Plate Tectonics to Earth expansion - one more time

Or, .. doing it again for the Platies, .. the  Flathead Flat-Earthers of the Earth sciences.
( Blog for website at http://users.indigo.net.au/don/ )

Fig.1.  Global deformation according to Plate Tectonics.  The partition of the Earth into 'plates' according to the distribution of Earthquakes.  One of the top ten scientific accomplishments of the second half of the twentieth century, warranting (it is said according to those promoting it) a Nobel Prize.  (The map is predicated on the findings of the ocean floor; the geology of the continents is not taken into account.)

"Plate Tectonics is a theory" googles 15,400 entries at the time of writing.  Or as *Berkeley.edu more correctly would have it, a framework for understanding many geophysical observations etc..

Based on the distribution of Earthquakes, the Earth's surface can be described as "segmented into a number of plates" (about 8 - 12 depending on who is doing the counting) (and lots of smaller ones to cover exigencies).  And the above map is used to illustrate it.  Each Plate has a continent on top (or not, as the case may be), and a convection cell underneath, driving the plate (which is basically regarded as the brittle outer shell of the Earth - because of the earthquakes in it), away from the spreading ridge towards a subduction zone where it is returned to the convection cycle.  The continent on top, it is said, can collide with another to form mountains, while the ocean floor part of the plate descends to the mantle. 

And basically that's about it.

So much for the theory.  Let's compare it with the geological reality that shows aspects of global geology whose relationship to the ocean floors is not taken into account in the plate model.

Fig.2  Global deformation according to geology.  Structure is dominated by the big circle of the Pacific spreading ridge, and another circle defined by the fold belt of the circum-Pacific (with the bottom half shunted eastwards along the Indonesian Shear - strip of brown from Polynesia to Peru that aligns with the fold belt extending from the Alps to the Himalayas).   (Compare with the plate map in Fig.1 which does not take the geology into account.  Image courtesy of Unesco.)


Two big circles of global deformation - the Pacific spreading ridge and its circumferential fold belt. The geological map shows the circular elements of Pacific structure,  1. the spreading ridge (much ruptured at 5 and 6 o'clock), and 2. dilation of the pre-Pacific Pangaean equatorial fold belt now configured as the circum-Pacific margin.  Note how Pacific spreading merges with that of  the Mediterranean where it links with the fold belt extending from the Alps to the circum-Pacific. (Closing the Pacific and the Atlantic returns the fold belt to the Western Mediterranean.)

It is the failure to relate these two aspects of Pacific circularity in Fig.2 that has accounted for the emergence of Plate Tectonics.  Instead of going down the geological path and integrating the two, which Harry Hess confessed would solve his "three most pressing problems of the ocean floors", geophysicists chose the sociological route of funding and self-interest, myopically restricting their efforts to the ocean floors and continental margins.  Continental exclusion was justified by the military nature of the funding (for 'oceanographic research' read 'submarine warfare'), and theories developed according to this deficiency, with a validation of sorts sought in the supposedly democratic but specious "principle of multiple working hypotheses" which allows one bit of nonsense to exist side-by-side  with another, propping each other up like Tweedledum and Tweedledee.  (Crossing eyes to see them as one, does nothing to negate the reality of 'doublethink' that passes in some quarters for scientific enterprise.)

Just for the record, Mr Frank B.Taylor  deserves a mention here, because he too thought that the Earth's global features were due to Moon capture.  His drop-out from formal education described on the wikipedia may be intended to denigrate his ideas, but I think in his case, eschewing formal education just might have been a positive; not all 'education' (rote learning) is edifying in the way it is thought to be.  (Something about flat-headery here, .. and stunned mullets.) 

"Children have this habit of thinking for themselves, and the point of education is to cure them of this habit." ~ Bertrand Russell

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Fig.3.  F.B. Taylor's interpretation of the circumglobal mountain belt due to crustal drift from the poles to the equator.  (Image from Kearey, Klepeis, and Vine, 2009   (Global Tectonics, Wiley Blackwell - 482 pps) after Taylor, F.B., 1910, "The origin of the Earth's plan"


Certainly Naomi Oreskes in her book 'Theory and Method in American Earth science' seems to regard Taylor (an American) as something of a traitor to the tribal tweedle-dee-dum consensus-think democratic way of doing science according to the principle of multiple working hypotheses, which she makes out has proved its credentials in the development of Plate Tectonics.  But Taylor did go to the trouble of writing a book about his ideas, which is no small measure of commitment regardless of right or wrong, and I think just from his illustration (with some modifcation to include the northern arm of the Alpine - Himalayan fold belt as in Fig.2 above, and the opening of the Atlantic which was not known about in his day) he's right on the money.  It *was* after all a hundred years ago. Taylor did see the equatorial singulartity of structure that the mountain belt represents, a singularity that is not recognised in Plate Tectonics (and inexplicable if it were), and also perplexing to most advocating Earth expansion today.  From the viewpoint of Moon capture the *formation* of the Earth's equatorial bulge advocated by Taylor as well as its *deformation* exemplified in the loopy shapes of known gravitational collapse, would be obvious sequential effects if capture is correct (especially if the Earth was a smaller size).  Stepping back a hundred years, it is intriguing to see how Taylor (and later Wegener) nearly got it right, and chastening too, to consider the blind alley that Plate Tectonics, with all its technological and consensus support, has led us down. 

Such is the legacy of the politics of fear that funded this diversion. Adapting  John F. Kennedy's claim to being a Berliner (something like a Frankfurter, or a Hamburger), and Ronald Reagan's later challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev, we might say,  "Well, Mr Plate Tectonics, .. If you value truth in science, If you value the future of geological research, .. if you value the sophomoric cleanslates you scribble your rubbish on, .. TEAR DOWN THIS WALL ! "  (of ignorance and fear).  But they can't because to do so exposes the very ignorance and fear that lies behind it, and opens up a very telling window to the way that Plate Tectonics has evolved, and to the operation of consensus science in general, and the sand on which self-serving consensus typically builds .. which we will draw a wet cloth over, noting only the degree to which virtually all educational institutions (secondary, tertiary and post tertiary - and the media) are complicit, ..  and hope that the said wet cloth will encourage them to clean up their act.

Figure 2 is of course a flat-map projection, but that in no way detracts from the point, that within a geological framework of scale and time and the workings of stratigraphic and structural superposition, the rough parallellism between the two circularities of structure shows they are related in a spatial and temporal sense.

Fig.4  Related circularities of Pacific structure.  The flat-map circularity of the Pacific spreading ridge transposed on to a sphere to show the near-parallellism of the Pacific spreading ridge (half-toned on the reverse side of the image) with the Eurasian sector of the circumglobal mountain belt.  Indonesia (not scribed, the better to avoid obscuring detail ) duplicates the arc of the Himalayas and marks the original locus of breakout of Pacific dilation.

Fig.5. Circularity of initial breakout of the proto-Pacific.  Correcting for ridge displacements at 5 and 6 o'clock in Fig.2 highlights the initial circularity of the spreading ridge centred on the now collapsed and disrupted Indonesian bubble.  The missing half of the roof of the bubble in (b) now constitutes the disrupted Western Pacific margin which has swivelled open to the Russian Peninsula (Fig.6 here), over the scar of which Asia is collapsing (Figs4, 5 here)


Once part of the equatorial bulge in Pangaean times, the Indonesian loop represents the remnant of breakthrough of a mantle bubble, expressed now as the great circle of the Pacific Dilation.  Growth from a small circle breakout (Fig.5b) to a great circle (Figs 4, 5a) necessitates an extension along the spreading ridge that can only mean global EXPANSION.  There is no alternative.  It is as plain as the extents of Pacific Ocean that describe it.

"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle" ~ George Orwell

And why was it missed?  Well, it wasn't missed.  It was (and is) interpreted in terms of lateral movement of the continents away from the spreading ridge, for which ridge-lengthening must be ignored, for acknowledging it would have been admission of expansion, which in turn would have driven oceanic research down a (continental) geological road, and scuppered the funding.  The American military (= submarine warfare) were not interested in geological questions of 'plates' or Earth expansion. Before there is research there needs to be funding, and the politics of the time represented an offer of funding of very deep pockets indeed - unasked..  Science, strapped for cash at the best of times, does not look a gift horse in the mouth when one turns up on its doorstep unannounced with saddlebags of gold, frankincense and myrrh (especially when it looks like a donkey), .. well, .. who could blame them?  It was like Christmas after all.

Columbus Iselin, Director of Woods Hole, wrote, "The effects of this great outpouring of money on oceanography are by no means all healthy.  In the first place nobody knows how long it will last."  ( H.W. Menard, 1986, The Ocean of Truth)    See comment re funding in this blog. 

The geological reconstruction above showing expansion, is self-evident to the point of hardly worth mentioning (I really don't know why I bother), because the continental margins of the oceans are virtually of the same age as the initiation of the Pacific spreading ridge. Allowing for a degree of crust - mantle offset in the Pacific they are spatially the same thing too - just as the Atlantic spreading ridge and the Atlantic margins are the same thin.  There is simply no space, (spatial or temporal), for any speculation regarding the existence of a pre-existing Panthalassa (necessary in Plate Tectonics to keep the Earth the same size).  Panthalassa (and therefore the Earth maintaining a constant size) is a myth.  The Earth has got very substantially bigger since the Mesozoic.  The Plate Map (Fig.1) and the arrows showing plate movement that go with it (Fig.3 here) are a furphy.

That's it.

Fig.6.  Wonderland.   Excused from the Mad Hatter's Tea Party, Sophie More encounters the doublethink of the Principle of Multiple Working Hypotheses in the forest of trees known as Plate Tectonics

 

[ See also - Debunking Plate Tectonics - at :-

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