Madagascar to Africa - a seamless fit.

(Seamless?  Not that you would guess from their juxtaposed continental margins.)

Fig.0.  Madagascar to Africa fit.  (a) Looks good to me.  (b) Looks even better.  [Added as an afterthought to the post below in case it wasn't clear what I meant by the juxtaposed continental margins looking a bit iffy.]  Superficially the split looks good, as in (a), but when the geology is taken into acount the waterline itself won't do, .. because the build-up of stratigraphic sequence over time has to be taken into account (b); see Fig.4 below).

============================


Hmmm...

 (... Still harping on about the importance of letting the data speak for itself, rather than being guided by theories),  ..  the fit of Madagascar to Africa provides us with a good case in point, .. because did it?  I mean, fit? .. once upon a time?

This example illustrates the criticism that Wegener faced in relation to the Atlantic in a nutshell, but these days we are in a much more foward position to answer the question.  Continental shapes are much more readily accepted as indicative of crustal rupture than in Wegener's day, and spreading ridges and transform faults are accepted too as indicative of the trace of continental separation.  This adds much to the arsenal of 'facts' that that may be brought to bear on the question, .. the 'facts' are no longer 'hypotheses'.

Nevertheless, in regard to Madagascar and Africa (and India) and in a context of Plate Tectonics and Earth expansion there does remain some aspects of theory in regard to where Madagascar might once have fitted.  Certainly Madagascar is a crustal fragment, and there are geological similarities with Africa (and India), .. biological similarites too, and clearly (given what we know of spreading ridges) the Indian ocean was once closed.  So where precisely did Madagascar fit in the jigsaw puzzle?

Best Plate Tectonic practice using the objectified data of palaeomagnetism and the geophysical black box puts it in what is called the "northern position" (Fig.1), with consequences for the entire population of continents waiting to grow into so-called plates to the east and south in the figure,

Fig.1. Madagascar - Africa fit according to Plate Tectonics best practice can-o'-worms palaeomagnetism, in what is known as the 'northern position' (about 2,500km further north of the "southern position').   (Image courtesy of  http://www.scotese.com/satlanim.htm .)

Fig.2. Alternative fits of Madagascar to Africa.  1. = Northern position (according to the 'objectified data of palaeomagnetism' and consensus Plate Tectonics); 2. = southern position ( according to the subjective, opinionated, non-scientific correlation of geology and Earth expansion here). (Click the image for a bigger figure; geology courtesy of UNESCO world map.)


See how 'science' is done?  And why geology gets such a bad rap?  You're supposed to distance yourself from the data, .. "objectify" it.  Put it in the box, shake it, close your eyes, and Lo! the box will speak.  Using your head (a.k.a. 'common sense) is not considered 'science'.  You have to 'measure it' to make it 'science', then theorise what it means.  That way you're ok, according to 'The Method'.

[ Bloody 'Method' actors, .. doing Plate Tectonics..  ]

Now, .. I would agree with that (about measuring being science).  There's nothing scientific about common sense though.  Common sense is the destination at which science hopes to arrive.  Through the application of science, puzzles become common sense, self-evident truths.  Commonsense transcends 'The Method'.  And that's what geology boils down to with its commonsense ('Pssst') Principles of Stratigraphic and Structural Superposition shouting clues in our ear, by which commonsense application all is revealed, if we just keep our hypotheses and theories out of the way - Common Sense Rules.

So let's see how we get on with some anti-science commonsense (Fig.3).
























Fig.3. Anti-science common sense revealed.  The fit of Madagascar and Africa according to commonsense Geology and Earth expansion.  Is seamless. The detachment from Africa, which is axial to the syncline (blue-and-green "boomerang'', bounded by blue) at the southern extremity of the Great African Rift Valley, is hardly detectable. (Blue = Jurassic, Green = Cretaceous; mixed sediments and volcanics)  Geology courtesy of UNESCO.

It's obvious, .. it's where it all happened.  No need for 'supporting' palaeomagnetics - which are not supporting at all.  Just like day and night are perfectly explicable to our space traveller in terms of shadow cast by a spinning Earth, and an avalanche burying the village (rather than a village rushing under the mountain) is explicable from the vantage of distance, so too it is perfectly obvious that Madagascar has separated from Africa along the axis of the syncline in the southern position - palaeomagnetic 'evidence' or not. 

Anyway, hidden in those measurements taken to "objectify the data" and purge it of all subjective influence is the randomising effects of surficial slumping and other crustal rotations that happened since the Curie point was frozen in the rocks, not the least of which are the trials and tribulations of trying to collect orientated samples in the first place (or worse, have others collect them for you).   I reckon it's a wonder palaeomagnetic data  even places Madagascar anywhere *near* Africa, .. which 'northerly position' makes me seriously suspect further finagling and cooking of the data.  (... )

(Geology?) .. it's how it maps out that counts, .. how 'the data' is contextualised - scale and time and all that, .. not what you 'measure' (with all its inherent uncertainties) at a specific field location.

Fig.4 Near retrofit of Madagascar to Mozambique.  Lighter colours (= Tertiary sediments) infill the 'scar' created as Madagascar recedes from Africa - or rather Africa recedes from Madagascar - is about 350-400km.  Tertiary sediments filling the gap reflect falling sea-level /local isostatic correction as the Earth gets bigger.  Note the ENE-WSW move is reflected in structure that spans from pre-Jurassic times (the intracratonic syncline of Jurassic volcanics preserved to the west) to post-Tertiary times (parallel coastlines) (Image base courtesy of Google Earth, geology courtesy of UNESCO.)


So there we have it, .. the simple commonsense, no-hypothesis needed, non-scientific ("Pssst"-in-your ear) picture : Madagascar as a crustal fragment detached from Africa as the Indian Ocean opened, and part of a much larger picture of crustal dilation. It fits, .. with the proviso that it overlaps some 400-450km of the Mozambique coast.

Which (overlap) is a nicety that would have scuppered Wegener totally at the time, because there is no coastline fit here whatsoever, .. but the geology , sequenced in time, fits very well.   (Ask mother.)

[Added, 2012-09-15.  (Loose talking here).  I meant there is no fit of that syncline ('banana') with the coastline, so I guess I shouldn't say that, about "no coastline fit whatsoever", because the actual coastline of Neogene (yellow) and Quaternary (buff colour) sediments fits quite well with the banana, .. which shows the importance of flat detachments, basin subsidence and isostatic rebound of the pull-aparts.]

How many more suchlike overlaps (/duplications) (/isostatic adjustments) are hidden in the stratigraphic sequence, that support Earth expansion, and belie Plate Tectonics?

Lots.  It's the whole story of geology that is yet to be properly contextualised, and has universally been overlooked; an Earth that is getting bigger.

Fig.5.  Madagascar and Africa separation in relation to India is shown by the arrow, the trace of transforms in upper mantle between Madagascar and the Seychelles, those of the spreading ridge more generally, and the paired banks of the Seychelles and the Maldives representing an ancient position of Madagascar and India across the ridge. (Click for a bigger figure.)

In terms of global context, geology has hardly begun.  And, .. since it's telling us the Earth is getting bigger, .. neither has physics. [link added 20170417; about 9:10 in, where she says,  "It looks like we're going to have to start over", and he says, "Ya-ya."]

( Commonsense, .. see? )

=========================


[Added below, .. 2012-09-16  in answer to Anonymous, ..September 11, 2012 8:15 PM ]
(More on the Madagascar fit.)

Fig.6.  More on the Madagascar fit.  Bad and jangly on the left, smooth and good on the right. (Click image for a bigger one.)

Bad on the left.  Is based on a common misunderstanding what transform faults are all about (Mental note to deal with later.)   Transform faults are the trace of spreading *along* the ridges as much as they are *across* the ridge.  The red interpretation denies the obvious structural connections in regard to the Great Rift Valley /African coast /Madagascar separation /Indian connection illustrated by Good on the Right.  (And a whole lot more in the global context.) The Mozambique Basin (white) is the scar left on the mantle as Africa shimmied to the left on flat structures when it detached ("un-docked") from India, leaving the Moz. and Mad. Plateaus also as scars - which is why the left /south side of spreading on the Indian Ocean Ridge is more than on the north /right side. In other words, Africa probably separated from India, rather than the other way round, leaving the Seychelles and Madagascar in its wake.  Similarly the Indian coast has shifted too from the Mascarene / Laccadives ridges.

Fig.7. Madagascar Separation according to the Davie Fracture Zone (a.k.a. "The Garden Path.")  This is a classic example of  thinking in a lobotomised way about detail ..that sees villages rushing under mountains, rather than looking with cognitive connection at the larger picture as in Fig.6 green above. (Reference : - Fig.1 :- http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1464343X05002220

[Further update 2012-10-04 ]

Fig8.  Gravity signature.  The 'Davie Fracture Zone' (Fig.7) is paired here with the Mozambique Escarpment to the west (yellow lines in (a) ).  The rift separating Madagascar from Africa is a 'doppelganger' of the African Rift Valley to the west, and the Indian Ocean spreading Ridge to the east.  (Click the image for a bigger figure.)

[Added 20180731 - "Fudge"]

[Added 20180905 :=: [Added 20180905 :=: 

[Added 20180905 :=: Correlation Madagascar to Western Ghats, India ]

Earth Expansion for Kids

 Helping Mum and Dad with the homework
( .. Plate Tectonics - the official version for kiddies .. )

---

Child abuse (Yeah!)
(.. in more ways than just this one.)

Fig.1. Pangaea - in the Panthalassic- Tethyan seas
(that never existed) [original here]

The picture is from the Kidipede. It shows the continents assembled on one side of the Earth surrounded by the mythical Panthalassa. Mythical? Sure, ..

So children do so like stories. Like this one:-

"Once upon a time, in a big flat land far, far away, .. there lived a beautiful princess. Every morning when she got up she would sit in front of the mirror and say to herself, "I am so beautiful." One morning after many years had passed and she had become Queen of the Realm she thought, "Indeed, I am more beautiful than ever." And it was true. She was very, very beautiful indeed. People throughout the kingdom whispered to each other of her beauty, saying, "There never was such a beautiful princess, and now she is our queen she is more beautiful than ever. We are so lucky to have such a beautiful princess become queen."

One day, having heard of this beautiful princess who had become queen, there came to the castle a famous painter who asked if he could paint her portrait. The queen, who was as usual studying her beauty in the mirror thought, "What an excellent thing it would be if I could hang such a picture on the wall behind me so I could see its reflection in the mirror, and see how beautiful I am twice over, ..and so she said to her councillors, after a suitable delay so she could attire herself, to bring the painter to her chambers.

Now, the queen knew that in a far-off kingdom there lived a king who had procured for himself a bride by mail-order, on no more encouragement than the picture painted of her by this same painter. The queen had also heard rumours that the reason this painter was so famous was that he used a trick, which was to mix eggs with his paint to give a lustrous quality to the image, and so she thought to herself, "Perhaps if I mix egg with these lotions that have helped to make me so beautiful all these years people will surely think I am even still more beautiful." And so she called her favourite maid and said, "Maid, fetch me some eggs." The maid duly returned with the eggs and when she had departed the queen thought to herself, "In fact, if eggs are such a magical ingredient then instead of lotion perhaps I should just use egg so the painter will see I am most beautiful of all, and do a bloody good job." And so she cracked six eggs into a bowl and proceeded to paint herself with egg, believing that it would make her more beautiful than anyone in the whole wide, wide world .. .. .. (etc. etc...)"

See? Stories. Children fall for them every time. If you got this far you'll know exactly what I mean, because the child is deep in all of us, in the trust we put in our dealings with the world around us. The abuse of that trust ranges from a harmless and instructive silvery translucence, to a dark forbidding blue, bordering on panthalassic black.

Panthalassa? Who are they kidding? Not my kids. How about yours?

I mean, ..kids, ..they really have to put up with a lot of rubbish from adults (or read, 'lies and harmless stories') (?) Is this why we call them kiddies? ..because we are always kidding them? ... First, there's Santa Claus, .. then the Easter Bunny ..then the tooth fairy (I'm sure there are more), and now, from institutions of learning, the "Panthalassa", the mythical big ocean that never was, but that nevertheless we tell our children the continents used to sail around on, "the way bath toys move around in the bathtub".   [Note the subliminal shots of the child in the accompanying advert on the page, too which seem a bit inappropriate too (i.m.o., .. kids being invited to drop bombs on other kids) (video1 of four).  "Get them when they're young and Bob's your Uncle."]

Parents, ..telling their children lies with a straight face. Reminds me of the story of the dad who stood his little boy on the table, then with outstretched arms told his son to jump - and promptly moved out of the way so the child fell on the floor, then said, "Just kidding. Don't trust anyone, son ..not even your own father."

But there's a big difference between the Santa Claus, Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy kind of kidding given evidential reality by the presents under the tree and money under the pillow, and the fictional princess that lives between the pages of a book decorating herself with egg to look nice. Fairy stories allow the child to be eased gently into the realms of permitted fantasy, to help to discriminate the internal world from the real one. The trust in a child's face when he/she comes to you with a question is a precious jewel not to be abused, but it is exactly that abuse of trust that we are witnessing in the above picture of the Panthalassa, designed for consumption by very young children in the name of science.

"Hey, ..we couldn't get them with the Santa Clause, the Funny-Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, ..let's get them with this one... "

Why do we abuse children so? Why couldn't Nasa, the USGS, and all the other institutions   complicit in educating our children, give them (and the child in us) the alternative story - the one WITHOUT the mythical 'theoretical' Panthalassa? This one:-

Version for children - (with instructive silvery tranlucence)
No mythical Panthlassa - just today's oceans

Fig.2. Pangaea from opposite sides of the Pacific Mantle Bubble. 

(Like an open locket .... Snap it shut to see Pangaea.)

See? No jolly fat men dressed in red scooting aboot the sky on a sledge pulled by reindeers, no rabbits, no fairies, no myths, no stories, no deep-blue-bordering-on-panthalassic-black, and no_"moving_plates",  ..just the straightforward geological fact as it exists - the continents reassembled as they once were before the break-up. Goodness knows they're spending enough on space exploration, you'd think (in the name of fair representation of science) they could rise to showing an alternative figure like the one just above, instead of leaving it to fringe-artists like me, to do on a pension.

So why does the Panthalassic invention survive? Why? Because the current crop of Plate Tectonicists have grown up on stories that they believe to be true, because those stories have been told to them by adults with a straight face, and because they've paid for them, and because of the popular belief that 'paying for' means commensurate value. They don't realise they've had their trust abused.  They seem to think that because they learnt it in school, and see it still being taught in schools, and indeed because it is the consensus view of all educational institutions, that they must be on pretty strong ground.  Well, not so. Much of consensus is a fraud to beware of. The construction of Plate Tectonics is built, as Harry Hess pointed out in his "Essay in Geopoetry", not on the facts but on the fiction of his own "philosophical dissatisfaction", with the implication of the facts of that dilation - that the 'locket' in the above picture does indeed snap shut.

Despite the 'locket' being known to close by the extents of the Atlantic, Indian and Southern Oceans (this much is not controversial), and despite the simple construction here for the closure of the Pacific, Hess could not "philosophically" accept it for the Pacific, because to do so would snap the locket shut completely, which would mean that the Pangaean crust covered the entire globe, which would mean in turn (to put it in context of the present day), that the Earth has virtually doubled in size.

It was EXACTLY this implied philosophically unsatisfying size-doubling that was the crux of refusal. Hess acknowledged the geological support for it, and conceded it would solve his three most important problems in understanding the ocean floors, but he couldn't accept it because to do so would mean, .. (well, ..no need to repeat it here).  But it is why Plate Tectonics exists today as an overblown, bloviating, blustering consensus model for the Earth sciences that doesn't work, (link) noting as we go that there is NOTHING about the geological facts of crustal architecture that is not better explained by Earth expansion.

How many BILLIONS of dollars are being spent on space exploration (e.g., looking for Plate Tectonics on other planets) when they can't even see the much more accessible variety here on Earth?

Rather, not can't - won't. Instead they're telling you that all that dark blue stuff in the top image is reality. And fervently asking you to believe them. Why? Do they believe it themselves? I don't know how many do, but there's a whole lot of careers involved in supporting that dark-blue never-never, and the necessity to maintain those careers (and for educators not to transgress the curriculum) is a powerful encouragement to belief, even if it is tongue in cheek. Even if the story is one of twisted logic: at least it is straight-faced, which as dissemblers know is so beguiling to the winning of trust.

But that deep blue-black Panthalassa is based on no evidence whatsoever, ..only the failure of logic to accept what is staring us in the face, ..that the locket does indeed close, .. and a disingenous attempt to conceal this by not presenting the obvious alternative case for what happens if subduction is interpreted as 'overriding'. And by not-doing-it where it counts most of all - in the kidipede, ...abusing our children (and us mums and dads helping with homework) (since we do like stories too) with the biggest lie of all - the lie of omission.

"... We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield."  ~  George Orwell)

<Boom - boom>

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

Blowing the whistle on Plate Tectonics

http://users.indigo.net.au/don/nonsense/index.html

Plate Tectonics, founded on the convenient assumption that the Earth cannot get bigger, is untenable for the reasons listed on the above linked page. The geological evidence is that the Earth is indeed getting bigger, and is doing so at an extraordinary rate having doubled in size in the recent geological past; it is no exaggeration to say that on the scale of geological time the planet is exploding. The cause is unknown, but must in some way be related to energy transformations within the planet's interior.


Failure by the geological and geophysics community to acknowledge and investigate this aspect of global tectonics is sourced wholly within the convenience of a monolithic and duplicitous consensus, which refuses to apply the fundamental principle of science - falsification. Instead, and for reasons of self-serving interest effort is directed to shoring up the initial assumption, resulting in an illogical geological model that contradicts itself at every turn. Despite this Plate Tectonics claims to be the jewel in the crown of the Earth sciences, an achievement of the twentieth century comparable with space travel, even (it is said) deserving of a Nobel prize.


Plate Tectonics survives solely because of a combination of hubris ("There is no known way whereby the Earth can get bigger to the extent apparent, therefore it cannot happen") and comfortable expediency:- "..therefore as scientists we can all sit back and enjoy the benefits of consensus."


This state of affairs is unacceptable. It contradicts not only the ethics of scientific endeavour, but offends public morality. The public is not getting value for money, education is falling well below the plimsol line, and science is falling into disrepute.


The onus is on all right-thinking people to protest this state of affairs. For the science itself, the issue is the sterility that consensus engenders, and the consequent usurption of its goals. For the public purse the issue is one of plunder of its investment in its future. As Michael Crichton astutely observed, "Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, then reach for your wallet, because you're being had."


All naysayers who vest the reasons for rejection of an expanding Earth in the monolithic view of Plate Tectonics had better review their conviction in the light of the geological evidence, for the only logical conclusion that can derive from it is that the Earth is indeed getting bigger.


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