Mountain1

So, .. what is a mountain?
( .. is a very good question.. )

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.. And a very good answer (as well as them usually getting built out of molehills) is that it is a word weaponised by Plate Tectonics to mask wilful ignorance by subverting perceptions of scale and context, and turning sense of proportion into goo.  ["The most powerful lie is the lie of omission .." (=context) ~George Orwell]

(Image credits Google earth and Disney Pictures)

Fig.1.  Reading the runes.  Looking across the much degraded, incised landscape that once formed the essentially flat surface that now closely marks the summits of the MacKenzie Mountains (Canada.)

One look is all it takes to dismiss P.T. in an instant.

Now, .. it could be argued that it is a matter of scale and proportion. A little erosional mountain here and there, or a prominence that is mountain in name only, or one that is looked up to from down in the valley, .. or even (though it would be on shaky ground) the whole of the MacKenzie Mountains (image), is of no consequence.  BUT when *all* the mountains in the world are seen from Her Royal Highness's perspective, then a central and fundamental pillar of Plate Tectonics is being removed.

So, is she right, .. or being cute?

Whether she is or not, by referencing her view to the horizon and the increasingly apparent smoothness of the intervening rugged terrain in doing so, she is including a readily observable context that Plate Tectonics ignores - namely perspective and scale expressed by the incised planation surface from which the MacKenzie Mountains are carved.  And, by the way (and by a similar dynamical likeness), she is implying a likewise 'scaled' situation of flatness and smoothness for all the other incised planation surfaces in the world from which mountains are carved. By doing so she is drawing attention to a certain wilful blindness that Plate Tectonics demonstrates when strutting its duplicitous stuff.

When confronted with contretemps such as this Plate Tectonics might be expected to adopt an apologetic tone, but no, .. it merely ||coughs|| and says :-

"Well, you might be right about the horizon, erosion and all that, .. but there are different *types* of mountains .." [ five if I remember ] "It's true that some of them are formed by erosion, but others, .. the ones called "fold-mountains" that are said to be formed by colliding plates (and that's most of them) are not. When continents carried on plates "crash together" (link), elevated prominences are formed that stand high above the general terrain." (sumo) (other).

Now it is true that rocks are folded when they are compressed, and that we can see this in outcrop, and at local and regional scales too, so it is natural enough to think that large-scale buckling must be due to "crustal forces" acting in the 'plane' of  the Earth's crust, and that buckling will cause the crust to become locally elevated (as at the foot of a landslide).  However, crustal-scale buckling downwards is more difficult because there is resistance from crust that is already there, and there is also resistance due to Earth's curvature because a larger surface area is being pushed down into a (smaller) one. So buckling as a means of lifting up the crust is only half the story.) (The other half is a problem)

But buckled rock sequences do indeed occur over very large areas in sedimentary basins, and to very considerable depths in the crust, i.e. in regions where the crust has been extended or pulled apart, so there is no contradiction in having some regions that are folded and buckled upwards, paired with other regions that are depressed and filled with sediments.

But here's the crux, which makes this controversy so deliciously worth writing about (and I hope reading about too) :=: as everyone knows (ever since they were the same age as the Princess) the Earth is *ROUND* and not 'flat'; and this is something that (unless I have a whole lot of egg on my face), is something that seems to have escaped a worldful of experts in Earth science who still have to discover it ("for the first time") ("going forward").

Shadenfreude?  Maybe.  But I mean, .. who's kidding who?

O.k., so what's with this roundness then?  :-  "..What's roundness got to do ("got to do") with it?  What's  roundness but a useless observa.a.ation? "

Isn't the Earth flat?   Well, .. just simply this. When the crust collapses, and whether it is ice (/glacier) moving down a mountain slope, or the bullnose of a surface debris flow (/pediment) in mountainous terrain, or ductile creep deeper in the crust, the contour of its collapsing front is rounded (Fig.3).  Rounding is the signature architecture of gravitational collapse of a smaller (tighter) curvature sliding out over a larger (more open) one (that has been up on my old website for the last fifteen or so years, and that nobody seems to want to notice) (but does seem to be catching on) (but without any attribution of course). [Academia never credits anything other than that supporting its own particular point of view. (And the consensus supporting Plate Tectonics is monolithic).]

So maybe a little bit of shadenfreude is ok, .. y/n?

 

>Fig.3. The Svalbard fold(s)

Of course this loopy roundness is not always easy to see because of the scale on which it occurs, and because what is happening (/has happened) at depth can only be seen once it is exposed by erosion, but the princess (who is clever as well as beautiful), can see it when everyone else seems to have fallen into flat-trap acedia by not recognising the effect that gravity can have on the architecture of the Earth's surface.

Scale and context .. is the rabbit hole we have to go down in order to correct the errors of Plate Tectonics. When we do, it quickly becomes apparent that the only mountains that get "built" are volcanoes, and even these are easily argued to result from gravitational collapse (of ejected debris), which begs the question why does the Earth's interior keep pushing stuff *UP* (globally) (and not sideways) (and sea-level to fall - globally). Considering that over geological time two-thirds of the Earth's surface have been created in this UP-way, while the other one-third has been collapsing *down* to gravitationally correct for the changes in Earth's surface curvature, allows mankind to make another giant leap forward without even thinking about it, .. or even lifting feet off the ground, .. so we have to wonder (with the beautiful princess) what a worldful of experts have been thinking about for half a century, and how it happened that they managed to dig themselves into the hole they have.

So you can see how careful we have to be with words when it comes to their use and abuse when we don't use our heads. Even the simplest of them - like, 'mountain' and 'valley' can be our downfall, as we trundle along to where we think we are going.

.................

'Mountain building' is an excellent example of a meme being used to subvert common sense. It is *firmly* rooted in theory. It has *no* foundation in reality. And consensus is its *sole* validation. It derives *entirely* from a misapprehension of Earth's roundness and the importance of gravity in making the Earth "flatter-than-it-used-to-be" - i.e., changing its curvature.  It is, in effect, flat-Earth thinking in another form.

And I think that's a great big joke that children would just love to explore in the classroom - in pairs or foursomes. For a whole term.

Even though mountains (except for volcanoes) are manifestly artifacts of erosion this geological 'concatentation' /chant? of them being "built" (by "colliding" continents) (on "moving" plates) is a mantra that for more than half a century has remained an unshakeable barrier to making sense of global geology via the landforms that preface the formation of the so-called "mountain belts" of the world. By drawing attention to the importance of erosion the princess (who by the way has no intention of being lured up any mountain to be rescued) is firing the opening shot across the bows of the Big Ship that should have it ploughing those waves for that far horizon as fast as it can, so it can scuttle itself on a coral reef somewhere on some distant shore.

And has been for virtually the duration that Plate Tectonics has occupied the high ground.

Fig.3. A coral reef on some distant shore ?. (Just watch your feet when you get out of the boat. It's sharp.) [The exhumed shelf of the Upper Triassic dolomites, Italian Alps.]