What is a mountain? Is easily answered. What is 'mountain building' is a more difficult question and confronts 'experts' with some serious oxymoronic contradictions, because ("Hello, sailor") there is no such thing. No 'mountain building', no 'orogeny', and no tectonics (in the sense meant by Plate Tectonics) - only the inexorable, relentless collapse of the crust as it is made to adjust to the changing curvature of the Earth as it gets bigger.
["Mountain *building*?"]
(" Whenever ideas fail, men invent words," ~ Martin Fischer)
Figure 1. Contemplating dandelions and the Gaia principle. (Not exactly a mountain, .. but ..) Investigating the Vedas - Earth, water, wind, and fire - and the 'void', .. and finding life. And mountains. But not 'mountain building') [Image source [1] [2] ]
Between the sun and the seed there are many things in the Vedas, including mountains. But "mountain building" is not one of them - despite the authority of 'experts', ..
USGS "mountain building" = About 140,000 results
NASA "mountain building" = About 189,000 results
Google scholar "mountain building" = About 23,800 results
... and just "mountain building" by itself = About 423,000 results
So what's going on? Why does this meme, this mantra of 'mountain *building*' mesmerise people so, even to the exalted level of the 'expert'? Well, it's quite simply the 'flat-Earth /round-Earth' thing in another form. Plate Tectonics is getting its sense of proportion (=/commonsense) screwed up, and (in the fine tradition of "the more you get to know the more you find you don't"), is providing an excellent example to aspiring young scientists how to let all this 'not-knowing' and lack of commonsense hang out. Unashamedly.
The appropriate scale is not being addressed. And words are being used to conceal a clueless deficit. It is a classic example of the hubris that will be around for a long time before it is written out of the history books. It's already inexplicably survived for half a century beyond its use-by [See note :- 20181105] which was the date of its birth (~1967). Geologically speaking, Plate Tectonics was still-born. An invention /contrivance to milk the trough of government funds. It should never have got up.
In the never-ending story of Plate Tectonics everything is upside-down and round the wrong way, and so back-to-front and inside-out that it makes it very difficult to work out where to begin to fix it. A bit like those wonky mirrors we look in to see ourselves as we really are.
On examination we find this has more to do with the language, the 'management-speak', being used than the thinking behind the science. You have to pull the whole thing apart in order to find a suitable thread to follow, and then, finding all the ones you've already pulled lying all over the floor in disarray, you have to work out how to put it all back together again to make some sort of sense, knowing even when you do that the facts and the logic won't cut it (because they never do). Because when people, particularly those thinking they know most have their ideas and beliefs, feel threatened they become even more militant in their views - exactly as Carey found . (Paraphrasing here), "Structural geologists were not getting the big picture because they were working at the wrong scale and off flat-map projections, when what was needed was to look at the Earth as a whole - 'in the altogether round' so to speak." (=>)
But the fact that we don't see much evidence of this 'round' approach in the academic literature says that maybe it's not so easy as it looks. [Pre the launch of Google earth in 2005 I can vouch for it.]
The reasons are firstly that Plate Tectonics is a consensus, and secondly that to go against consensus is academic suicide.
Robert Dean Clark :- From 1930 to 1960 a scientist who supported it knowingly committed academic hara-kiri. S. W. Carey of Tasmania, a major figure in igniting the revolution, could not get his papers published in reputable scientific journals in the 1950s. "He had to run them off on a mimeograph machine and distribute them himself," Wilson says. (link)Sam Carey: "Through the 30s and 40s and 50s if you dared to propose this sort of thing in America you'd be laughed at, you're a ratbag flat-earther. And there was no chance of getting a job if you had that kind of idea." (link)
For Carey, three books on the subject in twenty years didn't cut it. Even though Earth expansion accommodates more of the facts than Plate Tectonics, and connects all of Plate Tectonics' inventions in more economical ways than P.T. itself does, and demonstrates how P.T. is unsupportable, it makes no difference, leaders in the field hunker down and become more entrenched in their positions and the herd follows, feeling themselves also under attack. Change has to happen in such a way that will let others see (because experts certainly won't) that the lynchpin of their thinking is only part of the story - then see that it is really quite a minor thing, so minor in fact that it comes to be seen (with time) as insignificant, .. then with more time, as irrelevant. With more time still, it becomes acceptable to write the 'lynchpin' out of the history books entirely. Thus is the smooth transition of science "by teams of researchers discovering .. for the first time " ("going forward" when it is mostly old hat reworked) assured.
A concerted enterprise that increases momentum with time is required to combat consensus, which is not a job for one person in the face of a worldful of experts who have learned their rote-lessons well, and have built careers and reputations upon them. (No small thing in the academic world.)
So (dear newbie, hoping to make your great discovery and mark in the world of science) beware of 'experts', especially when they come at you in "teams" ("for the first time"). They mean business, .. and not of the scientific sort.
Thus does the lumbering gravy train of 'science' with its knobs bells whistles lanyards and measuring tapes, and bright-and-bushy-eyed rabbit-tails and the advance guardians of media and consensus peer review, work their way towards going forward, contriving as they do so to not notice all the collateral damage of dying and sweeping under the carpet that must happen before any 'progress' can be claimed. Even so it must recognise and acknowledge that such a claim might well be one leading to stagnation from which there is no chance of further 'advance' at all.
Further (therefore) it must ensure that the back-up point for some possible future system-recovery is clearly defined. It must clarify the doubt and its underpinnings, as Holmes did with his big "IF" , but as the Big Ship Plate Tectonics (crewed by geologists under the captaincy of geophysics however) did not.
And so geologists, under the tutelage of popular media are only now beginning to waken up to the nonsense of "mountain building" that Nasa, the USGS, and a worldful of scholars have been promulgating, and are now holding wet fingers to the breeze to see which way it is blowing in case there is a 'something in it' (for them). How long it will take for them to work out that whole concept of so-called crumplecrust, orogenic, tectonic "mountain-building uplift" is simply a non-starter when it comes to contesting erosion, is anyone's guess. The monsoonal torrents of Cherapunjee mentioned in that video (in case you missed it) , and the grain of sand that gets bounced on to the side of my bucket whenever it rains (and the Vedas that make both possible), render the whole notion of "colliding plates and mountain building" not implausible, but impossible, .. and Plate Tectonics a derelict cadaver.
(read more? => ) (Why not. It's good deserving fun painting holy cows black.)
(What's that? .. Show them some love? Are you kidding? They need held to account - for half-a-century of deliberate misadventure.)
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