also - Debunking Plate Tectonics - at :-
http://www.platetectonicsbiglie.blogspot.com/ ]

The I-Ching of Earth expansion

(..or Copper knickers, piss-flaps, and the iching..)
Otherwise known as "The debate we have to have".
( Blog for website at http://users.indigo.net.au/don )

Fig.1  The I-Ching of Earth Expansion.  The blue circle represents the smaller curvature of the mantle shell breaking through the Earth's crust; the coppery colour represents the equatorial bulge on an Earth that was once more oblate (the line in the middle being the equatorial split), and the Big Loopy 'A' (combined with the dynamics of blue-circle breakthrough) is the trace of crustal accommodation as the split swivels open.  (Guiding arrows later; check back.)



Girls, wear this one proudly.  Of course, you always knew you were endowed with the Da Vinci code of enlightenment for us rock-hard men down-under contemplating elegance and beauty and the way of the world, but I'll bet you've never seen it in this particular way.

For what we are looking at here, inscripted in the trace of crustal adjustment as the Earth gets bigger - is encrypted nothing less than the I-Ching of Earth Expansion ("ICEE" or "ICHEE" - either will do).  And there is no better way to engrave it into the collective consciousness than to describe it as something that insistently draws to itself an attention that just won't go away - like falling asleep and having to get up in the morning keeps remindin' us of the Earth's place in the 'eavens an' the need to address cosmological constants, infinity, black holes and the like, (..well, it does, .. dunnit?), so that little bit of a tingle will henceforth remind everybody that the Earth is getting bigger, and that we need to do something about it - like tell people.

Did Copernicus know the *real* mayhem he was setting in train when he proposed the heliocentric system?  Newton when he mentioned that stuff about apples?  Einstein and Bohr with their rambunctious bomb?  God when he created woman?  Woman when she blamed Man?  Man when he retaliated by seeing himself in God's image?   Plate Tectonics when it recognised sea-floor spreading?

I doubt it, but each one ups the ante on the previous, if only PMS (the Principle of Multipleworking Stories)  would stop trying to shove the biggest revelation in a century - that the Earth is getting bigger by the extents of the ocean floors - down the gurgler.  It isn't (getting shoved down), .. and the synoptic illustration  (a homage to the elegance and beauty of Mother Earth) shows why. 

But first, this, ..from Bernard Coakley's 'Scientists-at-work' blog, which I found by tracking Blogger's next blog on its title bar, by way of illustrating the quality of arithmetic on which Plate Tectonics' geophysical esotery is based,

"If the ocean is growing and (if) the surface area (or volume) of the planet is not increasing, it is necessary that an equal amount of oceanic crust is being destroyed elsewhere. Destruction of oceanic crust, the recycling of this material back into the earth’s interior, is accomplished at subduction zones."

..is instructive for the arithmetic, which is :-

.. 'if is'  +  'if is not'  =  is

See?  ..  Sorry Bernard, .. doesn't convince me, .. the embedded conditionals say it all.  Sure, it's the party line, we know, .. but it's what ( 'ear-dahnahndah), is called, "coming the raw prawn". 

And frankly, I don't think Bernard falls for it either.  But he needs some support for his iffing swither, .. a truss of some sort.  He needs to back up a blog, and contemplate the I-Ching.  For what we are looking at in the above figure (in its simplicity and beauty), is the blueprint for the trace of continental dispersion according to Earth expansion - catapulting the dinos from Antarctica all the way to Alaska, and the like, ... ..  It's the way it is and the way it has to be - the Earth is getting bigger.  (And we should tell people.)

So watch this space for more telling.
All according to morphotectonics.
No geophysics needed.
Hardly any geology either
It's obvious.

(Compare with the I-ching for Plate Tectonics from "palaeomagnetic evidence".

Fig.2  Polar wonder-path, for North America;  "Scientists 'R us : Embedded Entrails as can-of-worms."  Greenland in the top right corner for anybody interested. (Right-click new Window for a biggerfigger)

There is a very certain irony here, in that just when university boards have been closing down geology departments the world over (thanks to the bullshit of Plate Tectonics) (and the media cheer squad cutting its own throat by promoting it - making everybody think the destination has arrived), it would seem that really, geology hasn't even begun to get off the ground, two centuries and more of it notwithstanding.

While Rome burns and all the big questions remain unanswered, Plate Tectonics is fiddling its own dirge of an epitaph, and tellin' everybody through the mind-numbing insistent beat of subduction that this kindergarten cookbook of 'real science' is the gig, .. and wanders the aisles handing out librettos in case the polloi in the cheap seats don't get the plot and laugh in all the wrong bits, like when the dude with the entrails enters stage left.

[ P.S.  But first, before the check-back we really need to add another line.  This extra one goes as shown, parallel to the left leg of the 'A', and represents part of the Pacific dilation  ( = the sweep of North America away from the equator).  The  sweep of South America is marked by the other one, the right leg of the big 'A'.   I've added this extra line separately, because I think it would be confusing otherwise.  Its significance will become clear later but for the meantime we can see the elements of another great circle emerging (and yes, they are the same line) which is how expansion does it - *dilation* tends to end up on great circles (the expanding balloon analogy; see also Figs 1a,c here).  Small-circle displacements on the other hand are due to swivelling crust-mantle detachments.  Note this is different from the Euler-pole small-circles of Morgan and McKenzie, where transform faults (on a constant-sized Earth) are some sort of tramlines of continental displacement.   In expansion, given time all small-circle displacements evolve to great circles - which is what we see (Fig.2 here evolving to Fig 7 here). ]

Fig.3.  The extra line. (In red)  Represents the sweep of North America away from the Pangaean zone of equatorial elevation (exposed as the continental seas withdrew) scissors open.  (Morphology only just now; .. arrows and clarification later.)

[ But while we're at it, note that when we're talking three dimensions, that terms like 'northeast' etc don't mean very much unless referenced to a specific point on the globe.  For example as we look, the red line is northeasterly but viewed from the back it it northwesterly, and in the middle it is east-west.  But it the same 'straight' (great-circle) line.  This is why describing global geology using directional references on flat map projections (Fig.5 here)  can be confusing.  ("Plate" tectonics.)

[ See also - Debunking Plate Tectonics - at :-
 http://www.platetectonicsbiglie.blogspot.com/ ]

Summary of Global Tectonics (Earth expansion)

( Blog for website at http://users.indigo.net.au/don/ )

Summary to be read in conjunction with [ 1 ], [ 2 ], [ 3 ]
---------

Retrofitting global mantle dilations describes a zone of present-day circumglobal elevation that originated as sea-floor sediments in Mesozoic times, that was part of an Earth that was once more oblate than it is now, and that despite gravitational collapse of the zone (causing folding), retains the essential flatness of the precursor sea-floor.  .


Forceful mantle breakthrough along the middle of the zone and centred in the Indonesian region partitioned the Earth into structurally distinct northern and southern hemispheres and dilated the crust to form what are now the world's oceans.

Fig.1  Equatorial breakout, centred on the Indonesian region (shaded disc on the surface of the sphere) partitions the Earth into northern and southern hemispheres. Transform faults are shown figuratively as slashes.


Eastwards of the central breakout, the northern and southern margins of the split swivelled open on crust-mantle detachments about a pivot in the Caribbean region to form the oceanic seaboards of North and South America.

Fig.2.  "Here's Looking at you".  Initiation of the 'Eye of the Pacific' -  detail of the equatorial split around Indonesia.  Growth of the spreading ridge is initiated peripheral to the breakout.  Swivelling open of the Americas was (geologically speaking) extremely rapid.

West of the breakthrough, dilation was less and floored in the continental crust, with incipient mantle breakthrough forming the Mediterranean, Caspian and Black Seas.

Central to breakout, the Indonesian 'bubble' swivelled northeastwards in a series of flattish, mantle-floored scissored detachments as far as the Russian Peninsula to form the 'back-arc basins' of the Western Pacific as they appear today.  Advance effects of the same tectonics extend as far as the Urals.

Fig.3.  Scissored detachments of the equatorial split and Indonesian 'bubble' (the real "Roof of the World" - but now collapsed).  Numbers indicate duplication of the Indonesian bubble on flat detachments as the hemispheres split open. [Inset is schematic for the crust of the Western Pacific, scissoring open and exposing the upper mantle.  Which was out-from-under which, would be difficult to tell because of the way it would all flatten off, and would depend on intimate local knowledge of the region.  Small arrows at the spreading ridge = direction of mantle growth, which is implicitly UP - which is why there are the big swivel detachments in the first place (not recognised in Plate Tectonics). Right-click image in a new window for a bigger figure.]

Forceful equatorial dilation of Earth hemispheres was followed by slower, passive spreading of the Atlantic on an Earth that was larger by the amount of earlier Pacific breathrough, .. and more spherical.  Swivel-opening on a roughly longitudinal line was pivoted at the North Pole and terminated around Africa in the Rodriguez Spreading Ridge. Westward drift of the Atlantic 'superplate' on lithospheric detachments (conceived as crustal lag due to the Earth's rotation) caused the Americas to override the Eastern Pacific as far as the spreading ridge.

Fig.4  Figurative sketch of Atlantic breakthough.  Cross structures are transform faults.  The Atlantic Ridge got deflected to the right along one of them down the bottom where it met the big swivel dislocation of South America and the displacements of the Pacific spreading ridge (through the Falklands) (Fig.3).


Sequential breakouts of the mantle increased the size and surface area of the planet.  A corresponding withdrawal of the seas from the continents was accompanied by the slower gravitational collapse of the crust around the equatorial zone, which is now some forty degrees north of its original position. 

Breakout represents a shift from forceful mantle extrusion (Pacific) to more passive spreading (Atlantic) and amounts to the extent of the present day ocean floors and a commensurate increase in mantle volume.  The cause is not known, but the movement patterns of the crust in relation to mantle growth indicate disturbance of the Earth's equilibrium in the celestial sphere.

Global deformation occurred largely by swivelling dislocations of the crust on crust-mantle detachments, and continuing upwards growth of the mantle (outwards from the Earth's centre.)

Fig.5.  The eye of the Pacific.  The circularity of structure described by the Pacific spreading ridge mirrors that of the dismembered circumglobal mountain belt that circumscribes the Pacific, most immediately observable in the northern hemisphere.  The pre-Pacific location of the belt was equatorial in Pangaean times.  The so-called subduction zone that separates the two (the subduction zone and the mountain belt) marks a lithospheric discontinuity, which is the distended periperhy of the Indonesian 'bubble' (/breakout). [Note that the Pacific spreading ridge is actually a great circle (Fig7 here), .. just like the root of the Pangaean equatorial zone (Fig.1) that it defines (offset by asthenospheric dislocation) (because the Earth got bigger) (and there was lithospheric adjustment) (etc. etc.). ]

Just look at the squiggly way the Russian Peninsula has swivelled north away from Indonesia across the Marianas, at the same time as the Americas scissorred open as well (real early) (.. see all that very dark blue stuff marking the western margins of the Americas ..?)  And geologically speaking (to me) that says, "Wow!"   It's almost enough to get you interested in fossils an' rocks 'n stuff, .. not to mention geophysics, .. if you want to get real deep.  But it's all there in the surface geology, staring us in the face (wink-wink!)

(What a wonderful world.)

Summary of the summary

Something happened to disturb the rotational equilibrium of the Earth.
Which is associated with mantle growth.
Mantle grows, breaking through the crust, .. making the Earth bigger.
Crust swivells to accommodate breakthrough.
Most swivelling occurred earliest (least was latest).
Forceful equatorial breakthrough was followed by passive longitutinal spreading.
Rotational equilibrium of the Earth appears to be re-stabilising.
Growth may be too.

Plate Tectonics is dead.  (Oh Dear.)
RIP

[ See also - Debunking Plate Tectonics - at :-

http://www.platetectonicsbiglie.blogspot.com/ ]