.. "and Ice-Cream Castles in the air."

.. Built by the Big Chill.
( Blog for website at hhtp://users.indigo.net.au/don/ )

Fig.1.  Mount Everest and the Himalayan front as seen from Alice's Tardis.  (Wikipedia)

Chomolungma.  Qomolangma if you're Chinese.  Everest - or (as we learn from the wiki) 'EEv-rist' if you are the man himself, .. or Peak15 if its a matter of cata-logic.  Draped in ice and snow, .. rocks that are today chiselled to a peak that were therefore once even higher.  Yet they formed in the deepest recesses of ancient seas.  What cataclysmic event was it turned those chilly watery deeps of  five hundred million years ago of Ordovician time, into the freezing hell of today's Heavenly Holy Mother in her icy throne on the roof of the world - eyeballing her adopted daughter with the 'attitude', on cloudless nights?

You'd think there would be an answer to that one by now, wouldn't you?  And so there is.  It is the chill of those ancient seas soaking up heat from the sea bed, or, since those seas are themselves losing heat to the atmosphere (and thence to outer space), it's the chilly night air.

And that's the best answer modern 'science' can give as a mechanism for mountain building, .. the chilly night air is causing subducting mantle slabs to drag continents from one side of the planet to the other, and crash them into other continents, likewise but oppositely pulled, to 'build' mountains - "by plate collision", ..and buckling to form the highest tracts on the planet. Because, .. "Subduction is driving the plate machinery".

Now it might be asking for some child-like credulity from us to believe that colliding plates build mountains, but it's quite another to ask us to believe it's the cold night air doing it.  And yet  that is precisely what is being said, coded in platespeak and straight-faced as you like.   And that's even not allowing for a breeze.  You could understand it (a bit) if there was a chill factor in it, .. some friction, .. but no, .. nothing so complicated.  It's just the chilly night air standing there doing nothing,  moving the crust around and crumpling it up into mountains.  Well! .. everybody had just better look out, and not open their fridge doors all at the same time or the consequences could be dire indeed  - every bit as devastating as my shaving cream knocking a hole in the ozone layer, or anthropogenic (that means you and me by the way) bad behaviour causing global warming.  (Spin, .. and couching rubbish in big words to confuse the issue.  They're at it all the time, .. in the name of 'science'. )

"Tossed high by colliding plates." So the story goes.   A high toss indeed, considering that the forces for the requisite crumpling reside deep in the crust, .. as does the heat that mostly accompanies it.  So the question stands.  How did all that (metamorphosed) sea floor get up there?  Well, .. so the story goes, .. and considering Mr Uyeda's proposal (mentioned above) of subduction driving the whole Plate Tectonic gravytrain, the cold night air ('cooling') makes the mantle sink and at the same time makes the continental crust rise up into mountains, ..that is, the air draws heat out of the mantle to give wholesale convective mantle overturn, and at the same time (via the exigencies of moving plates) puts heat into the continental crust to give folding and thrusting and metamorphism (and mountain building).  When you look at the sum total of nonsenses in that lot, maybe it's best just to stick with 'tossing' for peace of mind.

The extensive pediments that flank the mountain chains are the eroded products of the mountains and show no folding (Fig.3 here) The folding that is being exhumed in the mountainous terrain (from the Alps to the Himalayas and the Americas as well) therefore did not take place during elevation from the surface of the sea floor to the present mountain tops..

We are left with the only reasonable and logical conclusion that folding happens deep in the crust.  But the only way there can be folding (accompanied by heat and pressure)  is if the crust buckles *down*, .. not up.  And it's not so easy to crumple crust down, because there is no space for 'down', so to speak, to occur.  Pushed stuff crumples *up*, where there *is* space, not down where there is none.  The only way there can be crumpling down is if there is a hole of sorts for the crust to 'fall' into.  And holes are not formed by crustal 'collision', but by extension.  And extension (on the scale of mountain belts) happens when the crust as a whole is being stretched, not compressed.  That is, except for smaller-scale second-order effects at the toe of collapse structures, such as was mentioned before in that post about collapsing, folding by-and-large is due to *extension*.  And wholesale extension happens with the crust having to continually take up an ever enlarging surface area. 

And so we are returned to the considerations that plagued geologists of a century ago, considerations that led to the questions of geosynclines and orogens, epeirogenesis and taphrogenesis, but with the added caveat of scale:  How, really, do mountains form, and the answer most certainly is, *not* by the collision of any "moving plates", which can't get their act together to push up a global-scale mountain belt any more than their proponents can get theirs together to come up with a coherent story.
 
 And with equal certainty (going by the distribution of the present-day mountain belts of the Earth) it may be stated that they form by erosion of the crust as this is exhumed by the relentless drop in sea-level as the Earth's surface is extended and takes up an ever-increasing surface area - *Globally*.

And in the passing we should note that the above gobbledegook about colliding plates crumpling the crust is promoted by the foremost teaching and research institutions in the world - and all others as well.  What's the deal? How far are people willing to let themselves be led up the garden path (by other people who are not Elvis)?   What's their agenda?  It can't be the geology when their concoction of it is so patently deficient and the simple alternative so obvious.

Well, the answer is really quite simple : the objective is to remain within consensus and 'do science', because to not remain so is high professional risk, i.e., the point is not the doing, but the remaining within.

When academics are rated according to the number of publications they can notch up, preferably in prestigious journals, and number is best met by staying within consensus, what else *can* be the reason?  It contradicts even the basic intelligence necessary to do science if you don't obey its rules.  It's not just the scientist himself that's the issue, but his family and place in the community as well, not to mention how his wayward behaviour might affect his colleagues.  What value truth in science then?  So long as career is founded (/funded) on publications, the answer is "not much".  It's an oxymoron: no bang for the buck.


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