Don Findlay's Plate Tectonics Blog

" Omm..." = Other Mysterious Movements

2012-03-01T05:51:00.003-08:00

The Mantra of Plate Tectonics
( Blog for website at http://users.indigo.net.au/don/ )

"Professor Seiya Uyeda (Tokai University, Japan), a world-renowned expert in plate tectonics, concluded in his keynote address at a major scientific conference on subduction processes in June 1994 that "subduction . . . plays a more fundamental role than seafloor spreading in shaping the earth's surface features" and "running the plate tectonic machinery." The gravity-controlled sinking of a cold, denser oceanic slab into the subduction zone (called "slab pull") -- dragging the rest of the plate along with it -- is now considered to be the driving force of plate tectonics. http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/unanswered.html

And we also learn (from Tuzo Wilson, another world-renowned expert in this matter of Plate Tectonics) that :-

Transform faults are "A new class of faults", .. and (as accepted in the more general consensus) .. "the means by which plates move past each other".

It seems reasonable to think therefore that this sinking slab could be linked in some way to the development of spreading ridges. But if we thought we could go the extra yard and say that this "fundamental role of subducting slabs in shaping the Earth's surface" could also be linked to the making of transform faults, then (according to the said experts) we would be quite wrong. Transform faults (it is said) exist before the ocean floors begin to open [ google up any animation, or try Animation 1 in Fig.2 on this page ] and are generated half-a-world away from the subduction zone.

Although it might seem intuitively obvious that a subducting slab would have no role in generating transform faults half a world away, and which formed even before the continents began to separate, there exists nevertheless a disconnect that requires some consideration, because (we are told), plates have boundaries that enable them to move past each other, .. the boundary in question being specifically the third one - the transform fault, the fault along which area is "'conserved" : no area is added (as at spreading ridges), .. and no area taken away (as at subduction zones).

Evidently if the displacement on transform faults exists before the continents begin to separate, then we don't need to consider them as part of the Plate Tectonic machinery. Supposedly we must regard them as some sort of 'happy convenience' to be passively exploited by the later slab-pulling and general "plate movement" that defines the Plate Tectonic process.

Though exactly how (in Plate Tectonics) this passive exploitation operates is a m..m... mmmystery, .. because in the context of the plate machinery plates in fact don't move any more than the sides of a fishpond do, as the water in it circulates. The plates as depicted on maps are static. There can therefore *be* no *plate* movement or ("plate collision building mountains") even though the mantle underneath may be conceived as circulating. Of course, just as flotsam carried by the current moves, so continents riding on top of a convecting cell could be said to move, and no doubt this is what Plate Tectonicists mean when they talk about "plate movement". But if that's the case then they need to tidy up their language - and any thinking that might go with it.

This lexical substitution (plates for continents) was originally designed to remove the language of convective machinery as far as possible from that of continental drift, which had already been extensively denigrated for several decades, but the stroke of real genius (attributed to Tuzo Wilson) was the labelling of transform faults as "a new class of faults", which developed prior to continental separation. Thus labelled they could be disregarded as part of the active process. However it is precisely this labelling that has led to the mystery of movements that Plate Tectonics suffers from :-

"The tectonic plates ... are driven by definite yet unseen forces. Although scientists can neither precisely describe nor fully understand the forces, most believe that the relatively shallow forces driving the lithospheric plates are coupled with forces originating much deeper in the Earth." (opening quote link again = http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/unanswered.html.)

And ..

".. Lately, the convection theory is much debated as modern techniques based on 3D seismic tomography of imaging the internal structure of the Earth's mantle still fail to recognise these predicted large scale convection cells." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics

Although both citations implicate the thinking that subduction zones and spreading ridges are regarded as corollaries of convection, neither mentions the linking architecture of the transform faults, which are the key to understanding the connection. Mysterious unseen forces that somehow move whole ocean floors across their entire off-ridge extents as silently as night, when piggiebacked continents that supposedly don't move with respect to their substrate are riddled with a cacophany of earthquakes that would waken the dead, .. is a mystery indeed.

The solution to these mysterious, ghostly, unseen forces for which there is no evidence is obvious : slab-pull as a driver of the Plate Tectonic machinery is a furphy, .. mere window-dressing designed to help distance Tuzo Wilson's clever invention of a "new class of faults" [ for which he was much lauded ] from the dynamics of creation of the ocean floors. By labelling them such, .. by dismissing them as existing prior to the separation of the continents (and thereby avoiding any need for further enquiry), .. and by allowing them only a convenience role as "the means whereby plates move past each other", they were therefore placed in the same convenient bag as that other convenience - the convenient assumption that "the Earth must remain a constant size, for to do otherwise..etc/ etc., (is inconvenient).

'Mystery'? There is none. The ocean floors grow towards the ridges leaving in their wake 1. the graveyard of the once-active ridge fractures that defined the growth of the ridge over geological time, and 2. the cross-fractures that define its continual collapse as that growth adjusted to the increasing radius (reduced curvature) of the Earth necessitated by 1.

Which means 1. that there *is* no subduction, and 2. that what is happening around the Pacific is simply overriding as the continental lithosphere (aided by dislocation related to Earth rotation = 'crustal lag') also adjusts to 1 and the consequent curvature of 2, and collapses over the ocean floor [ 1, Fig.2 ], [ 2 ], [ 3 ].

This geologically simple solution without mysterious consequences for mantle movements is evidenced in the architecture of spreading ridges, particularly in their lengthening by the development of the transform faults, which foxed PT-ers in the beginning. Shoving these structures under the carpet has taken Earth science down a wrong road. 'Progress' is not always built on rational (or honest) 'scientific' assessement. The personalities and self-interest of the players bear much on the outcome,
See:-
[ 4 ] Maurice Ewing staking his claim to the results of ocean-floor research.
[ 5 ] Resistance to Heezen's work and the role of Marie Tharpe on identifying spreading ridges.

See also blog for Earth expansion at :-
http://earthexpansion.blogspot.com/]

Mountains arise (!)

2011-12-22T13:31:00.000-08:00

(Through a Head of Cloud)
( Blog for website at http://users.indigo.net.au/don )

Fig.1. India collides with Asia. The image from Preston Cloud's Book, 'Oasis in Space*' illustrates the consensus view of mountain building in the type area of continental collision: "When continents collide, they pile up into mountains with deep roots, as in the complex multicollisional Himalaya." - p207. .. Or compare with these :-

"When plates and the continents riding on them collide, the accumulated layers of rock crumple and fold like a tablecloth that is pushed across a table."
http://www.geography.learnontheinternet.co.uk/topics/foldmountain.html

"The pressure of the colliding plates could only be relieved by thrusting skyward. The folding, bending, and twisting of the the collision zone formed the jagged Himalayan peaks. This string of towering peaks is still being thrust up as India, embedded in the Indo-Australian Plate, continues to crunch relentlessly into Tibet, on the southern edge of the Eurasian Plate. "http://www.platetectonics.com/book/page_11.asp

..and so on..

* Fly-leaf:- Preston Cloud, professor emetitus of geology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, holds a doctorate from Yale University. He is the editor and co-author of Resources and Man and of Adventures in Earth History as well as the author of Cosmos., Earth and Man. Dr. Cloud is a member of the National Academiy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the AmericanAcademy of Arts and Sciences. In 1976 he was awaded the Penrose Medal of the Geological Society of America. For many years associated with the United States Geological Survey. (died 1991)

The quotes cited are typical of the current consensus as regards so-called 'Fold Mountains", mountains that are formed by the "buckling, crumpling, and upward thrusting of continental crust as plates collide", and are so named to distinguish them from volcanoes and 'erosional mountains'. The Himalayas are generally regarded as the type area.

What Professor Cloud's figure does (by showing the limits of Indian crumpling restricted to simply the Himalayan sector), is give voice to the consensus view how mountains are formed at the date of publication of his book (1988), by which time Plate Tectonics had become well entrenched. Of course he knows full well that the mountain belt continues out of the figure, ..extending eastwards to encircle the Pacific and westwards to the Carpathians and the Alps (and with the Atlantic closed the Appalachians as well). And so does everyone else. So what we are witnessing in this 'figurative voice' is a kind of struggling for words around a silent question, "How is this uniformity of circumglobal elevation to be explained by "independent plate movement" "? - India crumpling Asia, Africa crumpling Europe (but what is crumpling the Americas?) .. and a certain tacit agreement not to try to answer it.

"So arose at different times the Atlas Mountains of northwestern Africa, the Pyrenees, the Alps, and their eastern European extensions and, with them, the distinctive flysch deposits of Alpine deformation. The orogenies responsible for that picture-book scenery then gave way to the vigorous erosion whose distinctive post-tectonic sedimentary product is the Alpine molasse."

"And so arose... " There reads to me a certain lyrical, almost creationist tone here, and Preston is covering his bets by adding erosion to the picture. But notice he attributes to it, not the tossing high of the jagged peaks everybody calls mountains, but the rubbish down the slope we all call 'dirt'. With which I would agree (about dirt), .. but not the bit about arising. It is an expert sleight-of-word from a professorial purveyor of Plate Tectonics that does two things, 1. it avoids addressing the question how, exactly, this "arising" happened, and 2. with it, Professor Cloud gets to state his own probable view (as a geographer) about the 'arising' of mountains without actually having to state exactly how they do that, .. because (as a pre-Plate Tectonic, old-school geographer) it is almost certainly different from the view he is having to state and is tip-toeing around.

Really, what he should be doing is not promoting Plate Tectonics at all, but from the vantage of his geographical experience, questioning it. And since he doesn't question it, I'll do it for him : "How in the face of all this convergence, collisional crumpling and the thrusting skyward of so-called "fold-mountains", does the surface from which the mountains are carved (Fig.2) manage to stay as flat as a tack?" - and as well, that flatness for the most part be the same flatness as the flatness described by the flat sedimentary sequence as it was deposited on the sea-floor. How do we get all this flatness way up there? Mmmh? And no doubt Mr Cloud could answer it to my satisfaction very well, being as he is a pre-Plate Tectonic geographer - as could all geographers before the advent of Plate Tectonics. But somehow, with the need to be part of the plate-colliding club, the significance of plateaus has come to be unlearned. Obeisance to consensus has its metaphorical equivalent of nose rings and belly studs as well, to signify being part of the herd.

Fig.2 Mount Kailash, the Holy Mountain of Tibet. The remnant flatness of the Mesozoic sea floor preserved in Mount Kailash is mirrorred in the flatness of the Tibetan Plateau. Flatness extends even to Mount Everest. The white line is the Himalayan front. India to the south. (Right click / new window for bigger figures.)

Location

So to properly understand Professor Clouds subterranean dichotomy (how to present his view without actually presenting it), we should have another read of his description of fold mountains (Fig.1) in conjunction with those just below his, but this time compare the careful wording chosen by Mr Cloud with the gung-ho flamboyance of the others.. Does he mention folding? No. Crumpling? No. Why? Because the Himalyas, and Tibet behind them, are essentially uncrumpled, ..not folded. And Professor Cloud knows this because he is old school, a palaeontologist /geographer, and also knows very well the signifance of the plateau surfaces from which mountains are carved. He's just not telling anybody since the rise and rise of Plate Tectonics, and the need (then) to fit in with it if he wanted to keep his job. (" Preston Ercelle Cloud, Jr. (September 26, 1912 – January 16, 1991) was an American paleontologist, geographer, and professor - wikipedia.).

It couldn't have been easy, trying to find words that would convey to the reader what the reader wanted to read, and the same time satisfy what Mr Coud wanted to write.

"Wherever the current cycle of continental motion has caused plates to converge and collide, mountains have arisen." Preston Cloud Oasis in Space, (p.417).

Does Mr Cloud use the word crumpling? No. Folding? No. Contorting, crushing, crashing etc etc etc.? No, .. just (obligingly, if a word must be used) "arisen" - Like Jesus on the third day, .. a kind of predictable event, a foregone conclusion; no need for the histrionics of 'plates' according to Saint Tectonics.

So mountains do not crumple by collision, they just "arise" and "pile up". What he does say is that India first "docked" then according to seismic evidence, proceeded to "tuck its leading edge" beneath the Asian Plate, thickening the crust and uplifting the Himalayas.

"When the leading (oceanic) edge of India itself first docked along the present northern margin of the Himalaya, it generated a 2,400-kilometre-long suture, or zone of joining (refs fig. above) tracked now by the sacred Indis and Brahmaputra rivers. Seismic reflections from the crust-mantle boundary in this region indicate that India thereafter tucked its leading edge beneath that boundary and was overriden from the north in the main Himalyaan mountain building event terminating perhaps 10myBP"

"Docked"? "Tucked"? What sort of language is that to describe the spectacular consequences plate collision, crustal crumpling, buckling, and the upheaval of mountains to form the roof of the world? No sort of language at all, really. By his use of the much more moderate language of "rising" we might expect some qualification along lines that stress the retention of essential flatness. We don't get it, but at least we don't get the popular liturgy of "tossing high of mountains by crumpling and folding, twisting and collision". Instead we merely get sedate "docking", and "tucking under".

Publication may have been jeopardised had he cast doubt on Plate Tectonics from the vantage of his lifetime credits. Yet this is in fact what a close reading of his book suggests, cloaked as it appears to be in academic diplomacy and written more as an impartial onlooker, than as participant, ... which is interesting given that he (Cloud) lived the transition from continental drift to Plate Tectonics and knew full well the arguments for Earth Expansion. He was also critical enough of the arguments for subduction, referring to Panthalassa (one of the lynchpins of Plate Tectonics) as "The phantom global sea" (p.166). Still, .. he was old-time, and knew about plateaus. Geologists and geophysicists today apparently don't. He impartially puts the two emerging hypotheses of the day in the same "outrageous" and "preposterous" bag (an interesting word-choice, given the nearly 20-year acceptance of Plate Tectonics by the time of publication of his book in 1988): -

"Two seemingly outrageous hypotheses have been proposed. One calls on plate tectonics and subduction since the Archean to recycle the ocean floor so completely that no trace of it is left outside the residual greenstone minioceans. The other hypothesis is even more outlandish. It proposes that an Earth of a once much smaller volume has literally expanded like baking bread, extending its diameter to the present size. Preposterous as these ideas may seem they meet the essential criteria of scientific hypotheses. They explain what we know and they have verifiable consequences. They are testable."

Testable? To be sure they are, and the test is the simple one of flatness in Figure 2 that Professor Cloud fails to address, yet as a geographer he is surely cognisant of it.

The writing seems to be of one who is personally bemused by the conundrums of both hypotheses yet, possibly on account of keeping a certain 'professorial distance', is at pains to represent the status quo impartially and let the voice of others speak. "Will crustal compression continue?" he asks. "Assuming it does, will the Himalaya grow still higher, or will they at some point flow to lower levels under their own weight?" (p.421.) The question is an interesting one (considering it already has, as we go east to Indonesia, and Mr Cloud probably knew that too), .. and carries a barb that goes right to the core of Plate Tectonics, and supports the argument for Earth Expansion - that the Himalyas are intrinsically gravitationally unstable and are, as professor Cloud says (but the Plate Tectonics of his time didn't), collapsing over India. That is, .. India is not pushing from the south, Tibet is pushing from the north under its own gravitational weight - the collapse of the now unstable, remnant curvature of the Pangaean Earth. India never was anywhere else relative to the collapsing Himalayas, .. but was attached to Africa (according to a smaller Earth).

If there is one thing we can admire about Professor Cloud's appraisal of Plate Tectonics, it is his carefully chosen wording to describe it, and an angelic hesitation to tread where others have no qualms rushing. Plate collision by "docking" and "tucking"? Indeed. Others after all are far more extravagant in their advertisement of an event that in fact never happened, in order to maintain a belief in the fineness of cloth and feathers that dress the lunatic emperor who pulls their strings.

We should thank Professor Cloud for his manifest hesitation, if perhaps not for the disingenuousness that underpins it, .. and also give some consideration to the benefits of 'going-with-the-flow' under the aegis of such a lunatic and naked leader, when the price is merely one of lip-service and suspension of belief.

[See also blog for Earth expansion at :-
http://earthexpansion.blogspot.com/ ]

The Plate movement of Plate Tectonics

2011-11-28T20:11:00.000-08:00

(..is meaningless, shameless twaddle)
( blog for website at http://users.indigo.net.au/don )

Of course, .. if subduction happened the way Plate Tectonics says, by continental lithosphere forcing the oceanic lithosphere down, .. then the ocean floors would never open. Plate Tectonics overlooks this nicety because of its need for the destruction of a pre-existing Panthlassic ocean to make way for the present ones - so that the Earth remains a constant size and the question of an enlarging Earth therefore does not arise. Plate Tectonics doesn't even consider the question why a second ocean floor would break through the crust when there is already one doing a perfectly good job as it is, of separating the continents and keeping the Earth the same size anyway. Why doesn't the first one just keep opening at one end and subducting at the other? Why should the whole contraption suddenly change configuration?

According to Plate Tectonics the answer appears to be embodied in the so-called Wilson Cycle. although this is really a restatement of the question rather than any real answer, since it simply says that there must be an arbitrary change in the location of the convecting cell, or at least a change in the location of the rising current. However goalposts have shifted since Wilson's day. Plate Tectonics is no longer driven by the uprising part of the cell, but is driven specifically by subduction, .. the downgoing leg of the cell.

"The greater density of old lithosphere relative to the underlying asthenosphere allows it to sink into the deep mantle at subduction zones, providing most of the driving force for plate motions. "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics#Driving_forces_of_plate_motion

Overlooking the obvious point why the old lithosphere doesn't get warm and bob back up, .. the question is thus reversed: what is it that causes the subduction zone to change *its* location; if subduction is the driver for plate movement, then how is subduction initiated, and how is its location changed? - and how then is the 'Wilson cycle' - still a major part of the Principle of Multiple Working Stories - supposed to work, predicated as it is on continental rupture by the uprising part of the convecting cell? All of which begs the further question, how wide does an ocean floor have to be before subduction happens, .. and what then determines the respective roles of cooling (making the oceanic lithosphere dense enough to sink), and 'forcing down' (by continental lithosphere) in driving the Plate Tectonic machinery?

If these are difficult questions to answer, then perhaps they are invalid in the first place. If the uplifting part of the convecting cycle is not the driver, and there are serious questions besetting the subduction alternative, then perhaps convection is not the way to look at it. Perhaps we have to back up a bit and reconsider that the way to look at it is indeed as Mr Benioff suggested in the first place (Fig.3B here; it is his zone after all), that as the distribution of earthquakes shows it is the continental lithosphere that hosts the dynamic side of the action and that it is the continental crust gravitationally adjusting on its substrate that is responsible for the seismicity, and and that there *is* no movement of the seismically silent oceanic plate, .. that there is no cycling return of the oceanic lithosphere to the deep mantle, .. and therefore that there *is* no convection.

This point is actually implicitly conceded in Plate Tectonics which acknowledges that the domains of oceanic and continental lithosphere are different, and the continents are rooted more deeply than the thickness of oceanic crust, so that continental crust cannot be ferried around on oceanic lithosphere to collide anywhere. The theory talks of plate movement, but the facts talk of 'plates' as fixtures.

Also, the difference in length between spreading ridges today compared to their initial breakthrough during the Mesozoic means that the sideways movement of plates is really only an artifact of upwards movement of the ridges (Fig.2 here), which negates the premise of the ocean floors ever getting to the subduction zone in the first place. The only option open to structural interpretation at the 'subduction' zone, is therefore overriding - or (as it has become in Plate Tectonic terminology to accommodate reality), .."Flat subduction".

So, .. it's not so much the plates we're taking issue with here as the aspect of "movement", and even more to the point the aspect of "independent movement (although there is a point to be made about the difference between segments of the Earth's crust making shuffling adjustments to gravitational collapse and segmented plates of lithospheric dimension sailing about the Earth's surface like stately galleons, and colliding with each other to build mountains).

If I am sitting in a chair reading a book, I could be said to be moving round the Earth and I'll be back in a day, or round the sun and I'll be back in a year - but that is not the analogy implied by Plate Tectonics when it refers to 'plate movement' on the surface of the Earth. Neither could I be said to be moving just because my circulation is convecting gouts of blood around my body. However intended or not, this second state of affairs is actually closer to what Plate Tectonics means by movement, because plates as depicted on plate maps are actually fixed - they don't move around any more than I do in my chair, .. though what's underneath them supposedly moves by convection, i.e., the skin of the planet as mapped by plates is not moving, but its internal circulation (supposedly), is.

Fig.1. Plate Map. (Courtesy of the USGS.)

Plate maps are like the window in a glass-bottomed boat through which we can see the movement of the convecting cell. Although we can see the movement of the flotsam (= mantle convection) through the window, and there might be water running across the top of it, the window itself ( = plates on a plate map) is not moving. The ridge is a boundary that stays where it is. And although the subduction zone could be said to be moving, the preponderence of earthquakes clearly shows this movement has an active commonality of movement from the continental, not the oceanic side. Satellite data for the Pacific also clearly shows the azimuths of movement vectors for the continents and the ocean floors are different, which is consistent with Earth expansion in relating crustal movement at the continental margins to the continents, not to the ocean floors. That is, even if the ocean floors are convecting, sea-floor spreading has nothing directly to do with the earthquakes around the Pacific rim. Certainly there is a correlation in that both sets of movement are related, but not in the direct causal way that Plate Tectonics says. Both are related to a third factor - Earth enlargement. Pacific rim earthquakes are an artifact of continental overriding by the peripheral continental crust, not subduction by movement of the Pacific 'plate'.

Fig.2. Movement vectors of the North Pacific due to earthquakes and crustal collapse (around the rim), and transform faults and spreading ridges ("North Pacific"). For movement vectors according to satellites see last link - http://sideshow.jpl.nasa.gov/mbh/series.html

Readers who have got this far who object to the above point about fixed plates, and think that the convecting cells (and therefore plates) are indeed moving about (independently) as Plate Tectonics says, should consider the origin of this opinion. It was precisely this vector difference in the North Pacific (Fig.2) that led McKenzie to propose, if North America was considered (for convenience) to be fixed, then wholesale movement of plates in a direction other than that indicated by the 'tramrails' of transform faults could be postulated (Fig 5 here). However (another point conveniently overlooked by plate tectonicists), if the North Pacific Plate were to be moving in a direction different from the 'tramrails' of transform faults, then so too must its spreading ridge, *and* the adjacent plate on the other side of the ridge as well. And since all 'plates' are tied one way or another to spreading ridges ("which encircle the Earth like the seam on a baseball"), this means *all* the plates are moving in the same direction (relative to their ridge). And since the pattern of vectors related to earthquakes encircling the Pacific are clearly determined by the movement from the continental side (as logically deduced from earthquakes, the larger picture of global geology, and now supported by satellite data), this so-called "independent plate movement" (reflecting sea-floor spreading) is just meaningless twaddle.

Repeat:- " Plate movement is just meaningless twaddle."

Nothing wrong with the "sea-floor spreading" of course. That's what the whole thing is about! - it's the subduction that converts it to Plate Tectonics is the twaddle.

Earth expansion's view that the spreading ridges are moving away from the continents (and *UP*) means that segments of continental crust are always moving away from each other and can never collide on this account. The 'collisions' (overriding) that we do see in the thrust belts of the world - from the Alps through the Middle East to the Himalyas and through the Americas are due to crust - mantle instability and the collapse of the crust on an Earth which was once more oblate than it is now, and is tending to increasing sphericity, .. a once-equatorial oblateness which yet remains in the continental crust , and which as erosion and earthquakes show, is doing its level best to adjust to the increasing sphericity of the planet.

And so we are in a position to assess as garbage Plate Tectonics' core tenet, .. that the Earth's crust is "divided into a series of plates that move independently on the Earth's surface, colliding, crumpling the crust, and building mountains". To be sure, the Earth's crust is indeed partitioned into a number of segments, as many as we may care to represent defined by the distribution of Earthquakes and the faults they represent, ..but that is not quite the same thing as saying it is broken into a number of *plates* that move independently around the Earth's surface. And of course if there is no plate movement, then there can be no "colliding plates". And whilst there is certainly crumpling of crust (in the manner of gravitational correction) (/ folding), there is no "building mountains" by the mechanism of "colliding plates".

Plate Tectonics (as the flag-bearer for Earth science) is like a bad experience in the hall of reflecting mirrors - wonky and laughable for the glaring inconsistencies with which we have burdened it in the name of 'theory'. Why are we teaching it in schools? Whatever the reason, it has nothing to do with the science, .. and everything to do with consensus.

It needs outed. That's it.

[See also blog for Earth expansion at :-
http://earthexpansion.blogspot.com/ ]

Time out for a Peep at the Herd

2011-10-06T06:36:00.000-07:00

To Follow, .. or not to follow .. ...
( Blog for website at http://users.indigo.net.au/don )

In the news

India
The Associated Press
Date: Wednesday Oct. 5, 2011 12:21 PM ET
India launches $35 tablet computer aimed at world's poor
NEW DELHI — India introduced a cheap tablet computer Wednesday, saying it would deliver modern technology to the countryside to help lift villagers out of poverty. ( ... ) Human Resources Development Minister Kapil Sibal called the announcement a message to all children of the world. "This is not just for us. This is for all of you who are disempowered," he said. "This is for all those who live on the fringes of society." ( ... ) "People laughed, people called us lunatics," ministry official N.K. Sinha said. "They said we are taking the nation for a ride." ( ... ) India, after raising literacy to about 78 per cent from 12 per cent when British rule ended, is now focusing on higher education with a 2020 goal of 30 per cent enrolment. Today, only 7 per cent of Indians graduate from high school. "To every child in India I carry this message. Aim for the sky and beyond. There is nothing holding you back," Sibal said before distributing about 650 of the tablets to the students.
Read more:
http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/SciTech/20111005/india-cheap-tablet-computer-launch-111005/#ixzz1ZygkG6h6

Nobel Prize'Atomic mosaic' wins chemistry Nobel
Middle East correspondent , wires
Updated October 06, 2011 07:23:07
An Israeli scientist says he endured years of ridicule for the discovery which has now won him the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Thirty years ago Daniel Shechtman discovered quasicrystals - a new form of crystal that had a structure many scientists said at the time was impossible. For years his peers rejected and ridiculed the findings, with the head of his laboratory handing him a textbook in crystallography and suggesting he read it. At one point Professor Shechtman was even branded a disgrace and asked to leave his research group at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-10-05/atomic-mosaic-wins-chemistry-nobel/3310930/?site=sydney

Steve Jobs
Josh Visser, CTVNews.ca Staff
Date: Wed. Oct. 5 2011 10:19 PM ET
Steve Jobs, Apple's visionary co-founder and chairman, has died. He was 56. In 2005, Jobs gave the commencement address at Stanford University, a speech called "How to live before you die." "Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life," he told graduates. "Because almost everything -- all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."
http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/SciTech/20111005/apple-steve-jobs-111005/

( Mooo ... ... ooo.)
( Mehe-heh - heh.)

"The problem with the path well trod, is that it is just so full of shit." (~ d.f.)
(But usually it leads to a trough.)
So you walk the walk and talk the talk.
And you don't look down.

And the closer you get to the trough,
the more you have to brown-nose your way there.

(That's a poem by the way.)

Euler poles and plate movement : Plate Tectonics' supporting pillars

2011-09-11T15:21:00.001-07:00

( Blog for website at http://users.indigo.net.au/don )

Fig.1. Hand job. Carey's assistant does virtuously and manually (with dedication and cognitive connection), what would later have only virtual currency when done impersonally and blindly by the computer. Carey's caption reads, "Hemispherical table with the same radius as the globe behind, and spherically molded tracing foil for accurate comparison of continental shapes. The foil sheet on the upper left of the globe fits so accurately that it does not need sticking down, and North America shows through. On the table, two foil sheets have been joined to cover the whole arctic region." (Carey, 1989, Theories of the Earth and Universe)

The development of Plate Tectonics from sea-floor spreading was (and still is) all about the time (post-war funding generated by the politics of fear), place (the very few institutions who got it - and the correspondingly few 'key players' who had access to the data), .. and spreading in the Atlantic - the cradle of it all : continental drift, sea-floor spreading, Plate Tectonics, and Earth expansion.

And so we begin this note with Sam Carey, the real father of Plate Tectonics, and his comment on Atlantic opening - though as far as 'father' is concerned one could be pretty sure that is an attribution he would rather let pass to another. But history has it, (click the link and scroll down to comments by Moores, .. and Armstrong just below), so he doesn't have a choice.) Carey writes,

" ..In 1929 appeared Sir Harold Jeffrey's prestigious book, The Earth - quite the most authoritative treatise ever on the physics of the earth, following the tradition of Osmund Fisher and Lord Kelvin. However, Jeffreys (1906 --) was completely opposed to Wegener's hypothesis, and in regard to the alleged fit of South America into the angle of Africa, he wrote: "On a moment's examination of the globe, this is seen to be really a misfit by almost 15 degrees. The coasts along the arms could not be brought within hundreds of kilometres of each other without distortion. The widths of the shallow margins of the oceans lend no support to the idea that the forms have been greatly altered by denudation and deposition.

From my many "moments" of accurate examination of this question that I had done, I knew this statement to be incorrect. I considered that the matter was rather trivial, that the true position would be generally realised, and that this criticism would fade away. But Jeffrey's prestige was so great that most workers accepted his pronouncement as final. Jeffreys repeated the statement in the second edition of his book in 1952, and to rub salt on the wound, Dr George Martin Lees (my former chief in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company), in his 1953 presidential address to the Geological Society of London, listed this as one of his three crucial reasons for rejecting the Wegener hypothesis. So I sent Lees my stereographic projections of two decades earlier [1933 - thirty years before 'Plate Tectonics' in 1960-1967 - d.f.] (Fig.11), proving that Jeffrey's statement was false. I added that "whether the continental drift hypothesis be true or false, this argument should never be used against it again." I asked Lees to arrange publication of this rebuttal, which he did.

When I went to England in the summer of 1960 as Tasmanian delegate to the third centenary of the Royal Society, Sir Edward Bullard invited me to lunch to discuss the Atlantic fit, which he then repeated with the aid of a computer. The Atlantic match has since been known as the "Bullard fit" and adopted generally. " (Carey, 1989, Theories, P.103.)

The "Bullard fit" of the Atlantic, usually figured so,

Fig.2. The Bullard fit. (Courtesy of On-line Encyclopedia Britannica.) I think the dark blue bits are areas of overlap , on which grounds some protested the fit (Aww, .. c'mon, .. fair go. It was just a dumb computer after all. And in any case that figure is constructed of flat-map cut-outs joined together, as you can tell from the skewed ("least squares") squares mirroring the projection. It's not a snap-shot of a globe.

[Addendum. Scouring the web for an image from the original publication encounters a barage of paywalls. (!!!! - that! ) Carey's first book, dated 1976 shows the 'Bullard fit' to be the same as above but in black and white, from which it may be presumed that this is indeed the original. To me this raises severe doubts about the efficacy of Bullard's 'least-squares' method of fit on a same-sized Earth, compared to Carey's on a half-sized Earth, which worked too - probably better. d.f. 2011-09-13]

Well, .. if geology was a romance, to be seen as either "philosophically satisfying or unsatisfying" when compared to the quantitative grit of the 'American Way', then the Atlantic was the elusively beguiling Queen no matter from which perspective she was viewed.

Following Carey in 1933, and Bullard in 1965, the next guy to have a go, now that the computer had demonstrated its formidable intellectual power, was Jason Morgan, .. but just while we're talking about the Atlantic, the following figure, also of the "Bullard fit "from Dan McKenzie's account of his own role in the evolution of Plate Tectonics in relation to that of Jason Morgan, deserves a mention in view of the Bullard "fit" above. Accent on theoretical (inductive /armwaving) coastline-fitting was shifting to take into account the Great Cross-Faults of the ocean floors which was becomming available, and which (*But hey!!*) looked for all the world like tramlines of continental displacement. Crikey! This was something! Obviously what was needed was some theory to show that they were indeed 'tramlines' of movement (the 'rails' of convectional flow). So, think of one, measure them up, stick it in the box and see what comes out. The one that Jason Morgan came up with - rotation on Euler poles - is figured in Dan McKenzie's account : -

Fig.3 The Bullard fit again. This time three-dimensional, showing the latitudinal lines of displacement about a pole of rotation (an Euler pole), which is not the same thing as the North Pole - although in the case of the Atlantic and within the latitude of the 'fair go', it probably is, Dan's caption (in Naomi Oreskes (2001), Plate Tectonics, an Insider's history of the Modern Theory of the Earth, P.174) reads : -

"..The fit between Africa and South America obtained by Teddy Bullard and his colleagues using Euler's Theorem (Bullard et al., 1965). The theorem states that any motion of a rigid plate on the surface of a rigid sphere corresponds to a rotation of the plate about some axis that passes through the center of the sphere. The problem on the Earth is that every point on its surface is on a moving plate, and no rigid sphere exists. So one plate must be chosen and taken to be fixed. Then the motion of any other plate with respect to this fixed plate corresponds to a rotation about an axis. In this figure Africa has been taken to be fixed, so South America moves. (a) shows the location of this axis, marked with an arrow, that Teddy and his colleagues found for the motion between Africa and South America. The circles are lines of latitude about this axis, just like the usual lines of latitude about the Earth's rotational axis. (b) shows the original position of the two continents before the South Atlantic opened., obtained by fitting the edges of the continents together. These edges are under the sea and are not the present coast lines. As the continents move, every point on the South American plate moves in a direction that is parallel to the latitude lines. This behavior is easily seen by comparing the positions of the latitude lines in the two pictures before and after opening. Their position on South America does not change. [Note that by 'plate', McKenzie means not just the continent of South America, but the ocean floor west of the spreading ridge as well, which is half way between the two continents.

Considering the anathema that Earth expansion presents to Plate Tectonics it should not go unnoticed that North America and Europe are missing in the figure, and therefore that the sphere is effectively half the size it should be. The fit therefore is shown on a half-sized Earth, which is a construction supporting Earth expansion, not Plate Tectonics! (Just a nicety, thanks to McKenzie in support of Plate Tectonics that should not go unremarked, particularly in view of his comment that, "I remembered I had disliked the method he (Bullard) used to fit the continents together." (Oreskes, p.180.)

Well, .. they were all young guys then, . didn't have the mantle of gravitas that age and career usually bestows, so the figure could be excused for being a bit 'iffy' as regards support for Plate Tectonics (but bloody good for Earth expansion!), but it does show the point of small circle rotations. Whether or not those are real is another matter we might look at later.

After seeing a two-page note by Bill Menard (published in Science in January 1967), on the linear configuration of the Great Cross-Faults in the Central Pacific, Jason Morgan wrote a computer program that showed their configuration as small circles too.

Menard writes : -

Jason had already submitted his abstract for the April 1967 meeting, of the American Geophysical Union when he saw my paper. He was due to talk on "Convection in a Viscous Mantle and Trenches," but he immediately stopped his project and spent two monthes generating a computer program. I had learned about the properties of great circle charts as a naval officer, and so had he. What struck him about my illustrations, however, was not that the fracture zones were almost straight, but that they were not completely straight. It appeared that they followed the arcs of enormous small circles and that the radii of the arc increased from north to south. Like Teddy Bullard, he recalled Euler's theorem, and what he was programming was a means of determining an Euler pole from the geography of fracture zones. ( ... ) So, as the geological world tried to accommodate to the shock of Vine's paper in December, Jason Morgan was already developing the quantitive theory of plate tectonics that would subsume the qualitative miracle of sea-floor spreading. ( .... ) Jason Morgan's paper provided the foundation for all subsequent work on ancient plate etectonics and may have been the most important paper ever written in geology, and certainly in tectonics." (Menard, 1986, The Ocean of Truth, P.284.)

Fig.4 Menard's caption reads : "Morgan 's evidence that the old fracture zones that I had plotted (heavy lines) followed small circles (dashed lines) around a single Euler pole. (Menard, 1986, The Ocean of Truth', Fig.24c)

"Ultimtely it was not geology or physics, but a theorem proposed by the Swiss mathematician, Leonard Euler two centuries earlier, that provided the linchpin of plate tectonics." (Menard, Ibid., p.2)

"The most important paper ever written in geology"? Well, .. high praise indeed, to be sure! But it doesn't sound to me that a paper talking about a computer program and 'small circle fault traces' is saying much at all about geology, other than that there is a sea floor with lines on it. Global geology involves rather more than a computer program to describe small circles, -- particularly when very likely they are not small at all. Black boxes = "Garbage in, garbage out," if you don't consider the facts, particularly geological ones. And the main geological fact that was not being considered was that those 'small circles' were formed very close to the Pangaean equatorial zone (Synoptic simplicity, Fig.1) where small circles very closely = great circles, and half of their extent is concealed in American override of the Pacific anyway. In such a situation it would be almost impossible to tell the difference, and a smaller Earth getting bigger would exacerbate the problem.

But it did at the time serve to describe plate *movement*. That is, .. if you ignored the along-ridge spreading, manifested in the difference in lengths between the spreading ridges and their original breakout from continental margins, which implied it was not movement at all in the rightful meaning of the word, but *growth* in the opposite direction, which in turn (when both sides of the ridge were considered simultaneously) implied UP, .. and Earth expansion.

Next was Dan McKenzie, who showed from earthquake first motions around the Aleutian Trench that this Pacific plate with the Great Cross-Faults (transform faults) could also move bodily in a direction other than that indicated by those faults (/cross-faults /transform faults). (Fig.5).

Fig.5. Pacific plate motion according to Dan McKenzie's analysis of earthquake first motions. The caption reads : -

".. This figure shows the motion of the Pacific plate, obtained from the motion on faults during earthquakes,. when the North American plate is fixed. The solid dots show the locations of a number of large earthquakes produced by the motion between these two plates. The arrows show the direction of motion between the two sides of the faults on which these earthquakes occur when the side of the fault that is part of the North American plate is taken to be fixed and the Pacific side is moving. The map is in a special projection, chosen so that the motion of the Pacific plate is everywhere parallel to the big arrow if the plate moved rigidly. (b) Contours of the depth of the ocean around Hawaii, using the same projection as (a). If the volcano that forms the Hawaiian Ridge is fixed to North America, the ridge should be parallel to the large arrow, which is approximately true. (Courtesy of Oreskes, 2001, P.179)

So, .. Morgan says the Pacific plate moves west according to the tramrails of transform faults, and McKenzie says the same plate moves north according to the first motions of earthquakes. Different spatial moves for both of them, but both in the same time frame. This difference is rationalised in Plate Tectonics, not by trying to understand the information in terms of a single data-set and finding a single solution (the scale problem again), but by considering the data sets as independent and trying to find a solution that will suit each independently. Puzzling at first, this apparent contradiction is rationalised by hypothesising that the reference frames for the two movements are different : the Pacific plate (moving west in respect of original continenal separation) is also moving north with respect to the fixed American plate. So relatively speaking, one movement is a subset of the other (a solution reminiscent of the olden days of astronomy when inventing epicyles to the planets was what the demonstration of intellectual endeavour was all about, and which earned the pleasure of the Pope as a demo of God's work.)

But NASA's time series satellite data shows America is not fixed but is moving in accord with overriding (as Earth expansion maintains). So if we reverse the movement frame and consider the Pacific plate to be fixed and the American plate that's moving, then it also reverses the hotspot story : a fixed Pacific plate means the hot-spot must move. But this would disturb the convection story necessary for the whole concept of plates - so we can't go there.

Fig.6 Synopsis of the data. (You need to right-click this one to see a bigger figure.) Red arrow (visible on the larger figure) shows plate movement according to Morgan, pink arrow shows movement according to McKenzie, big white arrow shows direction of *growth* (projected on to the present-sized Earth) according to Earth expansion, small white arrows (pointing south) shows overriding according to NASA's time-series data and also according to expansion, and the smallest arrows with the red flag (pointing north) shows movement according to the USGS plate movement (presumably after McKenzie).

So, .. complications. ... Jason Morgan writes the paper that "provided the foundation for all subsequent work on ancient plate tectonics and may have been the most important paper ever written in geology, and certainly in tectonics", .. and Dan McKenzie's paper is the one generally cited as "the first paper on Plate Tectonics", yet both are citing exactly opposite conclusions regarding plate movements - for the very same plate, .. for the very same time. For the hypothesised reconcilliation of this, Jason gets a gong from my fishing buddy, .. and Dan gets the credit for laying the foundation of plate movement over hotspots. This is the doublethink Orwell warns us about, otherwise known as the PMWS syndrome - the Principle of Multiple Working Stories - much beloved of 4-year-old children as a way of rationalising 'the terror' - of the adult occupation of their world.

Earth expansion dispenses with all of these stories, beginning by recognising that ocean floors cannot move the way Plate Tectonics says, in a direction of either Morgan or McKenzie, but must grow towards the ridges. And therefore move up, ..as Menard was reaching for with his "moving ridge" as a way of rationalising the difference in lenth between the magnetic anomalies at the ridges and those further away. Expansion explains overriding as gravitational correction attributed to the brittle outer crustal shell, not gravitational correction due to a sinking slab, and overriding (not subduction) is supported by the satellite time series data (which is more recent than the USGS arrows. (I can't paste a quick-fig convenient copy of that since it is 'interactive', but if you go to the site you'll see what I mean..)

So which is to be believed? .. and on what grounds? The PMWS-supporting-pillars of Plate Tectonics? ... Or the ("neither of us believed for a moment ") unbelievable, .. the unthinkable, .. the un-IMAGINABLE Earth expansion, that solves all of these multiple (and contradictory) movements at a stroke?

Plate Tectonics is slowly having to admit the support for expansion in the OVERRIDING shown in NASA's own time-series data (Fig.6) (and in the Flat Subduction of the circum-Pacific. But it's taking its bloody TIME. You know why? Because it's not a geological issue, .. and never was. But now the issue is the corner Plate Tectonics has painted itself into.

"Least noticed, but most important of all, a generation of conservative geologists had passed on. As Max Planck wrote in his autobiography, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." (Carey, op.cit., p.121)

Now that Carey himself has passed on we are left with the tribal 'volunteers' from the compost of the mentis, convinced by the fatherly gravitas of those who firstly couldn't get their minds properly around what Earth expansion was saying, secondly were afraid of the implications for funding if they did understand it aright, .. and thirdly were denied the powerful three dimensional manipulation of the data that is now casually available to schoolchildren, thanks to Google Earth.

It's time, fellas, .. c'mon. Earth expansion is *IT*. Do your dooty.

Well, we began this post with Carey, .. meandered through the young-lad supporting pillars of Jason Morgan and Dan McKenzie (and my fishing buddy George). In view of where all this is heading we might let Menard have the last word in regard to attemps to rationalise the along-ridge spreading, in a meeting discussion : -

"The discussion was brief, but it offered Vine the occasion to refer to convection cells as "presumed" and "mythical." Certainly , the many problems related to convection that had been troubling the conference members would have been solved by eliminating convection entirely. " (Menard, The Ocean of Truth, p.276.)

"Along ridge spreading", ..not from the continental side of any initial split, but from the oceanic side of differences in length of magnetic anomalies between those at the ridges (bigger) and those away from the ridge (smaller). Menards' remark that "It certainly helps to think about these things (ridge length difference) at leisure.." has now had its leisure lengthened to half a century with still no takers on the Plate Tectonics side. Nobody has done it, because to do so challenges both the fundament and the firmament of Plate Tectonics. Menard did suggest that it might be explained by the ridges themselves moving (sideways), but moving sideways only works for one side of the ridge at a time (and provided the implications for the other side are ignored). If it is considered for both sides at once, .. well, .. that means .. the only way it can do that is if the ridge moves UP (which means expansion).

You can see the problem that would have posed for Menard, given the hatchet job they already did on Bruce Heezen, which was also (I think) why as he says, "There is no record in the published account of any discussion after this talk." No wonder. Lurking under the surface here is probably the reason why Carey never took up the offers either, of a position in the States despite being quite pally with Hess, ..

"Harry Hess, chairman of the Princeton geology school, and I cemented a warm friendship that deepened until his premature death." (Carey, 1988, Theories of the Earth and Universe, 1988, P.119.

..and why he thought Tasmania on the other side of the world was just hunky dory to pursue the geo-*logical* questions, instead of those arising from geophysical PMWS syndrome. Those guys and the institutions that housed them would not have thought twice about doing a hatchet job on him too, given half a chance, had he threatened the Big Story. They would have found a way, as Armstrong did in time in response to Carey's book, Theories of the Earth and Universe; (Hollywood Cowboys post and scroll down to 'Armstrong' again). And as many others have done too, labelling Carey (politely) as 'misguided'). But it would have had to have been more forceful than just removing handles from office doors (Ewing on Heezen), or forbidding him to use certain data at conferences (Ewing on Heezen again ).

Between the lines, .. the story is quite murky.

("From the ashes, ..a phoenix rises.")

[See also blog for Earth expansion at :-
http://earthexpansion.blogspot.com/ ]

Sea Floor Spreading - Plate Tectonics' Crisis Point

2011-09-01T18:06:00.000-07:00

Perhaps people don't know something about Plate Tectonics that maybe they should, .. which is that it developed from a refusal to believe the accumulating data on the evolution of the ocean floors that would negate it, and that the term, 'Plate Tectonics' is no more than the epitaph it will be remembered by when this deficit is corrected and it is consigned to the refuse bin of history.

If data is fact unspoken, .. and language the vehicle to convey it, then terminology is the baggage compartment with the clutter that needs ablution : -

" 'The Ancient Mariner' would not have taken so well if it had been called The Old Sailor" (~Samuel Butler); "Language forces us to perceive the world as man presents it to us" (~Julia Penelope); "A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years"(~Wendell L. Willkie); "The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand"(~Lewis Thomas); "Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons" (~Aldous Huxley); "Whenever ideas fail, men invent words" (~Martin H. Fischer). And so on.

"Whenever ideas fail, ..." The ideas that were failing (and therefore needed some language for), was how to explain what the Hell was Going ON with the sea floors that were so obviously young, .. enlarging, .. getting bigger - and yet couldn't represent an Earth getting bigger. ( No? Why not?)

Well, of course recognising that the ocean floors were getting bigger was not something that happened overnight, .. it developed over a number of years - more than a decade in fact, as people worked to interpret the data that was coming to hand. The result was embodied in The Word that was coined to describe that interpretation of "getting bigger - but not getting bigger", which was (and which was no small achievement for a word) "Sea-Floor spreading". The 'Word' has been variously represented as moving, growing ('spreading') - take your pick (and don't even think about what so-called *plates* are doing); better to just stick to the facts of sea-floors and their age, and forget the 'verbology' of spreading /moving /growing / grinding /crashing / bashing.

In late 1959 Carey was visiting professor to Princeton and had outlined the geological case for Earth expansion to an audience of geologists and geophysicists, (scroll down to Eldridge Moores, then read Armstong's following critique as well ). Bruce Heezen at about the same time was coming to the same conclusion from his work in the Atlantic. Nearly a decade later, by 1967 the emerging data from the ocean floors too (as well as the continents) was beginning to show exactly what Carey and Heezen were saying : the ocean floors were everywhere young and getting bigger, which could only mean that the Earth was getting bigger - unless, of course, you believed (in a biblical sort of way) that it wasn't.

Let Bill Menard, one of the main players in the story, tell how it was :-

"After the apparently conflicting dates of ocean basin rocks, the most troublesome aspect of the sea-floor spreading hypothesis was the absence of direct evidence of convergence. There was no problem if the Earth was expanding, but if it was not, enormous areas of old oceanic crust had to be plunging into the mantle along the line of oceanic trenches.. It was generally expected that the sediment in trenches would show signs of this violent phenomenon, but none could be found. The lack of such signs would raise many questions in the next few years as more and more people acquired pertinent data. In 1967, however, Maurice Ewing was surely the one most troubled by this issue because he already had many seismic profiler lines across deep-sea trenches. He visited my office at Scripps in the fall of 1967 to discuss this very issue. He had folders full of profiler records with him, as he often did, and we looked at critical crossings. One of the most likely places to look for disturbed sediment was where the east flank of the Juan de Fuca Ridge abutted the continental slope of Oregon and Washington. Turbidity currents from the Columbia River had built a smooth plain, and the slightest folding or faulting would be obvious. We studied his profiler records in the area. The sediment was undisturbed. He had heard me talk at the NASA meeting, but I repeated my analysis about how a driting ridge crest could produce symmetrical magnetic anomalies while the east flank was motionless . The magnetic anomalies extended under the continental slope, so at one time there had been convergence and subduction, but perhpas it had stopped before the turbidites were deposited. We looked at crossings of active trenches elsewhere but saw no signs of deformed sediment. There was no question in our discussion about the existence of sea-floor spreading, although neither of us was confident about it being at a constant rate. Neither of us believed for a moment in an expanding earth, so we were left with a puzzle. Ewing indicated that he would welcome some help in interpreting the profiler records and we discussed active cooperation, but nothing ever came of it. He may have been missing Bruce Heezen*. (I remember this talk well, because it was the only time Ewing ever visited my office.)

(H.W. Menard, 1986, The Ocean of Truth, a Personal History of Global Tectonics, P.283, Princeton University Press. 353pp.)
(*Bruce Heezen was excluded from much of the data because of his conviction that the Earth was expanding, and therefore that he wasn't part of the club. He could scupper the ship. )

Fig.1. Sea floor off Oregon. The sector of ocean floor sediments that Menard and Ewing checked for deformation - and found none. (Vancouver Island at the top of the figure.)

"Neither of us believed for a moment in an expanding Earth..."    (Really? Why not? It was what the data was saying after all, was it not? )

Well, .. forget the data, .. obviously if we don't believe something, it can't be happening, can it? Science must be logical and reasonable - and seen to be. I don't know, .. it might just be me, .. but Menard's account seems to smack a bit of "protesting too much", especially in the face of Heezen's (and Carey's) rationale for expansion, that had been promulgated some years before, Carey's from the geological side and Heezen's from the oceanic side, .. and had no doubt been fermenting away because the implications as regards funding were considerable.

What was needed was a way out. And the way out was to be found in more words (rather than understanding - for if there was understanding, this hotch-potch of multiple hypotheses could not exist). Two to be precise: "No Mechanism." A catchy couplet to be sure and, moreover, one that everybody could truly believe: because there *was* indeed none. That was precisely the stunning implication of the data that research *should* have followed - finding one!

It was not a very responsible position for physics to take when such large-scale evidence was staring them in the face - that there had to be a mechanism. Physics invents all sorts of hypothetical confabulations to justify clever arithmetic when it comes to the vastness of the firmament - like black holes and dark matter, .. strings-and-things, .. and big bangs, but when something as inconsequential as the Pacific Ocean gets underfoot, well, .. apparently we just don't know what to do with it.

What was the way out of this dilema?   How was it confirmed that "..enormous areas of old oceanic crust had to be plunging into the mantle along the line of oceanic trenches" in order to avoid this implication of expansion and keep the Earth a constant size. And how did the hopeful conviction of "had to be" morph into one of factual 'was' when the evidence confronting Menard and Ewing's close scrutiny of the offshore sediment structure in 1967showed there to be no deformation of the ocean floor?, Nearly half a century later there still has been no attempt to resolve what this "no deformation" conundrum means.

The conversion from hopeful expectation to bullish assertion was to be found in another Word, .. 'subduction' - one that transmogrified beautiful fact (of ocean floors getting bigger at oceanic ridges) to ugly hypothesis (of them shrinking in the face of a continental buttress). The word itself also carried a sting, because it was quickly realised that although the ocean floor could conceivably be said to be 'subducting' in a relative sort of way, the continental side of the zone was also, after all, 'overriding'. Subducting, and at the same time overriding, .. were corollaries masked in a behavioural symmetry that carried an appeal all of its own because according to the cross-eyed tweedle-dee-dum principle of multiple working hypotheses they could be regarded effectively as the very same thing!! What could be more beguilingly demonstrative of veracity than this philological as well as behavioural symmetry? (Perhaps the morphing of subduction into 'flat' subduction? - another cross-eyed contradiction.)

Such was the crisis confronting Plate Tectonics way back then, nearly half a century ago, when the true beauty of scientific endeavour was revealed in the spreading of the sea floors. However, it was about to be challenged by exactly those controversial twins of subduction and overriding, the one ('overriding') supporting expansion and the Great Leap Forward, .. the other (subduction) denying it, and drowning it in a moribund quagmire of contradiction, and at the same time attempting to pass it off as a democratic 'achievement'?

I'm all agog to read Menard's next bit. So far, as above, he's quite right. Sea-floor spreading (it still had to become Plate Tectonics) is all about Earth expansion - and *was* a fantastic achievement that really *was* deserving of a Nobel Prize. No wonder they were creaming themselves, .. but over such small beer, really (the facts speaking for themselves), compared to the big one that was staring them in the face? - that they couldn't bring themselves to believe? No wonder they flunked in the Nobel stakes and had to resort to awarding themselves.

(While me and George went fishing ... )

For half a century that's been the sign hanging on the door, .. of the room with the elephant in it - that nobody dare enter because of all the 'elephant-dust' they have to wade through.

Enter Jason Morgan next, .. I think..   (Menard does a great job of telling this story.)

[See also blog for Earth expansion at :-
http://earthexpansion.blogspot.com/ ]

The Conundrum of Movement on Transform Faults

2011-07-17T01:48:00.000-07:00

Plate Tectonics versus Earth Expansion.
( Blog for website at http://users.indigo.net.au/don/ )

Fig.1 Ridge offsets of the ocean floors ('transform faults'). Ridge displacement (long arrows) is consistent with that of the continental margins, but opposite to Plate Tectonics' proposed mantle flow for the right-hand ridge sector (shorter arrows). The bracketed arrows indicate the "counterintuitive" 'real' movement in Plate Tectonics, supported (it is said) by first motions of Earthquakes (see also). Earthquakes are restricted to the sector of the fault between the ridges. (Large arrow displacements are consistent with an expanding Earth : "what we see is what we get".)

Fig.2. The Atlantic Ocean. Click image for a bigger figure to see the Great Cross-Faults transgressing the ridges better. Note that the northeastern coast of Brazil once fitted under the hump of Africa, marking the initial rupture of the Great Cross-Faults.

If you knew nothing about the ocean floors, the cross-faults would be an *extremely* enigmatic structure to try to understand, particularly for geophysicists not familiar with the subtleties of continental geology.

Two things could be brought to the table to address the question about how to interpret them. First, there is only one ridge (parallel to the continental margin) but hundreds of cross-faults of the sort diagrammatically shown. Second, convection had been proposed for decades as the mechanism for continental separation (Arthur Holmes and others), and although it was only theoretical (not the sort of thing that could easily be tested) convection was nevertheless logical to a degree. The Earth was hot inside (you only have to go down a mine to find that out - or view a volcano), and from surface outcrop to regional studies rocks were known to deform in large convoluted folds like toffee, particularly in the more highly metamorphosed (deeper /hot ) crustal regimes. Thus continental displacement, a single fault symmetrically down the middle of separation and reams of cross-structures that could be interpreted like tramrails of movement, were a powerful assortment of inducements to at least suggest, if not confirm, the validity of convection causing separation of the continents. Cross-faults could be seen as the brittle expression of ductile flow in the underlying mantle. All-in-all, convection seemed obvious.

However, there was a problem (Fig.1) because ridge offsets were consistent, .. not with divergent spreading of the ocean floors on 'tramrails' as convection would suggest, ..but with offsetting of the whole lot! .. with continents on both sides of displacement (e.g., Atantic) being equally affected by the same movement as the ridges. In other words the displacement occasioned by the cross-faults seemed to be post-ridge, and post ocean-floor formation, and nothing to do with them. However, given the tramrail appearance of these structures, their orthogonal relationship to the ridges, and the pleasing notion of convection displacing the continents, this seemed unlikely. Somehow they *had* to be part of the evolution of the ocean floor. But how?

The problem was solved by Tuzo Wilson's suggestion that the faults, with all their displacements, were actually there to begin with, before the continents began to open. and that each segment of ocean floor bounded by a cross-fault was moving away from the ridges, like a conveyor belt with each fault-bounded track trailing a newly created filament of mantle material from the ridge. At the time this was proposed it was indeed an ingenious suggestion, because it explained why earthquakes, as well as occurring on the ridges, were also restricted to the sector of cross-faults between the ridges, and virtually didn't occur beyond that. In other words, there was relative movement of the ocean floors *across* the fault only in the sector offsetting the ridges - but no *displacement* on the fault (since all displacement occurred (according to Wilson) before the ocean floors began to open). It was this nicety that enabled Tuzo Wilson to claim a "New Class of Faults", and for it to be accepted in peer review as the solution to the conundrum of the ridge-offsets as reflecting mantle flow.

However, it generated more problems than it solved, of which only one needs be mentioned here, namely, .. what sort of stress-mechanism is it that operates at the base of the crust (in regions of partial melting and granite intrusion) to create a brittle fracture / mega-joint system on the scale of the whole Earth? From consideration of which we might conclude that Tuzo did *indeed* get it wrong. It wasn't "A new class of faults" he was proposing, but a new class of *joints*, for 'joint' is the only structural discontinuity that can change direction through ninety-degrees (ridge to cross-fault) on a knife-edge and show no displacement. And 'new', because being generated at the crust-mantle interface nothing like it would have been, nor was, described before. And for good reason. Although fractures (faults) *do* occur in such regimes, there is no evidence of such structures as the Great Cross-fractures at *any* depth in continental crust, much less towards its base where, by implication of them forming before the ocean floors opened to expose mantle, Wilson was proposing that they formed. From a geological perspective this would be so verging on the lunatically asinine that the only explanation for its proposal could possibly be that it might be a test of the composed mind. And not a very sophisticated mind at that.

Nature (the journal that Wilson singled out for the test) failed with flying colours. From today's acceptance of "transform faults" Mr Wilson was clearly successful in his enterprise, no doubt on account of the editor being insensitive enough to pass it for review to fellow geophysicists (eagerly waiting for a solution to the conundrum).

Tuzo Wilson

Tester of the composed mind

In proposing the Wilson Cycle, Mr Wilson went on to claim another scalp) (..from the compost of the mentis) (to hang on his belt).

[See also blog for Earth expansion at :-
http://earthexpansion.blogspot.com/ ]

Plate Tectonics gone wrong

2011-07-15T15:09:00.000-07:00

(..Not that it was ever right anyway.)
( Blog for website at http://users.indigo.net.au/don/ )

Fig.1. Length difference between the spreading ridge and their length-equivalent continental margins. Which can only mean that the ridges grow away from the continents, .. which can only happen if the continents move up - and keep moving up.

Africa of course, .. is not moving away from the spreading ridge (as in Plate Tectonics), .. it has not shrunk. There is no need for Doctor Watson or Sherlock Holmes to turn up as invited guests on the Goon Show. The Atlantic ridge is just longer than its African continental margin, .. and the American one also, once we retrofit for the unhinging of the Americas in the Caribbean region and the swivelling of the northeastern margin of South America away from Africa.

Fig2. Spreading ridges getting longer.   "Keep moving up."   It's what ridges are, what they do, ..and what the geology says they've been being and doing for hundreds of millions of years. Are we really to believe this glaringly obvious, in-your-face, first-order element of Earth structure has been ignored by a worldful of scientists?

Unfortunately the answer would appear to be - "YES". 'Fraid so.   And exactly the same myopia has seen the ignore-ance of the Earth's rotation in Plate Tectonics. In its very name, 'Plate' Tectonics is a denial of the three dimensionality of the Earth. And no word could be more apt to describe it than 'plate', for 'plate' graphically underscores the two-dimensionality in thinking that has seen that theory come into existence, and worse, perpetuated the failure to address its many conundrums. Worse still, the Earth's rotation is simply not on Plate Tectonics' theoretical horizon.

So where did they go wrong? Is it really possible that a worldful of geoscientists are cognitively incapable of appreciating these two facts of global dynamics - 1. that makes the spreading ridges get longer with time (reflected in the growth of fractures on a round Earth), and 2. that the Earth is spinning? Or are we to believe that the sheer force of homocentric conceit can cast out these dual demons that threaten the sanctity of Plate Tectonics? Plate Tectonics (we're told by those in favour of it) is a many-splendoured invention, decked out in wondreous apparel, .. fit for an emperor and a Nobel Prize, but really when scutinised there isn't a warp or a weft of substance that holds a candle to the naked spinning beauty of Earth at this point in her evolution. She's an absolute *honey* of a *Big Gurl*.

So where *did* they go wrong?

Well (this is my take on it), .. two ways : geological and political, .. and both of them serious indictments of Earth scientists.   Geological, in being railroaded between a conviction-of-convection on one hand, and a perceived lack of mechanism (for expansion) on the other, which forced ignore-ance of the ridge-lengthening apparent in Figure 1 and its implications. Political in questions of funding.

The money was there (for certain institutions) for instrument-driven research of the oceanic type, so long as there was military application in the climate of the Cold War. But it would have been entirely different if things had taken a serious geological turn, because that would have taken the focus off the ocean floors. For somebody (like Carey) to come along and say, "Yes, ocean floors are all very well, but if you are going to posit a geological theory then you need to be more inclusive of geological reality and regard continents as well, .. you're barking up the wrong tree, cobber, if you don't include a geological /continental perspective to support your black-box instrumental inferences." By so saying, and being centred in the geology, Carey, intentionally or not, was being highly divisive, threatening to part oceanic research from the funds supporting it.

Hess, probably in deference to Carey as a friend, acknowledged the geological evidence for expansion, saying it would solve his three most important problems, but taking a backward step, considered it to be "philosophically unsatisfying" on account (ostensibly) of "no mechanism". However, with a foot in both naval and academic camps he surely would have felt more keenly than anyone that the way to keep military funds flowing into oceanic 'research' was to avoid getting geologically controversial and follow an indulgent geological path, and not to pontificate the virtues (or not) of Plate Tectonics versus Earth expansion, for which latter there was indeed no mechanism, and in which controversy the military had no interest whatsoever.

The concession to geology therefore was to adopt the safe fall-back position in Arthur Holmes' book, by then running to fifteen reprints, that convection, a thing of the ocean floors - and wholly restricted to the ocean floors - was indeed the driver of crustal deformation . With that geological question out of the way, it was possible to get on with the serious business of ensuring that funds continued to flow, for most important of all was that the navy would tolerate geology only so long as it remained oceanic, but would almost certainly not if funds were directed to abstruse geological questions of continental import. A non-controversial position that maintained the importance of the ocean-floor topography, and the use of geophysical methods to define it that ensured only ancilliary geological benefit, was what was required if research was to be kept out of harm's way of bureacratic beancounters. Had serious geological controversy arisen it could have blown the whole research program out of the water as the accent would have been seen to shift away from an essentially military focus to an esoteric academic one - particularly one for which there was no known mechanism.

So maybe from the point of view of funding it was not "going wrong" after all, for never before was there such massive and unprecendented financial support for the acqusition of data from the ocean floors, and very likely never will there be again. So paradoxically, eschewing the geo-*logic* of Earth expansion at the time and just getting on with the job of collecting data, was, and had to be, the centre of research, .. and if Earth expansion were occurring then it would all come out in the wash. Regardless of any theory it would surely be written in the physical structure of the ocean floors. This much seems obvious, but in my reading it is very much *NOT* a viewpoint of those at the time, with the particular exception of Bruce Heezen, who was excluded from much of the data.

And it *is* written in the physical structure of the ocean floors, .. beginning with the simple recognition that the spreading ridges today are longer than their initial rupture of continental margins (Fig.1). And supported by much else. And you don't need to go dredging around the ocean floors to see it.   On this score alone Earth expansion is as clear as a bell. There *is* no other way that this length difference can be interpreted. It is just as important, .. probably more important, because of the implications it masks compared to the obvious sideways growth of the ridges. And it is wholly ignored, even today.

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

Geologically, there is only one explanation for this, .. that the spreading ridges are moving *away* from the continents and not, as Plate Tectonics would have it (to maintain a convectional model), that the continents are moving away from the ridges. A consequence of spreading across the ridge and along it is that both directions are characterised by structures that define gravitational collapse. In the structure of the ocean floors this is precisely what we have - WRIT LARGE - in the structures called abyssal hills, ..and, as they were initially (and correctly) called, the structures named as "The Great Cross-Faults", before Tuzo Wilson invented for them "a new class of faults" and gave them a genetic labelling - "transform faults").

And why did he do it? Because in a convection model the displacement was the wrong way. As cross-faults superimposed on the ridges, sea-floor spreading by convectional mantle flow would not work. They implied Earth expansion, .. and that would simply not do. So they invented the theory of "a new class of faults". Tuzo Wilson came up with it (and gave them a name - 'transform faults'), and everybody else gasped in admiration and relief. Admiration for his ingenuity, and relief that convection as a driver for continental separation could be maintained.

" Whenever ideas fail, men invent words. ~Martin H. Fischer ..."

Let's be clear what this lexical pas-de-deux was about. First we have 'great cross-faults', an admirable name, .. a name which conveys *exactly* what they are, with no genetic connotations, but with a clear chronology indicated with respect to the ridges that they cut across. According to the principle of structural superposition they are later than the ridges. And next we have them renamed as 'transform faults', coined in denial of this clear cross-cutting relationship, and named entirely for a theory of how they could conceivably behave if you forgot everything you thought you knew about the principle of structural superposition. In this case all the cross-faults were formed before the ocean floors began to open.
And why did he do it? Because if the cross-faults had displacements commensurate with ridge offsets, sea-floor spreading by convectional mantle flow would not work. They implied Earth expansion, .. and that would simply not do. So here we have not only a clear case of denying the data, ..but effectively falsifying it as well, and represented by other 'scientists' as "a truly seminal result", ..and applauded by a media cheer squad into the bargain. In scientific terms this is effectively "massive academic fraud".

As 'great cross-faults' there can be no more apt name for these mind-boggling , awe-inspiring structures. Glossed over in Plate Tectonics as "the manner in which plates move past each other" (and that's about all plate Tectonics has to say about these structures), these structures are every bit as important, and in a sense possibily more important, than the spreading ridges because where 'spreading' can be easily construed as simply transverse ridge-growth (as advocated by Plate Tectonics) (with implications of subduction on a constant sized Earth), the 'great faults' are virtually irrefutable *proof* of continual gravitational collapse of growing, lengthening ridges.

Fig.3. The Great Cross-Fault of the Vema Fracture Zone. Isn't it just a ripper? Google it up, zoom in and open full screen to do it justice.

Quite apart from the dynamics of normal fault displacement that mark these structures as extensional, ridge-lengthening cannot be accommodated in Plate Tectonic theory, for in the time taken for the ocean floors to get to subduction zones the ridges have already grown longer - and the Earth has consequently got bigger by this amount. It needs no investment in scientific measuring devices to appreciate this, or deductive method to conclude it. It is staring us in the face.

And therewith, by a single logical, natural philosophical point, is the public purse saved from the ravages of the Draculean, blood-sucking, tool-driven community of deductive scientists, that prompted Naomi Oreskes to write her book on Plate Tectonics and let them tell their own story. Though it's not very clear if she's getting her own back for being misled in her undergraduate years or not ( "the learning that's been paid for") (see 1st and 3rd quotes here), i.e., whether she regards herself as acceptable collateral damage for the big guns of gung-ho, tool-driven, *do-it*, "younger professors" riding on the back of the deductive American Way of doing geology, or whether she is in favour of the more contemplative inductive method practised by the big-name geological gents of Europe, Africa and Australia - and Reginald Daly in America).

One great thing about the deductive scientific method, so favoured of the gung-ho 'doers' of any-old-hypothesis formulation and any-old-testing, is that you can keep measuring forever without having to use your head: your measurements tell you what to think, rather than you deciding what your measurements mean. When it comes to geology, tool-driven measuring is a fantastic fundraiser for the institutionally compromised, lobotomised 'scientist' enthused with the ability of black boxes to tell him what to think.

(Bloody rabbits.... )

They say science should be conducted with decorum and due respect for others' views, but the more closely this Plate Tectonics stuff is examined, the more it is very difficult not to be scathing about the deliberate avoidance of geological fact in order to shore up a manifestly sick consensus, whose only mitigation is that it secures public funds for 'science' of a sort, when a more honest approach often does not.

Fig.4. Length difference between the spreading ridge and the original continental ruptures in the Indian - Southern Oceans ... indicates upward movement of spreading ridges. The continents have moved away from their original location near (/at) the Rodriguez Triple Junction. Yellow lines show matching continental margins; arrows show the extent of continental separation along and across the ridge. The spreading ridge has virtually doubled its length since breakthrough.

[ See also blog for Earth expansion at :-

http://earthexpansion.blogspot.com/ ]

Plate Tectonics turns up for the Nobel Prize ...

2011-07-05T19:21:00.000-07:00

( Blog for website at http://users.indigo.net.au/don/ )

M'frock, .. Anyone seen me frock?

You know the adage: "If it looks like a duck, flies like a duck, walks like a duck and f-@#$ like a duck, .. then we must seriously consider the possibility that what we are looking at is, . a duck," .. particularly when the offspring exhibits the same appearance and behavioural proclivities. Otherwise we must seriously reconsider the type - or deny the logic of reason.

...As Plate Tectonics does with its determined invention of a Panthalassa to obfuscate the logic of what we see - that the oldest part of the Pacific (northwestern margin) is the same age as that of the ruptures of continental crust that allowed its emplacement. That is, regardless of whatever was the *configuration* of continental rupture that allowed Pacific emplacement, the *age* of the two - 1. continental rupture, 2. mantle emplacement - is the same.

Which means the dilation of the crust and the emplacement of the Pacific are coincident in time.

Which means that there is no spatial or temporal room for the emplacement or destruction of *any* Panthalassa, let alone one equivalent in size to the sum of the current oceans to meet Plate Tectonics' needs of a same-sized Earth.

Which means from the standpoint of simple geological principles of structural superposition, Plate Tectonics is false.

Even children in their bath know what a duck looks like. Which is more than can be said for Plate Tectonicists who, as well as ignoring the equivalent chronologies of crustal rupture and mantle emplacement in the Pacific, deny even the logic of 'mountain building by erosion', considering instead that mountains form by crumplecrust 'plate collision', and, further, ignore the difference in length between spreading ridges and their original breakthrough of continental margins.

Such is the nonsense geo-logic is up against when rationality and logic are negated by such obtuse ignore-ance. Can geologists *really* be gaslighting to such an extent as to pretend that these three lynchpins defining global dynamics (+ Earth expansion) (and - Plate Tectonics) do not exist? : -

Length difference of spreading ridges between the present and the past, which shows ocean-floor spreading is *towards* the ridge (not away, as Plate Tectonics would have it) .. and therefore the ridges keep moving up.
Folding and mountains do *not* have causal equivalence across the punctuation of peneplanation, i.e., the folds of mountains are not formed by crumplecrust tectonics (as advocated by Plate Tectonics), but are gravitational collapse features as the Earth's curvature reduces (Earth gets bigger), .. and mountains are simply the remnants of erosion.
The temporal equivalence of the Pacific ocean and its continental marginal ruptures, which tells us a Panthalasssa and Tethys could never have existed.

"...There probably has been an ocean in the present-day position of the Pacific Ocean for nearly a billion years..." http://www.scotese.com/pacifanim.htm

Not in my book.

What's going on? Why does Plate Tectonics ignore these factual lynchpins of global geological structure? The answer seems to be (Google it up) that : -

"Plate tectonics is a theory"    About 16,800 results (0.17 seconds)

..And as a theory it is touted as flexible, dynamic, etc etc.; "The mark of a good theory is that it is flexible enough to incorporate new facts as they come to light". And "being a theory" (centred in the oceans) Plate Tectonics is allowed to excuse itself from considering the facts of the continental crust and their margins. Hypotheses evolve as parallel threads, to be tested more against each other than the geological facts, leading to the claim (despite the many missing links) that is so successful that it is deserving of a nobel prize.

Ouch!    Wrong! A good theory is tested against the *facts*, not its multifaceted, hypothesised or theorised adjustable own moving parts. It is predictive and needs no finagling, .. no goalpost shifts.

The main proponents of this Nobel-claim are of course, geophysicists. I find it hard to believe that geologists are of the same persuasion, for this much is noticeable: geologists of field orientation are much more open to considering the possibility that Plate Tectonics is false compared to their desk-driving academic cousins. I put this down to two things, 1. They got where they did in academia because they excelled at telling the required story, and 2. if you *don't* tell the story in academic circles then you're in dangerous academic territory. No publish the story? - no job. Geologists in industry don't have that damoclean sword hanging over them, but by another token are mostly too busy to worry about the niceties of global geology, so most don't much bother with it; it is not of a scale relevant to day-to-day requirements of mining.   (However the way of the world being dependent economically and politically on ore deposits and the reasons for their location, perhaps they should be more involved in this question than they are).

So, we have to take all this Plate Tectonics stuff with a big pinch of salt, for how can a theory of the Earth be claimed without taking the continents into account? .. Which is what Plate Tectonics, by its own admission (and oceanic brief), does. In two of the most authoritative histories of the development of Plate Tectonics I've come across (Menard* and Oreskes** - see footnote) there is not even an index entry for "mountains", which by the failure of Plate Tectonics to recognise peneplanation as the precursor to building, is still the most perplexing feature of the continental crust. Consideration of global geology stopped at the continental margins, where, as Tanya Atwater succinctly puts it: -

"Subduction was a necessary adjunct concept" (Oreskes**, p.247)

Well, indeed it surely was, .. "if you believed Plate Tectonics was going on", .. and when necessity deemed denial of growth of the ocean floors ( = Earth expansion), which the 'tape measure' had so spectacularly documented was happening.

So what did they do? They invented subduction, ..and rigid 'plates', and backed it up with seismology (Isacks, Oliver, Sykes). More rubbish, because you see, seismicity is overwhelmingly an expression of movement related to the continental crust and its margins,

Fig.2. Seismicity an expression of continenal crust and its margins, *NOT* the ocean floors

..not an expression of ocean-floor movement (which is not movement anyway, but growth; see bullet point 1 above) - ocean floors that are riddled with more fractures than a truckload of slack. How is that lot supposed to make it, "jostling" and "grinding" from one side of the planet to the other, without making a noise?

The most perplexing features of the ocean floors? Transform faults, .. about which Plate Tectonics has *nothing* to say other than that they are "the means whereby Plates move /grind/ slide /glide etc. etc. past each other".

...and receives the Big Wooden Spoon.

But doesn't seem to notice.

("Hello Everybody! How you doin'?" )

("Believe in me..Kiddo.")

Menard, H.W., 1986, An Ocean of Truth, a Personal History of Global Tectonics, 353pps, Princeton University Press.

Oreskes, N., 2001, Plate Tectonics, an Insider's History of the Modern Theory of the Earth, 424pps, Westview Press

[ See also blog for Earth expansion at :-

http://earthexpansion.blogspot.com/]

Plate Tectonic Theory - Texts and Subtexts.

2011-06-26T09:46:00.000-07:00

( Blog for Website at http://users.indigo.net.au/don/ )

Following on from that last post, .. the one where I mentioned the development of Plate Tectonic Theory had to do with the massive amount of funding that was poured into oceanic research following the Second World War, .. I admit, that wasn't a very clever thing to say because instead of the funding we might as well blame the *reasons* for the funding, which was the Russians, .. who only got Bolshie because of the way that Hitler abused them, so we might as well blame Hitler, .. or his mother, .. or his father - whoever he was... And maybe therefore German beer, which would be drawing the long bow, .. because German beer is really pretty good. Not as good as the Czech if we're talking lager, but not bad, .. not bad. So maybe we have to back-peddle a bit and leave it in Hitler's lap. They do say you don't get very far into an argument about something before Hitler cops the blame - from both sides - but in this case, sure, .. you could probably make an argument for him being the puppet-master here along the lines of "multiple working hypotheses" which, if it's recommended as a way of going about science, I don't see why it shouldn't do for sociology, .. science being concerned with veracity and all that, where sociology is really more a matter of opinion. So maybe we have to be a bit more inclusive of the people who made the story up. Of Plate Tectonics that is. In other words maybe the reasons were more personal than political, which leaves 'sociological' in a kind of limbo, though reading what there is on that history (and apparently only two herstories - Tanya Atwater and Marie Tharp) it's a real pot-pourri of the three of them - personal, political, and sociological.

What about the scientific reasons? How do they push through the p-p-s ones to make it to the top of the heap? And what sort of 'battery' do they have to sustain to get there when there are so many people messing their inte-gritty (nitty-gritty) about?

So, in some way or other, I guess when it comes down to it we have to award the credit for the origins of 'The Theory' to the guys who claim to have made it up - if they still want to lay claim to it that is, since there's not much in it and since there is a resurgence of Earth expansion. Though as I've mentioned before, they didn't (make it up). The credit for that goes to Arthur Holmes and later Sam Carey, .. the latter who gave it up after teaching it for decades and moved on to Earth expansion. And Arthur himself, even though he'd been teaching it pretty well all his life evidently confessed towards the end of it, to not being entirely convinced of the veracity of convection-driven tectonics, though it's not clear if by that he meant that he was more of a fixist persuasion, or, like Carey, fixist of an expansionist bent (Google Translate - cop that one). What *they* did, those who made it up, was make up a story that is naive by any measure, and smacks of homocentric, dictatorial puppet-mastery, .. pulling strings to show how nature works,.. not science, that lets nature speak for itself..

However, that being said, I should begin by saying what a fantastic job all those guys did of collecting all the data, out at sea for weeks, maybe months on end, ship engines chugging away, not much sleep, .. bunks probably too small for big boys, .. nothing to occupy themselves with except eating, sleeping (some) and gathering the data, .. all young guys, ..but in the right place at the right time with right (new) machinery, and lots of money for what they were doing, ..all crossing their eyes and dotting t's about what it was all about.

But what *was* it all about, .. and were they cross-eyed? The interesting thing is that they didn't *know* what they were going to find. They were just poking around, ..'poking sticks down holes', so to speak, drilling, .. dredging, ..measuring., not knowing what they were going to get. I mean it wasn't as if they were doing it from today's clever perspective of knowing all about it and were confirming something. They knew nothing. It was a case of jobs for guys returning from the army (or Navy) and the huge increase in government support for science through military spending (in this case on the ocean floors). Oceanic research. The Navy was hiring physicists because of the tools being used for - magnetics (submarines) and sonar (sea-floor topography) and eventually seismics (them darned Ruskies again, .. exploding bombs). It was just jobs surveying the ocean floors. What a tremendous fillip it must have been to realise that they weren't *just* poking sticks down holes after all, .. and that the information they were gathering was beginning to mean something more than that there were just hills on ocean floors. Sure, .. the Navy wanted to know about those hills, but had no interest whatsoever in things like magnetic reversals, ..unless magnetism was something that could be switched on and off like a light and stick all those pesky Russian subs to the ocean floors - or something, .. which it can't. Imagine how things might have turned out, if that's all there was, .. hills with a bit of sediment draped over the top. It could easily have been. (Put that in your C.V. : "All at sea, .. dredging")

Instead there *was* something to talk about after all, .. and write about if you had to, .. and could). Publication naturally followed in magazines keen to have material to publish.

"Perhaps the most striking feature of the development of plate tectonics is the small number of institutions by large number of individuals involved. The bulk of the story told here takes place at only four institutions worldwide: Cambridge University, Columbia University's Lamont Geological Observatory, the University of California's Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and Princeton University. A striking feature of the stories in this volume is how many of the players moved back and forth among Carmbridge, Lamont, Princeton and Scripps, and how data sharing facilitated the rapid development of ideas and idea-sharing facilitated the effective interpretatation of the data (Naomi Oreskes (2001), Plate tectonics, an insider's history of the modern theory of the Earth, p.xiv)

Frankly, despite the frequent references to data-sharing in the historical accounts I get a picture of exactly the opposite where /when it counted - of them falling over themselves to outdo each other when it came to publication, .. and instances that, with all the talk about possible plagiarism, could be read (if one wanted to read it that way) as examples of the most treacherous academic perfidy, though couched in "What, .. whoME?" absolution. The following quotes are mined from H.W. Menard (1986), The Ocean of Truth.

P.34. (Morris Ewing:-) " .. This is by far the most important project with which I have been connected. It is so arranged that I see no possibility of anyone stealing the credit from me." (and, p.201), .. "Manik shared a house with Bruce Heezen in the early sixties, but he collected data for, and would publish with, Ewing, so he saw both sides. He described Bruce as "frantic to see" the records from which Ewing had excluded him.

P. 40:- ".. It is a curiosity of Harry's [Hess's] style of tectonics research that he believed he had discovered that the bathymetry around the great fracture zones was, "strangely enough" offset by the same amount as the magnetic anomalies. He just plain forgot that he had seen that in my papers in 1960 and 1961. The displacement was the main reason for my claim that the fracture zone offsets occurred after the rise had formed. I cite this lapse on the part of a man most generous to me as proof that there is no meaningful plagiarism without intent and to point out, if the question arises, intent is hard to prove."

P. 246 - 247. "..Hess read Wilson's manuscript and suggested some changes with the expectation that further discussions would follow a revision. The next day Wilson told Hess that he had modified the manuscript overnight and it was already on its way to Nature. ... In early June I received a letter from Tuzo mailed on 1 June from Churchill College. Hess had talked to him that night, and Tuzo had gotten the impression that I believed that he, Tuzo, had recommended against publication of one of my manuscripts and that he, Tuzo, in fact had not seen it. I have no idea what this was about, but it appears from the context that Tuzo felt that if I thought he had rejected my manuscript I might believe it was for some reason related to one of his manuscripts. (Wilson:-) "I have it is true sent a letter to Nature interpreting many large features in terms of a new class of faults and Harry has seen the paper and appears to agree. It is of course based on the observations of many others". . . . [dots are Menard's.] "If more scientists were as sentitive [sic] as Tuzo, there would be far fewer nebulous allegations of plagiarism in the air. [then follows an observation on the importance of the merchandising of information, and the credit going to the advertiser, rather than the priority (in this case, Alan Coode) ]

P243 :- "..One way to call attention to a new idea, however, is to give it a special name, like sea-floor spreading:. Moreover, if the creator wants credit for an idea, it is desirable to put it in a journal with rapid publishing and wide circulation. Alan Goode did none of these things. He sent his revolutionary little note to a relatively local journal that published quarterly. It would not appear until august. Meanwhile, another man entered the field, a man who would instinctively make all the right moves. "

Fig.1. Tuzo Wilson of the "New Class of Faults." (1984) - 'Merchandiser', and maker of "right-moves". (From Menard, Ibid.)

To me it all reads as an excellent example of how big science works, and the importance of institutional kudos in securing funding and the feedback loop it generates - careers, publications, and further reinforcement of institutional kudos. Factual data is automatically publishable, and when backed by institutional kudos the authors are regarded as having copyright on its interpretation, regardless of quality. Others who only have indirect acces to the data and who care to comment on the interpretation are referred to 'peer review' which, if the data is new, are the source authors themselves. However in the academic world it is a rare 'expert' who acknowledges error if it reflects on himself. The current drive now for academics to be rated according to the status of the journals they publish in, rather than on the quality of the content of their publication, insidiously reinforces this corruption of peer review.

... But anyway, .. what a program it was turning out to be, .. which was finally to document wholesale continental distension by massive and recent mantle extrusion. Or, as they called it, "Sea-floor spreading".

Well, they got the noun right, but the verb wrong: it's growing, .. not spreading. .. and happens right in the middle of the mantle rise where the spreading ridge is constantly adjusting to that growth, i.e., where the ridges move up, .. not somewhere else, where the ocean floors are moving sideways, say, .. somewhere along one of those many faults that the ocean floor is riddled with. The entire ocean floor is riddled with faults that parallel the ridges and which form the most prolific structures on Earth, ..the abyssal hills. If convectional traction is occurring, the ocean floors should be opening up just about everywhere else *BUT* the ridges, which, above a divergent convecting cell, is effectively a dead zone. As well, the other lot of faults, the so-called 'transform faults', describe normal growth faults whose sideways component of movement is only an expression of outwards growth of the oceanic crust from the Earth's centre. The legacy we are left with is overwhelmingly a normal fault, reflecting gravitational adjustment to vertical growth of ridges, .. not sideways convectional drift of continents. Only one guy (and gal) Bruce Heezen and Marie Tharp, got it. And Heezen, who was privy only to part of the information, was frozen out of the 'sea-floor spreading' club.

"I also regret the oblivion in which Warrren Carey and Bruce Heezen have fallen. I believe furthermore that not enough attention has been paid to the privileged relationships existing between a few key laboratories. In a sense the history of elaboration of plate tectonics can be read as a concerto for three instruments in which Princeton, Cambridge and Lamont successively held the soloist role until they joined together in the final chorus. (Le Pichon, p.221, in Oreskes (Ibid.)

Carey of course, in his assessment from the geological evidence rather than from that of technical instrumentation was nearly a decade earlier in his conclusion of growth (not movement) of the ocean floors.

"Of course Carey was nearly 100% right in 1958 about what was going on in the oceans. His detailed view of sea-floor expansion in 1958 preceded and was not much improved upon by the views of Hess or Deitz in the 1966s. Carey has a right to feel slighted here. And he correctly analyzed marginal basins and arcuate orogenic belts decades before others discovered the truth and accepted credit for it. His feelings sometimes show: "The precocious visionary bears a sinister taint, and the accolades for the great advance are worn by the nouveau-wise." Richard Armstrong.

How could they *NOT* get the idea that the ridges, .. if they are moving up today, .. and did yesterday, .. and likely will tomorrow, ..   just, ..well, ... keep moving up?   And if they balked at the implication (of an Earth getting bigger), why did they not look for evidence to support one way or the other - rather than just the one? ..  Because that evidence in favour of upwards growth of the ocean floors (with collapsing gravitational correction) is glaringly abundant. They *must* have , ..*must* have seen it, but the implications of an ocean floor riddled with (normal) block faults indicating extension *along* the ridge (as well as across it) was .. how did Hess put it? .. "philosophically unsatisfying".

Why did they not get the idea - or more exactly, refuse to follow it up? In the historical accounts it doesn't even get a mention. !! That is the big question, .. to which the big answer, as I read it, is that it would would have put a great big question mark over the security of funding, which was not to support geological research (with its inclusion of continents and continental margins where ships and submarines of the military sort do not sail) but oceanic 'research' of the military sort (where they do sail).

It's that simple. The argument for or against Plat eTectonics is not a geological one, but a sociological, personal, and political one.

And everybody thinks the argument for Plate Tectonics is centred in the geology? .. Puh! Nothing of the sort. Beyon the definition of symmetry of topography of the ocean floors, and the magnetic striping (which confirm crustal dilation - and Earth expansion) there is virtually nothing of the theory that hangs together. How is that "successful"?

Today on Google Earth the normal displacements on transform faults stick out like a sore thumb, and are of a distribution and scale that indicates gravitational collapse on a global scale, expressing outwards movement of the Earth's surface from the centre.  Certainly way back then the topographic information was accessible as contoured flat maps, but the three-dimensions offered by satellite view is a superlatively superior representation of the data, and corroboration - of an Earth that is getting bigger.

So come on, all you geological guys and gals. Get real! The information's been paid for - by the politics of fear. Now it's up to you to pin the tail back on the donkey, and have the 'geo' back where it's supposed to be - up in front of the physics! The Earth is getting bigger. Show it - *geologically*. Turf those Fyziks Fellas with their tape measures back on to their own patch and give them something to think about: what precisely *is* the condition whereby energy can be tranformed into mass of the mantle sort? *THAT'S* the question for *THEM*.   By having highjacked the geology on the back of easy funding they're avoiding the issue and abrogating their scientific duty. They have no more right to be running round the Earth measuring its ocean floor depth and magnetism as an aid to pontificating about geological process than geologists do, using ocean floor depths, mountain heights and erosion to pontificate about quantum theory.

"What's the mechanism? ..what's the mechanism..?
"Help help, the sky is falling!"
Bloody silly!    Don't you just luv'em?
(Horses for courses) (.. and donkeys for Plate Tectonics).
If they go about their physics they way they've gone about their geology (courtesy of funding), .. WELL !! What else could they come up with when lavishly funded by the politics of fear? (Global Warming?)

See also blog for Earth expansion at :-
http://earthexpansion.blogspot.com/]

Origin of Plate Tectonic Theory

2011-06-17T19:44:00.000-07:00

The Party's *over*, Rover.
( Blog for website at http://users.indigo.net.au/don/ )

If you search the web for the origins or history of Plate Tectonic theory you get the wool pulled over your eyes. Contrary to the proferred geological story, the development of Plate Tectonic theory was virtually wholly sociological in its origins, .. little to do with geological evidence. Had it to do with *geo-logic*, it would unequivocally have gone in the direction of Earth expansion. But it was the social and political contexts back in the days of the Cold War, that pulled it in the wrong direction. The much vaunted "no mechanism" aimed first at continental drift and later against Earth expansion was just a cop out, .. an excuse to avoid what was obvious even then - that the Earth's crust (in respect of continental drift) had been displaced in relation to the ocean floors, and that (in respect of Earth expansion) it had been dilated, the support for the latter being primarily the continental retrofits on the smaller Earth as proposed by Carey and others. It was a cop-out because if the path of geo-logic had been followed, research would have included considerations of continental geology instead of just mapping guyots (which Hess was good at) and the topography of the ocean floors generally. This would have meant putting a big question mark over the funding, which was available, not for abstruse geological research, but for getting on with mapping the ocean floors and dodging guyots, which had military reasons (sailing submarines), not geological ones.

In Europe, the concept of mantle convection with continents riding on top, colliding in some places and pulling apart in others was well known and well accepted well before the Plate Tectonics 'revolution'. Arthur Holmes textbook 'Principles of Physical Geology', had been a standard student textbook in Britatin at least for fifteen years by the time Plate Tectonics was developing in America. The last chapter of the book was devoted entirely to convection as a hypothesis for mobile crust developing the ocean basins and mountain belts.

However, if we are to read the preface to Naomi Oreskes' book (1999), 'The rejection of continental drift, theory and method in American science', we would get the impression that American geologists who were wholly responsible for Plate Tectonic theory, might have been oblivious to this.

".. (By 1978) I had completed two years as a geology major at a leading US university and counted myself lucky to have chosen a field of science heady in the wake of revolutionary upheaval: geologists around the globe were reinterpreting old data and long-standing problems in the new light of plate tectonics. It seemed a good time to be an aspiring young Earth scientist. Imagine my surprise - and dismay - to discover in England that the radically new idea of plate tectonics had been proposed more than half a century before by a German geophysicist, Alfred Wegener, and widely promoted in the United Kingdom by the leading British geologist of his era, Arthur Holmes. The revolution that had been described by my professors in the United States as the radical revelation of a dramatically new vision of the Earth was viewed by many of my professors in England as the pleasing confirmation of a long-suspected notion."

How did it happen that Naomi's professors gave her such an impression? From today's perspective it seems hardly credible that Wegener's 'continental drift' was not common knowledge in America by the time of 'The Great Plate Tectonics Revolution' in the 60s. And of course, it isn't (credible). Nor was it then. Even in the antipodes, the last stop before the polar wastelands of Antarctica, Sam Carey had been teaching mantle recycling as a model for crustal tectonics for almost two decades before that revolution, before giving it up as unworkable and moving on to the next contextual framework for geological advance - Earth expansion. It is simply inconceivable that Harry Hess, as one of those "senior geologists", though much earlier than Naomi's day and who would later claim the mantle of Plate Tectonics for himself, or his contemporaries, or those following, would have been unaware of the works of either Arthur Holmes or of Sam Carey; the latter in fact spending some sabbatical time in America at the invitation of Hess.

(Sam Carey [on continental mobility]) : "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. But by about 1956 I could see the glimmerings of the recognition that something was wrong, and then of course I was invited several times to Princeton. Harry Hess was the Chairman there and he and I became warmest of friends. I always stayed in his home, and in the many lectures I gave in Princeton, Harry realised it had to be, and later he became the leader in selling plate tectonics." http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2002/526793.htm and click 'show transcript'

[ Interestingly, H.W. Menard, 1986, writing from personal recollection on the development of Plate Tectonics and commenting on how Tuzo Wilson arrived at the idea of transform faults says, "Writing textbooks is not doing what counts, which is one reason why the older scientists in the United States never thought to read Holmes's text of 1944. Revising textbooks is an even drearier patching of new data on old ideas." (The Ocean of Truth', p.243.) ]

A strange observation surely, considering that the structuring of significant data and events is what one does from the perspective of more advanced years, and which by his book is precisely what Menard is himself doing. I guess he means that everybody was creaming themselves over the interpretations of new data to such an extent that everything previous was just indiscriminately swept away. Maybe too that after coming back to Earth from the stratospheric heights of speculation and realising that the conceptual framework was already common knowledge in sophomoric textbooks, life *was* a bit "dreary". Best to steer clear of textbooks if you're in America? (But what about the young guys that wre developing this? )

Naomi Oreskes attributes this apparent oblivion of American scientists to the different ways that American and British /European geologists actually do science, telescoping those ways into the words 'inductive' and 'deductive'.

"My English training and Australian experience had inculcated in me an inductive methodology, in which scientific problems originated in the observation of geological phenomena in the field, but many of my American professors disdained inductive science and what they pejoratively dismissed as "outcrop" geology. They encouraged me to pursue a deductive strategy, and to rely primarily on the tools of laboraytory analysis. This was particularly true of younger professors and those who had achieved a high level of professional recognition."

... but I don't think she has it quite right. I think the reasons are far more personal /political than can be explained by dedication to 'method'. It would appear from historical considerations that those "younger professors" she mentions would have been those riding on the back of the triumphal deductive methodological American way of doing science , .. so to address the question "why the difference?" it would seem that we have to return to the sociology of an earlier day. But first some clarification of the methodological difference might be in order.

In the inductive method you gather the data and make a judgement how they fit together. It's like doing a jigsaw, but in a kind of 'top-down' way, where previous experience, knowledge and understanding is brought to bear on how the pieces are likely to fit. In other words you build on what you already know. This cognitive faculty is analogous in a way to being armed with the picture on the front of the box. You've seen it before (or something like it), you know what it is (or something like it), .. so where's the problem? Well, one problem is that it is seen as highly subjective; one's experience is unique and non-repeatable, and non-repeatability is eschewed in science. Or to put it another way, science (of the mainstream sort) denies the individual. 'Big Science' is a Team effort, underpinned by institutional kudos. Repeatability is an aspect of the deductive method consequent on the tools and apparatus of the laboratory. But in the field of geology, and observation and the intellect of the individual, .. if you *do* know what it is, and you *have* seen it before (or some aspect of the picture on the front of the box), the inductive method works very well. (Ask Louis Pasteur.) (Or Albert Einstein).

One order of magnitude down from this is where, absent of Experience Understanding and Knowledge, an explanation of the data is simply formulated, .. fished from the air as a best guess as it were, and tested against the data. The potential for circularity and junk (formulating conclusions around original assumptions) is obvious, but neverthless this method enjoys respectable currency as 'the scientific method'. The obvious problem lies again in the guesswork, in the quality of hypothesis used to explain the facts. Anybody can have an idea, after all, .. indeed usually more than one, .. and more than one typically does fit the facts. So which idea is better than another? .. the one that might appear to fit the facts better? .. or the one proferred by greater experience, authority and knowledge? And who amonst those lacking such cognitive 'preparation' as advocated by Mr Pasteur, will be the arbiter? And if all ideas /hypotheses are partly right (according to the method of multiple working hypotheses) what is the underlying synthesis, the explanation, ..the paradigm, incorporating all? And how is this to be distinguished from 'just another idea'?

And then there is the 'deductive' approach where any allusion to the 'picture on the front of the box' is purposely eschewed. Attention is given wholly to fitting the 'contours and matching patterns' of the pieces themselves: the jigsaw is built from the bottom up as it were. The key thing here, is that it is not the *perceived* matching that is important, but the *actual* matching - in other words the degree of certainty involved, not one's perception of it.

This approach is admirably suited to the technological aspect of laboratory science - we stand back and let the tools do the job of unequivocally matching the contours and patterns of the pieces, e.g., the use of computers to do large calculations on large amounts of data. The 'hands-off' objective approach thus offered is lauded. However this deductive method suffers similarly from two things, firstly the 'being driven by the machinery' syndrome, i.e., the indiscriminate use of, and inappropriate reliance on, tools. In geophysics this is the 'black box' syndrome; .. because a tool was used, the interpreted result must, because it was objectively derived, be valid. Secondly (which is really much a restatement of the same problem) the hubris of their drivers, exemplified in the garbage-in garbage-out factor and wacky interpretations that purport to be significant by those explaining their data.

Technology that can infallibly match contours and patterns of 'jigsaw pieces' is of course a boon to science By all means we should stand back and let the algorithms of search-and-match do their stuff. But we have to know that the designers are competent, and in particular that they are not failing to take account of alternative patterns of matching. There is more than a little irony in Plate Tectonics claiming validity on account of the technologies that defined "sea-floor spreading when that 'spreading', inclusive of what is happening along the ridge as well as across it, also axiomatically defines the growth of an expanding Earth. It is also disturbing that Plate Tectonics hides behind the gratuitous shibboleth of "no mechanism" and retreats from discovery, when evidential reality points in the direction that a mechanism should be sought. As an explanation of natural phenomena "no mechanism" has no place in science, but going where no man has gone before is a (highly) risky business in science. The mantra offers security by closing off no-go areas of research.

No greatly sophisticated aparatus or deductive methodology is needed to confirm the upwards growth of the ocean floors. It is as obvious at a glance as continental fits support separation in the Atlantic. Are we to believe that this simple observation of along-ridge spreading there and elsewhere was overlooked by those developing Plate Tectonic theory? I think not. I think this is the unspoken lie (of omission) of Plate Tectonics that will torpedo the Big Ship, because it goes to the heart of the difference between sea-floor *spreading* and sea-floor *growth*, and chooses growth as the logical option, thus negating convection as the driver for Plate Tectonics .

We wait to see therefore what geophysicists will invent to deny this (for they haven't done thus far; they seem oblivoious to this implication) just as they denied Wegener his continental drift, and Carey his expanding Earth. Having twice before snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by self-serving denial, what aspect of deductive 'rationalism' will it take for geophysicists to overcome their denial this time, to once again claim (eventually) as theirs Earth expansion as the forward position of deductive Earth science?

What will it take? Again we get some idea from Naomi Oreskes assessment of the sociology of the day:-

"The choices these scientists made, moreover, were self-ratifying. American earth scientists chose not to pursue the field-based observational evidence relevant to the question of continental drift; instead they solicited the partronage of private institutions and miliary bureaucracies in support of instrument-driven science. Not surprisingly, then, little new observational evidence in support of the theory was gathered, while reams of instrumental data were. And when these instrumental data were made public and their support of moving continents became evident, earth scientists were satisfied that they had made the right choice. Yet had the Navy not been interested in supporting marine geophysics - had submarine warfare not existed - earth scientists would necessarily have taken a different route, and perhaps been well satisfied with that too."

[ H.W.Menard, 1986   " ..Moreover, success had become a trap. An astonishing fleet of research ships had been created, and it had hungry crews. Research laboratories were proliferating, and into them flocked eager graduate students who needed support. In Washington agencies were created to grant funding. The accepted way to finance a few kilobucks of thought by a senior scientist was to spend a megabuck at sea, and that took lots of time.   ('The Ocean of Truth', p.297) ]   (.. and money : me)

... from which it would seem to take some fortuitous coupling of technological apparatus and the security of funding to support its development to tell us what, from a much simpler and inductive commonsense coupling, is clearly apparent - that the Earth's crust has indeed been distended by the extents of the ocean floors. Hopefully the background of war will not be an additional sociological ingredient, as previously was the case. For it was *exactly* in this wartime coupling (and funding) that lay the evolution of Plate Tectonics; and whence better for that security of funding (in the days of the cold war) than from military sources through the tools that had proved their wartime use?

Moving on from this particular circumspection to questions of more geological import the question then arises, what difference would it have made had Hess (as captain /admiral of the Big Ship) accepted Carey's inductive *geo-logical* conclusion of Earth expansion, instead of as he did, reverting to the well known convective model of Holmes? Hess did after all recognise the value of inductive empirical geology of Earth expansion in solving his three most pressing problems regarding the evolution of the ocean floors. .. So why did he not go with it?

Personally I think again the answer comes back to the security of funding. Hess as a senior naval man knew full well that who pays the piper calls the tune, and that in the political milieu of the day the military were solely interested in securing and maintaining dominance, not answers to questions whether the Earth was expanding or not, nor even if ocean floors were spreading. The new tools that had been developed during the war for detecting ocean depths and the presence of submarines were obviously ones to develop in a new era of Cold War tension, where submarines were now armed with nuclear warheads and the threat of massive annihilation at the press of a psychopathic military button, was very real.

Menard (Ibid. p.38) writes : -
"Before the war there were three oceanographic laboratories in the Unites States: Scripps, Woods Hole, and the University of Washington. They had a total budget of less than $250,000. and with it supported three ships. In 1948 the Navy poured about $600,000 into oceanographic laboratories, which was a sizeable expansion even after allowing for inflation. Up to 1958 it spent a total of $46 million on academic research in oceanography. The number of laboratories multiplied, and the Navy spent about $300 million for ships, facilities and equipment. The Navy disbursements for three laboratories of the most interest here are shown in Table 1.

Lab          1948      1950     1952     1954    1956     1958      Total

WHOI       300       550     1,100    1,020     1,420    1,300      10,600
LGO           35       410        420     360    1,040      520      4,600
SIO           200      305     1,010      450    2,040    1,040      9,900

"By the end of the decade, NSF money was becoming abundant, and Scripps also received significant funding from the State of California. The first decade of postwar expansion, to 1958, was only the beginning. In the next seven years the Federal support for SIO and WHOI would triple to more than $10 million per year. The total for all academic oceanography from ONR and NSF would reach $25 million per year = just 100 times what it ad been in 1941.   In 1948 no one knew that this would happen. Even then, when funding had only doubled, 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." (SIO= Scripps Institute of Oceanography; WHOI=Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; LGO=Lamont Geological Observatory. NSF=National Science foundation?) "

How long it would last would depend on the reason for it. The degree of funding, both directly by the Navy and by specially created Federal grants committees, suggests that it would last as long as Cold War exigencies deemed it necessary. Military imperatives one way and another would have been central to funding.  Any geological understanding that may emerge was entirely spin-off, and had to be regarded as such by those dependent on it (if not the public paying for it). There was a need to keep the focus on the ocean floors, and the methodologies that defined them. Reds were under beds everywhere, and the navy was equipped to nuke 'em, provided they didn't bump into seamounts, the ocean floor, or other submarines of opposing sort. In terms of providing the funding for exploration of the ocean floors, Harry Hess, captain of the the Big ship, was (to the community of geophysicists) unquestionably an *admirable* hero. No question. If Hess's wartime experience had not happened, and Hess's military rank (as captain and later admiral) not been considerable, it is highly probable that Plate Tectonics would never, .. *could* never, have arisen in the face of the emerging geological paradigm of Earth expansion. As Oreskes (above) rightly observes, "Earth scientists would necessarily have taken a different route, and perhaps been well satisfied with that too."

"Different route"? There was only one alternative - the one that Plate Tectonics has resolutely refused to countenance (Earth expansion), because to do so would be to admit that the Big Ship of physics didn't have a clue about mechanism, .. and *that* (in terms of funding) was a no-go area back then. The same is still true today.

It is easy to make a case for Plate Tectonics being a classic example of "being used by your machinery", and Earth science being turned from its 'natural philosophy' inductive roots towards a tool-driven methodology of enquiry. But as much as anything the course of Earth science exploration was determined by the political / sociological climate of those earlier days when bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and when later Russia would threaten America in the space race. Military spending from the Cold War to Star Wars has ensconced physics in the driving seat of Earth science, and ensured the survival of deductive methods that have given us the rag-bag apology of Plate Tectonics as a geological model for crustal tectonics and even, as a sop to a barking public seeking 'value for money', the hyped imperative to look for it on other planets. But even though it has provided for many "the gift that keeps on giving", the geological return from it has been poor despite claims to the contrary. Worse than poor in fact, since it has spawned a false consensus that will require unlearning.

Plate Tectonics has given us starkly contradictory multiple working hypotheses that have served the Earth sciences very poorly, .. that have simply led us up the garden path. Most of all it has been derelict in its scientific duty of falsification, in failing to give any billing whatsoever to alternative views, especially (amongst other things) the incontrovertible fact (apparent to anyone) that the spreading ridges through geological time have got longer along their length as well as across them, .. and that transform faults are the brittle expression of this adjustment to growth, and are *NOT* the so-called "new class of faults" expressing tramrails of convectional mantle flow as continents have separated, as advocated by Mr Wilson. (Googlesearch : - Tuzo Wilson, "a new class of faults"). If ever there was a case of the expedient scientific finagle, a magic rabbit from the geophysical hat to maintain a false assumption, this is one - second only to the choice of subduction over its natural alternative, overriding.

It is time to recognise that Plate Tectonics is long past its use-by, that its roots in military funding imposed a myopia that much hampered exploration of important geological questions by keeping the focus on the ocean floors rather than on their relationship to the continents, and that there is a need therefore for Earth science to return to its traditional (inductive) geo-*logical* roots.  In many ways the larger-scale geological questions *can* only be approached by guesswork, and until such time as computers can truly simulate the higher functions of the human brain, logic steered by rational assessment remains the best tool for the job - a tool that from the many contradictions of Plate Tectonics has been woefully absent in the development of that model. Despite the obvious advantages that technology offers to science, the limitations of deductive methods of tool-driven exploration in Earth science should be recognised, not in regard to the tools themselves which are exemplary, but for the expediencies underlying their use that for decades have maintained a demonstrably false consensus, whose 'success' is unremarkable for anything other than it pays mortgages along the road that leads up the garden path.

Which is laudable enough as regards those who live in the garden, .. but the barking public dog might have something to growl about.

(And piss on the lamp post!)

See also blog for Earth expansion at :-
http://earthexpansion.blogspot.com/]

Plate Tectonics and subduction

2011-05-30T08:40:00.000-07:00

...the obvious question..
( Blog for website at http://users.indigo.net.au/don )

Fig.1 Standard image for subduction. Courtesy of :-
http://earthsci.org/education/teacher/basicgeol/platec/platec.html#ConvergentPlate

The above illustration raises the obvious question : -

"How wide does the ocean floor have to be before subduction, the sinking of oceanic lithospheric plates, begins?"
To which the obvious answer is : -
"Far enough for it to cool down so it will get dense enough to sink."
"And how far is that? "
"Well, .. that depends on how fast the mantle loses heat, and how fast it moves from the ridge. If it loses heat slowly and moves quickly, then it can go a long way before sinking. Conversely if it loses heat quickly and moves slowly it would sink almost immediately."

And thus does Plate Tectonics (theory), depend on the 'ifs' of subduction, .. for without the mandates of 'IF' properly aportioned the Earth could not remain a constant size and the extrusion of the ocean floors would mean that the Earth would be getting bigger. But the actual dynamic framework is entirely conditional on 'if', and thoroughly sensitive therefore to the 'gigo' (garbage-in, garbage-out) factor, namely the underlying assumptions and dependent incestuous logic used to develop the theory.

For example :- (fact); the subduction zones of the world occur around the Pacific; there are virtually none in the Atlantic, .. which means (theory) that in order for the basic premise ("that the Earth must remain a constant size") to be satisfied Atlantic spreading must be taken up in Pacific subduction, i.e., the Pacific is not just accommodating its own subduction related to spreading, but that related to Atlantic spreading as well, .. and, additionally, that west of the Indian Ocean Ridge, .. and that of the Southern Ocean too. It is in this continual 'winking in-and-out' between fact and theory and the intentional blurring of both, that Plate Tectonics finds its legitimacy, where theory is invented to fit every encountered aspect of fact, then 'smudged' to be represented as fact.

In Plate Tectonics it is not important that one element of theory contradicts the other. Science, (according to 'the method') lies in their invention and testing, and if one particular theoretical shoe fits one particular foot of fact, then it is offered for wear - and the audience being enamoured as it is of the belief that scientists have a respect for credibility (google up "scientific misconduct" for a return of 857,000 entries, .. to which we shall return later), buys this 'load of old cobblers', for no other reason than the hype is fashionable.

Plate Tectonics offers two explanations by which subduction can be understood in relation to the difference between Pacific spreading (with subduction) and the Atlantic /Indian /Southern Oceans (without it). The first is as described above, that Atlantic enlargement is entirely taken up by Pacific subduction, .. when Atlantic spreading is viewed as a plume, with no return to the mantle: the head of the plume is riding out, driving older mantle crust apart, as for example where the Americas override the eastern Pacific margin.

The second is where both oceans have their own subducting quota, so that subduction for the sector of the Southern Atlantic (say) occurs as hanging-wall return to the mantle on the western side of the South American Plate, while Pacific return is on the footwall side (Fig.2).

Fig.2. Subduction zones have two sides. (Not just one.)

Subduction associated with the Southern Atlantic on the African side is incorporated by supposed Mediterranean subduction (although this is actually European collapse from the north, .. a continuation of Himalayan collapse). However subduction related to the eastern half of northern Atlantic spreading presumably occurs somewhere beneath Asia, or at a pinch down the hanging wall of the Western Pacific subduction zone. However Plate Tectonics regards this particular subduction vector as consequent on Pacific subduction (Fig.3) ...

Fig.3. Subduction. Turning "according to arrows". (All that's missing is the traffic lights, but with the Plate Tectonic police on duty 24/7 these are deemed unnecessary.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subduction#General_description

... and therefore disallows any possible expression of North Atlantic subduction at all at this location. Subduction if it occurs must lie somewhere under the Eurasian landmass. As for subduction related to spreading in the Southern Ocean, Plate Tectonics offers none. It is assumed (somehow) to be accommodated in Pacific subduction.

The Fiery Ring of the Pacific exists, it is said, because the (theoretically) subducting plate supposedly grinds down beneath it and heats it up, melting the basal part of the continental lithosphere so that the fractions rise to create the volcanoes that describe the Ring of Fire. But if so much heat is generated (at least an order of magnitude more than that at the ridges going by the number of Earthquakes in a given time - not to mention that due to depth of burial) why would the slab ever sink at all? Why wouldn't it just get hot and bob back up?

Plate Tectonics' answer is that the buttress of continental lithosphere it encounters is "forcing it down" into the zone of eclogitisation (the temperature /pressure regime where basalt converts to its denser eclogite equivalent) whereupon it is dense enough to sink. But why would it? There is no density differential between a downgoing eclogite 'slab' and the eclogitic mantle that is already down there. The only way there can be further descent is if there is 'forcing', in which case we must address the question what precisely might (theoretically) be the driver doing the forcing? The continental buttress is merely the agent of diversion, the lever that switches the points on the tramlines, so to speak. The forcing, it must be concluded, originates at the spreading ridge, and even before that, in the (supposedly) rising mantle column, .. highlighting the further questions : -

1. Why is the deep mantle source of heat a linear, rather than a point source (plume)?
2. Why, if gravity got the differentiated shells of the Earth together in the first place, is the crust now being broken up by (theoretical) "convection"?
3. Why, with the downgoing slab under such necessary 'forcing' from the ridge, would the ocean floors not be crumpled into Himalayan-like mountain belts? .. all the way from the subduction zone to the spreading ridge?

If convectional cooling drives Plate Tectonics then it seems illogical that the greatest dissipation of energy should occur at subduction zones, where the cycle is already most spent and returning to the mantle, rather, say, than at the spreading ridges where the cycle breaks through gravitational containment to split the continents. Dissipation here however is an order of magnitude less than that at the subduction zones and the expanses of the ocean floors compared with both ridges and subduction zones show virtually no dissipation of energy at all ! In the Pacific the maximum energy release (Earthquakes and volcanoes) is half-a-world away from the spreading ridges, and in the Atlantic there is no comparable situation. And again (fact) the ocean floors are characterised by a graveyard of extensional ridge fractures; if gravitational correction off the spreading ridges is thought (theoretically) to be due to "ridge push", then Plate Tectonics must explain the absence of any compressional strain in the ocean floors.

And of course, if continental lithosphere "forces" the oceanic plate down then it must be explained why "forcing down" doesn't happen directly at the ridges anyway (Fig.1), i.e., before the ocean floors begin to open. Why should continental resistance to spreading have been any less at spreading ridges, compared to the resistance half-a-world away at subduction zones that "forces the plates down"? Plate Tectonics might (though never has) offer the explanation that separation is prefaced by erosion of continental roots, thus thinning the crust and making separation easier, .. in the process erecting another unfalsifiable epicycle-hypothesis to be tested, for if any melt-mixing due to corrosion were to operate, it would apply equally to expansion as to Plate Tectonics. Moreover if (in the face of such resistance to cycling at subduction zones) erosion of continental roots adjacent to spreading ridges applied for the supposed innumerable wilson cycles that Plate Tectonics proposes existed, then why are there any continents left at all? Why have continents not been assimilated by corosion into the mantle long ago?

More grist for the (theoretical) subduction mill.

And if subduction zones exemplify (as earthquakes) so much energetic resistance to sea-floor spreading (compared to rupture at spreading ridges where there appears to have been comparatively little), why would spreading occur in the first place? Why, with so much apparent energy in the system, wouldn't the uplifting mantle just lift the crust up in situ in a global ridge-doming event, with no return in subduction zones? In fact, this is exactly what the geological facts point to as having happened all around the Pangaean equatorial zone, focussed on Indonesia. This is exactly what is showing that the Earth is getting bigger.

The short answer to all of this theorising is that the geological facts point to the landward, continental side of the subduction zone as the agent doing the moving, .. not the ocean floors. We can see it even just from the distribution of the Earthquakes.

'Movement' of oceanic lithosphere has no reality other than fictional arrows stamped on all images of theoretical subduction just in case you get to thinking along geological lines and suspect that Hess's "Essay in geopoetry" (which was "for a time the single most referenced work in solid-Earth geophysics") is exactly that - theory. And when we reflect that it was concocted in unapologetic and dismissive denial of the empirical geological facts supporting expansion, and has populated the geological literature with the "no mechanism" mantra designed to avoid addressing the problems that this raises, ..we must acknowledge that really, .. it warrants little respect.

("..What? .. "No mechanism" a problem for Earth science?? .. You mean, ..a problem in science? That will never do! " )

[ See also blog for Earth expansion at :-
http://earthexpansion.blogspot.com/]

Plate Tectonics is a Theory

2011-05-06T22:39:00.000-07:00

( .. Earth expansion is a fact ..) ( Blog for website at http://users.indigo.net.au/don/ )

Road Map for Plate Tectonics

1. Destruction of the ocean floors. We might (with Earth expansion) say that Plate Tectonics should begin with the creation /extrusion /emplacement of the ocean floors, because after all something must be created before it can be destroyed.

But creation is not where Plate Tectonics begins. Nor does it really begin as many believe, with the destruction of the ocean floors. It begins with the *perceived need* for their destruction. It's a subtle difference that shifts the emphasis from the fact to the perception of the fact. The destruction itself is arguable, but for Plate Tectonics the *perceived necessity* for destruction is very real.

So the case for Plate Tectonics does not reside in the facts themselves, nor exactly in the way they are interpreted (though this is somewhat closer), .. but in the way they are perceived to be structured in the first place, in order that they *can* be interpreted.

The way I read it (as outlined in earlier posts), it begins exactly where the website of the USGS says it begins, .. with Harry Hess's *surmise* as follows:-

"..The size of the Earth has not changed significantly during the past 600 million years, and very likely not since shortly after its formation 4.6 billion years ago. The Earth's unchanging size implies that the crust must be destroyed at about the same rate as it is being created, as Harry Hess surmised." [emphasis - df. ] ( http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/understanding.html and scroll down to "Convergent boundaries".)

Thus are facts nuanced (presenting a 'surmise' as a fact, indeed). The foundation is not in the body of the paragraph, but in the last four words - "as Harry Hess surmised" (that the crust must be destroyed at about the same rate as it is being created) - and they are hoping nobody notices. It's quite possible the author him/herself didn't notice, though I doubt it since writing syntax like that for science is quite slippery. Succeeding in being more factual the Wikipedia says it this way :-

"Plate tectonics < ....... > is a scientific theory which describes the large scale motions of Earth's lithosphere. The theory builds on the older concepts of continental drift, developed during the first decades of the 20th century (one of the most famous advocates was Alfred Wegener), and was accepted by the majority of the geoscientific community when the concepts of seafloor spreading were developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s."

..which acknowledges that Plate Tectonics was based on earlier ideas of Holmes and numerous others, that convection was the driver of continental separation. It followed Hess's rejection of the implication of the geological evidence [presented by Carey] that the earth had expanded and would "solve three of my [Hess's] greatest difficulties regarding the evolution of the ocean basins."

Note that Hess didn't reject the evidence, .. he rejected the implication that followed from it re. enlargement as "philosophically unsatisfying", and therefore substituted the *need* for destruction of the ocean floors to match their creation (which is about expansion). No-one has contradicted Carey's case for expansion on geological grounds, only on the "no mechanism" claim.

The underpinning of Plate Tectonics was therefore not based on empirical fact but on Holmes' (and others') theory of convection, by way of (Hess's and others') denial of geological evidence that the Earth was getting bigger. The comment that "crust being destroyed (at subduction zones) at the same rate as it is created means that the Earth is not increasing in size", is entirely hypothesis, and the circular argument is obvious, which incidentally renders Plate Tectonics equivalent to Junk Science. (Junk science is when the initial assumption is used as the supporting pillar to reach the same conclusion as the assumption.)

Many people were working in the new field of geophysics, and framed their results accordingly, thus skewing the emphasis of the findings away from geology. This is the reason why Plate Tectonics (as a theory of convection) supplanted continental drift as something new when it wasn't. The way Hess in his 1962 paper dismissed Holmes's work on convection reads as a classic example of appropriation. The problems he was trying to address in relation to the ocean floors were by no means new :-

"In reality, this question had been solved already by numerous scientists during the forties and the fifties, like Arthur Holmes, Vening-Meinesz, Coates and many others: The crust in excess disappeared along what were called the oceanic trenches where so-called "subduction" occurred." ...

What he was doing in adopting this was avoiding having to face the implications of the data of continental retrofits and much else, which supported a smaller Earth as illustrated by Carey. And he was not alone. The complicity of the entire geophysics community in Hess's appropriation is apparent from the reference in the Wikipedia, that Hess's paper was "for a time the single most referenced work in solid-Earth geophysics".
(Continuing the above quote..) :-

" ... Therefore, when various scientists during the early sixties started to reason on the data at their disposal regarding the ocean floor, the pieces of the theory fell quickly into place. Wikipedia ref." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics
"Mid-ocean ridge spreading and convection"

I don't believe the "various scientists" did accept it on the data, because the essential facts on which those pieces of the theory "fell quickly into place", described creation of the ocean floors, which concerned the Earth getting bigger (expansion). Geophysicists were effectively taking the fall-back position of adopting the theory-of-the-day of convection that for nearly two decades had been first-year text-book geology - and, riding on the back of sea-floor spreading (expansion), calling it new. I believe *this* was the reason why geologists "adopted it": they didn't 'adopt' it at all - not on the new data at any rate: they already accepted it as a norm. They must have, because as a theory it had been standard text-book geology for nearly two decades.

In all retrospective comments on acceptance of Plate Tectonics, the phrase "quickly falling into place" is a common one and seems to be designed to gloss over this point, with the purpose of talking up new data of the ocean floors. Media likes to be part of 'new developments' - especially ones related to new fields emerging from prestigious institutions. In other words, the theory "falling quickly into place" was a 'media beat-up' in today's terms.

Thus was spotlighted the tracks down which the brand new gravy train was about to roll. What was being proposed in principle, in terms of theory at least (convection) was no more than people already knew. Certainly the facts emerging from the ocean floors provided additional graphic substance, but that substance, first and foremost, supported expansion. Destruction was a cop-out, to avoid having to face what could not be talked about - everything to which there could be aimed the criticism of "no mechanism". As a result and with a consensus assured, the emphasis was towards shoring up and confirming the meme that people already knew, rather than (as science demands) its falsification.

It was a classic example of the 'meme machine' at work, an appeal to people's intuitive understanding of the way tectonics worked using crumpling tablecloths to describe mountain building, and soup in a pot to describe convection):- "Everybody already knows what we mean, so we don't have to explain ourselves very well. In fact we don't even have to explain it at all; all we have to say is, "everybody knows" ". (Slogans will do.) ("Whenever ideas fail, men invent words" ~ Martin H. Fischer.)

In fact those subduction zones need very close scrutiny, which, in their reference to 'flat subduction' and "overriding" Plate Tectonics is only now beginning to do. "Flat subduction" does not return oceanic lithosphere to the deep mantle. And with no return to the deep mantle there is no convection, only sea-floor spreading and skating ('decoupling') of the crust on (/from) the mantle, . which is expansion. Sea floor spreading is the fact. The theory to explain it (in the absence of subduction and in the rejection of Hess's "philosophical unsatisfaction" as an modus operandum for science) is still not known.

Hence the *necessity* of subduction, with all its contradictions, for without it, Plate Tectonics is in the same ("no mechanism") position as Earthexpansion. But the 'soup-in-a-pot' convection model has no currency in the exchange with Earth expansion, based on factual evidence in the alternative blog (which Plate Tectonics ignores).

In short, Earth expansion includes facts that Plate Tectonics omits, and explains facts where Plate Tectonics provides only self-contradictory conundrums. Predictions, by the very nature of scale and time of parameters in Earth science , are specious. The only valuable prediction is that Plate Tectonics will naturally evolve to Earth expansion as [observation + logic] trumps [theory founded on "philosophical un-satisfaction"].

[ See also blog for Earth expansion at :-
http://earthexpansion.blogspot.com/]

Berkeley.edu credits Alfred Wegener and Arthur Holmes with Plate Tectonics

2011-05-01T19:52:00.000-07:00

( Blog for website at http://users.indigo.net.au/don/ )

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/wegener.html
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/geology/techist.html

The account in the above links from berkeley.edu is a good one for the credit it gives to Alfred Wegener as the father, not just of continental drift, but of Plate Tectonics as well:-

"Some truly revolutionary scientific theories may take years or decades to win general acceptance among scientists. This is certainly true of plate tectonics, one of the most important and far-ranging geological theories of all time; when first proposed, it was ridiculed, but steadily accumulating evidence finally prompted its acceptance, with immense consequences for geology, geophysics, oceanography, and paleontology. And the man who first proposed this theory was a brilliant interdisciplinary scientist, Alfred Wegener."

..and, in a link in the article, for the credit also accorded to Arthur Holmes for his elaboration of convection as a possible means for explaining continental displacment prior to its popular uptake some thirty years later. I might be wrong, but it sounds to me as if it is written by somebody who has not just learned the liturgy, but who actually lived the time of acceptance of Plate Tectonic theory.

However it is not a view that would appear to be shared by most advocates of Plate Tectonics, who would emphasise the achievements of modern geophysics (echo-sounders, magnetometers, gravity and seismic meters, and, later, satellites). But it is an accurate view nevertheless, for geophysicists well know (but usually overlook) all geophysical interpretations (/speculations) must be built on as solid a geological foundation as possible, ["the geo comes before the physics"], and the data gained in these various ways that have turned out to support Wegener and Holmes, should be therefore slanted towards supporting them rather than as appears from most write-ups, appropriating them.

The reason why there is such an impression lies in the remoteness of geophysical methods. Acquired data is removed from direct observation; derivative interpretations are (*entirely*) speculative. Thus occurs a natural schism between a geological way of looking at the surface of the Earth (through direct empirical observation and logical integrative synthesis = geo-logy), and a geophysical approach through the lens of speculative theory based on remotely acquired data. It seems those developing the field sought to distance their findings from these geological roots and represent them in terms as substantial as possible, ..as something apart from earlier geological developments, .. as something unto itself, .. a 'new way' of looking at the Earth - through the lens of geophysics.

The reasons why this parting of the ways happened are several, but two are of particular note. The first is that geophysics developed out of technologies of military interest following two world wars, and that those who pioneered the field were generally young and cognisant of the career opportunites that such a new field offered. Physics had cultural prominence due to the atomic bomb and the escalation of the cold war. In relation to geology (the mouldering dark of libraries, tales of fossils and dust, and dead old men) physics applied to the geosphere was (to a younger fraternity) young and 'sexy'. Also in the space raceYuri Gagarin (a Russian!) had done it ! What did this portend for the allocation of public moneys in research of the geo-sort, coloured with the kudos of physics? Geophysics was no longer to be seen as prefaced by the 'geo', but by the physics, and there was a concerted attempt to represent it as such. Whether intentional or not, geophysics developed a field of its own, and in a rush, ..with Plate Tectonics its eventual geological synthesis, but something of an apology, for not only was the priority of the 'geo' set aside, but the 'logic' simply just went by the board. In the face of these manifest deficits, Plate Tectonics was hyped to the nines with supposed geological achievement to conceal the reality of its subtext - that of career potential to be milked for all it was worth as the "gift that keeps on giving".

As a theory Plate Tectonics is claimed by its supporters to be one of the major achievements of the twentieth century, but the hard reality is that its many contradictions render it entirely absent of any geological support whatsoever! This is of no concern to Plate Tectonicists however, whose fall-back position is that as theory anyway it can always be massaged for more research.

Theory rules. 'Physics' after all it is scientific, and exemplifies the scientific method: gather the data, make a theory, and test it. Does it stand up? Yes? Fine. Make another theory. Does that one stand up too? Yes? Then you have two theories. Such is 'The Method', and remote geophysics is admirably suited to it, by actors who see their role in the gung ho invention of as many theories as are necessary to explain the various elements of data. The integrated picture is a sham. But it must be said they do come up with some really dazzlingly impressive hat-magic. For example :-

"...how seismic wave speed anomalies may be converted to temperature/ pressure "using equations of state determined from actual rocks", and thus converted to density, enabling a further calculation be made to extract stiffness of the lithosphere from which may then be calculated subduction rates and thus rates of mantle overturn, so proving that convection driven by subducting slabs is truly the dynamic agent for global tectonics. http://users.indigo.net.au/don/nonsense/rubber.html#rubber."

However, as an approach to global geology this kind of hyperbole with its reference to "actual rocks" as a sop to geology is as superficial as it is laughable. Although usually prefaced by references to 'teams of researchers' and citing the institutions they hail from, in reality suchlike confabulations have *no value whatsoever* in any assessment of tectonic process. A remote geophysical approach necessarily employs much that is hypothetical that *can* only be tested quantitatively, but much of geological process is by nature of scale, time and material, unknowable. The rigour of quantitative computational approaches are a poor substitute for direct empirical observation and rational assessment, no matter how sophisticated the mathematics or keen the astuteness of intellectual endeavour deployed - at this stage in understanding the Earth anyway. And direct observation of the Earth's surface restrained by logic wins hands down over speculations based on 'data' that are derived representations removed from the real world. Geophysics has given much excellent data. It is the resolute drive to interpret it in ways that refute logic that is the problem - and the second reason for the schism.

The second reason for the schism was the direction that the "new global tectonics" were headed, which lay in confirming the young age of the ocean floors, which in turn implied that the Earth was enlarging at a remarkable rate. This presented those of the new field with an excruciating dilema, for an expanding Earth had already been proposed as an explanation for Wegener's continental dispersal, and (as had 'drift' before) been rejected on grounds of "no mechanism". To support it was to raise the spectre of professional suicide, for the new findings not only confirmed the fact, but still offered nothing in the way of explanation. Geophysics was faced with its own objection. Was this bright new sexy field with such tantalisingly promise of careers and funding going to have to eat its own words and capitulate after all to geology with its mouldering dust, death-by-palaeontology, and the inedible crow of "no Mechanism"?

No Fear! If the goose laying the golden egg was to be cooed and wooed for its career value, then surely it would be suicidal to begin by advertising ignorance, not only of the *reasons* for expansion, but in admitting the fact that it *was* expanding in the first place! It was simpler (and easier) to deny that it wasn't - even if denial did contradict the empirical geological evidence of the fact. Evidence, after all could be regarded as a matter of opinion, and cooked, massaged, slanted, ...omitted. Theory (of physics at least), stood as impressively high as the fact of the mushroom cloud that enveloped the end the war and promised the golden egg.

And so, by the mask of 'fact', theory ruled.

Wikipedia :-

"In 1960, Hess made his single most important contribution, which is regarded as part of the major advance in geologic science of the 20th century. In a widely circulated report to the Office of Naval Research, he advanced the theory, now generally accepted, that the Earth's crust moved laterally away from long, volcanically active oceanic ridges. He only understood his ocean floor profiles across the North Pacific Ocean after Bruce Heezen (1953, Lamont Group) discovered the Great Global Rift, running along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Seafloor spreading, as the process was later named, helped establish Alfred Wegener's earlier (but generally dismissed at the time) concept of continental drift as scientifically respectable. This triggered a revolution in the earth sciences. Hess's report was formally published in his History of Ocean Basins (1962), which for a time was the single most referenced work in solid-earth geophysics."

Hess described his 1962 paper ("the single most referenced work in solid-earth geophysics"), as "An Essay in Geopoetry". Strange then, that bit about "the most referenced work" elevating 'poetry' over the geological evidence for Earth expansion. For the context of Hess's 1960 versus 1962 dates see previous posts, how 'Hollywood Cowboys' got to eat 'Big Macs'. The reference to Heezen (who supported Earth expansion - also see 'Cowboys'), is also dated 1960 (see wiki references).]

The article is also exemplary in crediting Arthur Holmes's priority in developing the concept of convection as the driver for continental displacements over that of Hess and Dietz in the 1960's. (And this is the bit that makes me think that the guy (or gal) writing the note for Berkeley is the same age (and inclination in this matter of assessment of Plate Tectonics) as me. (Might be wrong, .. but he puts the emphases in the right places) :-

"In 1929, about the time Wegener's ideas began to be dismissed, Arthur Holmes elaborated on one of Wegener's many hypotheses; the idea that the mantle undergoes thermal convection. This idea is based on the fact that as a substance is heated its density decreases and rises to the surface until it is cooled and sinks again. This repeated heating and cooling results in a current which may be enough to cause continents to move. Arthur Holmes suggested that this thermal convection was like a conveyor belt and that the upwelling pressure could break apart a continent and then force the broken continent in opposite directions carried by the convection currents. This idea received very little attention at the time.

"Not until the 1960's did Holmes' idea receive any attention. Greater understanding of the ocean floor and the discoveries of features like mid-oceanic ridges, geomagnetic anomalies parallel to the mid-oceanic ridges, and the association of island arcs and oceanic trenches occurring together and near the continental margins, suggested convection might indeed be at work. These discoveries and more led Harry Hess (1962) and R.Dietz (1961) to publish similar hypotheses based on mantle convection currents, now known as "sea floor spreading". This idea was basically the same as that proposed by Holmes over 30 years earlier, but now there was much more evidence to further develop and support the idea."

(He's just out a bit with his omissions.) (But it is about Plate Tectonics after all.) He omits to observe that Holmes's 'elaboration' also formed the last chapter of his book, "Principles of Physical Geology', published in 1944, and was a standard student text for nearly twenty years before the concept of convection was revisited by Hess and Dietz. By rights the new findings of the ocean floors should have been represented as support for the earlier advances by Wegener and Holmes, but instead Hess peremptorily dismisses Holmes's synthesis of convection, giving him hardly a passing mention in the body of his text, and not including him at all in his references (Hollywood cowboys link above, first citation by Hess). Naughty! But not *entirely* his fault because his article had to pass peer review! So on this score (writing Holmes convection out of the picture, .. but representing his own convection ("Essay in Geopoetry") as the holy grail for the newly emergent Plate Tectonics,"the single most referenced work in solid-earth geophysics") there was a strong element of collusion right across the board of the geophysics community.

As well, the article (Berkeley) omits all mention of the role of Samuel Warren Carey in the development of Plate Tectonic theory. Some at the time credited Carey with being wholly pivotal in the emergence of that theory, while others appear to have been less generous (see above link 'Hollywood Cowboys' ) - another instance of appropriation - that continues to this day.

The article also fails to highlight the *ambiguity* couched in the two central pillars for Plate Tectonics - sea-floor spreading and subduction, the first ignoring the importance of spreading *along* the ridge, and the second being more logically and accurately interpreted as *overriding*. True, the article is about the origins of Plate Tectonics, but in doing so it highlights another important point - the way that emergent thought is written out of history by the 'winners', and that the foundations of all claimed "spectacular breakthroughs" can always do with the closest scrutiny. In science wrong turnings are common, when the seeds of real advance are then to be found in writings much earlier than the fashion of the day.

There is no ambiguity in geology as there is in Plate Tectonics; the oceans floors do not spread in the way Plate Tectonics says, away from the ridges. Along-ridge spreading means that the ridges grow *away* from the continents - and up. It is unthinkable that this simple difference was not considered, and clear therefore why the term 'spreading' was adopted for the ocean floors, and not 'growth'. Even though the alternatives - 1. continents move away from the ridges, 2. ridges move away from the continents - are obvious, they have never been impartially assessed, an omission that is hardly accidental.

The article could also do to highlight Hess's Dilema, namely his own admission that the geological underpinnings of expansion would solve his three main difficulties in understanding the evolution of the ocean floors. His dismissal of this on grounds that it was "philosophically unsatisfying" on account of "no mechanism", has down the decades become a war-cry, an apagos satanos to thrust in the face of the factual geological evidence that the Earth indeed has got very substantially bigger in the recent geological past.

Also to be noted is that Hess regarded his article as highly speculative (an 'Essay in Geopoetry'), which it is. It is not the solid foundation that in later years many would like to represent; it is indeed little more than that proposed by Holmes nearly thirty years earlier, and by the 1960's, whether rightly or wrongly, standard understanding of geological process.

The ambiguity that Plate Tectonics stands on can be summed up by the following statement commonly used to support it :-

"We now know that Wegener's theory was wrong in one major point: continents do not plow through the ocean floor..."

Well is that so... ? I don't know that it is. Continental lithosphere is said to float on the more dense asthenosphere because the lithosphere is less dense, but there is plenty of evidence around continental margins to show that the continents and the mantle are *not* rivetted together like ships' bulwarks and piggiebacked around on the mantle like so much flotsam, but rather that the continents are dislocated from their mantle roots in many parts of the world, .. which questions the whole validity of the 'plate' concept. Do boats float *on* the water or *in* the water?

" Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack
butting through the Channel in the mad March days,"

...And those dislocations do have a global architectural symmetry commensurate with the Earth's rotation (see above header link.)

Just as Wegener said.

Plate Tectonics? .. is entirely up the garden path. "The seeds of progress are often to be found in writings earlier than the fashion of the day", .. and Berkeley.edu is going some way towards redressing the balance of credits due to the geological rather than the geophysical origins of present day Earth Sciences.

"Earth expansion is dead? Long live Earth expansion!"

Omigod! Who can hear the rumble of another gravy train revving up? Who will get aboard, I wonder? Certainly it won't be for the geological destination - of dead men, skeletons and dusty library shelves, but the prize of a successful career. After all, it falls to few to advance the science. Most are happy enough with a foothold.

Nope, .. it's not the science that drives the science, .. not the Earth sciences anyway, it's careers, fashion, and whatever hot button words can be found that will unlock the treasure chest of funds. Naked expediency, in other words. Global warming? (Maybe, .. but passe.) Quartz as a catalyst for Plate tectonics? (Good try, but hardly.)

"..What about the Earth gonna explode, an' we need a ticket for the other side of the galaxy? Anybody gotta plan how to scrounge some munny?"

[ See also Expanding Earth blog at
http://www.earthexpansion.blogspot.com/ ]

Hypothetical mechanism or geological fact?

2011-04-22T19:58:00.000-07:00

There appears to be a mistaken popular belief that Plate Tectonics is to do with geological facts. It is not. It is entirely a *theory* about *mechanism* to explain (limited) facts, and a concerted attempt to arrange that theory around the premise that the Earth must remain a constant size - for no other reason than it is the most convenient and happiest position to take in the face of the difficult implication arising from those facts, which is that the Earth has NOT remained a constant size through geological time, but has in fact doubled in size very recently (geologically speaking).

This distinction between the facts and a mechanism to describe those facts should be a simple one, but in Plate Tectonics it is far from it. Elements of the theory are presented as geological fact, and the theory as a whole is represented as a 'goes-without-saying', fait accompli. The most graphic example of this is the accepted, so-called 'fact' of subduction, when the same situation can be represented more logically as overriding. The difference when traced to its root is that between Plate Tectonics and Earth expansion, which is why in Plate Tectonics the overriding option is not pursued.

Plate Tectonics is all about mechanism, under which are buried many assumptions and conjectures. But the geological foundation is limited and much removed from its empirical base. Earth expansion on the other hand is simply about showing the spatial and temporal geological relationships on a global scale using the same logical approach as it does to define local and regional geology with well-tested principles of stratigraphic and structural superposition.

When Plate Tectonics is boiled down to its essence all that supports it is a zone of earthquakes around the Pacific which is happily assumed to be a zone of destruction of the oceanic lithosphere and its return to the deep mantle, where it is represented as a 'slab'. But logically this cannot be. It *IS* an array of earthquakes shattering the crust.. In geological terms calling it a slab is like calling a heap of rubble the same as solid rock, and is symptomatic of Plate Tectonics' woeful and cavalier disregard not only for geological facts, but for simple logic. People defer to this nonsense and don't pick it up because they appear to think physics has authority on account of its exploration of the quantum world and the destruction this can wreak.

Plate Tectonics makes (and from earthquake data alone can make) no directional discrimination between the earthquake solutions of subduction and overriding, but conveniently chooses the former for no other reason than it supports its assumption that the Earth cannot get bigger. This distinction (between the geological facts and an explanation for them) appears to be not generally appreciated among PT-advocates who readily represent assumption and speculation as fact.

Plate Tectonics purports to be workable, ...and within its own shaky terms of hypothesised parameters it may, since so many seem to support it, although there would appear to controversy regarding just about every element it postulates - single or multiple cell convection, plumes, subducting slabs, roll-back, slab-pull, ridge push, even "trapdoors" and "mantle wind". None of these have to do with geology but arise purely from derivative speculation within the rubbery arithmetic of seismology, which deals with the fractional differences in arrival times of seismic waves when coupled with supposed material properties of rocks deep in the Earth's crust (or mantle). However such has been the efficacy of promotion of the theory over decades that these imaginative speculations and onanistic variations thereof are indeed popularly regarded fact.

Earth expansion on the other hand is a construct of surface geological observation, in which geophysics may or may not be used as support. All honest appraisals of geophysical data will admit that interpretation MUST be guided by geological knowledge, NOT the other way round. Earth expansion is not a theory, and does not offer a mechanism. Insofar as geological observations are 'tantamount-to-fact', Earth expansion is a FACT.

The transition from Plate Tectonics to Earth expansion is no less than one of fundamental paradigm change. However, for anyone to invest time in this enterprise with any expectation of credit is to misunderstand the nature of that sort of change, the fogging of it by time taken for change to happen, and the many factors that affect it. Given the investment of their life's work in Plate Tectonics and the popularity enjoyed by that paradigm, resistance to the change by many will be eXtreme. Change will be decades in the making, .. and particularly now with the internet, it will be heavily dependent on the developing cultural milieu and not possible to credit to a single source.

The internet is a new medium of communication, and a more democratic one than traditional science journals of the past. Search engines are increasingly powerful and electronic archives are formidable repositories. Any who think that the written record of peer review and sequential publication dates retains evidence of priroty as in previous decades are mistaken. Through the internet science has irrevocably opened its doors to the public (as indeed was the original intent) and peer review has taken a different meaning from a few decades ago. In its thirst for ever-newer material, the media is making it increasingly difficult for science to keep up, with the result that the most assinine scientific 'findings' (usually nowadays "by teams of researchers" for added clout) are lauded as significant. Academic credits, once zealously sought as evidence of achievement, must in many cases change to a source embarassment as they are opened to public view, .. if not through the exorbitant (unaffordable) paygates of the source journals, then through the wider reach of popular science journalism and personal blogs that make it no longer possible to restrict the forum of science to the cloisters of academia.

Earth expansion is supported by irrefutable geological facts that are obvious to anyone. However the seed will not grow if the nutrients are absent, or if the soil is uncompromisingly hostile, or if there is a change in the weather. Change happens when the time is right, the ground has been prepared, and following conditions are favourable. This 'preparing the ground' is what this site and others' writings are about and short-circuits any claim to priority. As has already been noted it will fall to no single person to be credited for the change. Considerations of an expanding Earth predated Plate Tectonics by many decades before being derailed. Carey pursued the geological evidence relentlessly and can be considered torchbearer, but was overtaken by the incestuous onanism of geophysics, and groupie smushing by geologists seduced by the excitement of a new fad, and bright new publicaion potential.

One thing is certain however: Plate Tectonics will be relegated to the refuse bin of history. Neal Adams and Michael Netzer are doing an excellent job of popularising the concept of Earth expansion through animations on the internet, .. for if there is one thing that graphic artists irrefutably *do* have which very many scientists do not (given their typical descent into the mire of scale problems in any controversy) it is a sense of proportion. A skill in this area is unquestionably requisite, and will be essential in dismantling the contradictions and specious sophistry of Plate Tectonics.

"Does the subducting slab drive Plate Tectonics? Or does Plate Tectonics drive the subducting slab?" (Uyeda)

Adams' insistence that the continents "wind back to a sphere" (Google Adams + You tube) is correct. Although the detail of reconstruction may of course be augmented this is the incontrovertible fact that will replace Plate Tectonics' mantra of "No Mechanism". Anyway, if mechanism is an issue then it is one that Plate Tectonics must also address, for the mechanism creating the ocean floors for Earth expansion is exactly the same as that creating ocean floors for Plate Tectonics. No difference. The question of EXTRA mass bears on the question of mass itself, and falls in the ambit of nuclear physics, not geology. Adams' representation is simply stating a fact that is apparent to all, .. that the ocean floors have distended the crust to the extent of the ocean floors. It is a simple case of the public blowing the whistle on the emperor's new clothes.

By hiding behind the mantra of "no mechanism" geophysicists (for Plate Tectonics is a construction of geophysics) are simply highlighting their OWN ignorance - of the mechanism by which planetary material is formed in the first place, and its transmutation to the elements by which this distention has happened - and are refusing to acknowledge it.

Geophysics is being called to account in having failed to recognise its role in solving what is probably the greatest breakthrough offered to science yet, "By what agency, and by what expression, is energy converted to mass." Instead, in the face of this and in the name of professional expediency it has opted to remain enconced in the specious sophistry of infantile soup-in-the-pot convection above, .. because it is safe, and does not offend their "philosophical satisfaction".

Craig venter opines "I think the way science is conducted around the world, we probably waste over 90% of the money." Michael Crichton states, "Scientists best serve public policy by living within the ethics of science, not those of politics. If the scientific community will not unfrock the charlatans, the public will not discern the difference-- science and the nation will suffer." I say, if Plate Tectonics will not own and dissect its deficiences and leaves it to others such as the creationist church, then it will lose all credibility.

And will be deserving of that loss.

If scientists themselves will not unfrock the charlatans, then the public must.

Plate Tectonics as Hollow Earth Theory

2011-04-20T00:42:00.000-07:00

( Blog for website at http://users.indigo/net.au/don )

Fig.1 Collapse (two days before March 11th). Earthquakes preceeding the tsunami of March 11th 2011 herald the collapse of the wall of lithosphere into the Japan trench (the big one of the 11th is also shown) Arrow on the right (with the red flag) shows plate movement according to the USGS. Arrow on the left is according to the interpretation here of slumping out and over the Pacific plate (no plate movement). (Height exaggeration is x 3 for emphasis)

It may be a coincidence, but shortly after we posted the remark about the Big White Arrows on the ocean floors concealing an important point about RELATIVE movement (and therefore not necessarily being indicative of REAL movement of the ocean floors) (Fig.3, this post) the USGS appears to have put a red patch on the arrow, maybe to better draw attention to it. Clicking on it as before unearths the weasel word "RELATIVE", but if you didn't know, and with that authority behind it, why would you want to see movement any way other than their arrows show?

But look at it, .. a precipitous wall of lithosphere five thousand metres high, terminating virtually on a knife edge and slumping eastwards out over the oceanic plain.   And that is precisely what is conveyed in those hidden weasel words "relative to the plate in front", revealed when you click on the red flag. In other words, the oceanic plate might not be moving in the direction of the red-flagged arrow at all. In fact from all the data that we've got on earthquakes it could just as well be the other way round, and it be the plate in front (i.e., Japan) that is doing the moving - the other way - in the direction of the other arrow. It really could be the 'train' (and not the 'countryside') that is moving - as indeed would appear to be the case going by all those earthquakes being on the continental side of the subduction zone (Fig.1 on that linked image above).

It's an interesting idea of course that the ocean floors are moving. It makes for such fantastic inventions after all. But they're not. At least not in the way Plate Tectonics says. Plate Tectonics is going to have to face the reality that those 'tramrails' on the ocean floors (a.k.a. 'transform faults') are not the tracks by which plates "move past each other" (indicating 'movement') at all, but are the means by which the spreading ridges extend along their length as well as across them, and are therefore the trace of upward growth of the ocean floors, .. and that there never has been any "plate movement" (in the way Plate Tectonics says). And the simple point that's going to force them to do it is the difference in length between the spreading ridges and the first-severed continental margins. Continents swivelling around a bit on the mantle is ok, and maybe even thicker bits of lithosphere doing the same, but no movement of plates according to Plate Tectonics. That five thousand metres of collapsing wall we see in the above figure is only the tip of the iceberg where the Pangaean lithosphere 'leans' (curvature-corrects / overrides) against the newly created oceanic lithosphere (/mantle /ocean floors).

"Overriding" is the word if the dynamics are veiwed from the continental (geological) side, "subduction" is the word preferred by Plate Tectonics with its oceanview (geophysical) side. Or, as Plate Tectonics is now calling it, "flat subduction", because of the way that the active dynamical surface (as indicated by earthquakes) flattens off at depth. That's not a concession to the geology by the way, it is simply that Plate Tectonicists are being forced by the exigencies of their own data to recognise realities, an experience for them however that is apparently not without some pain, since they are reluctant to abandon the terminology 'subduction' which feeds Plate Tectonics the oxygen it increasingly so badly needs.

Subduction around the Pacific is now being everywhere reconfigured as flat subduction . But flat subduction faces Plate Tectonics with a further problem - a delicious conundrum that its contradiction-in-terms highlights - 'flat' means that the subduction zone is in fact not steep, and therefore that there is no return to the deep mantle, .. and if there is no return to the deep mantle then there is no compensation to mantle rise at the ridges. And therefore no convection engine to drive the schemozzle.

Just in case you are wondering where flat subduction fits in the picture of Earth expansion, flat subduction (or rather 'overriding') is axiomatic in Earth expansion as the curvature of the Pangaean Earth relaxes and slides out over the oceanic crust. (Why just in the Pacific? Because that's where the breakthrough was mostest and fastest, and where the need for correction mostly remains.)

So it looks like on this score at least, Plate Tectonics is inexorably headed towards the destination at which Earth expansion has already arrived - that the Earth is getting bigger.   By its own hand Plate Tectonics is being forced to recognise the problems inherent in its word -'subduction', for nothing is being carried down; there *is* only overriding = crustal correction to mantle extrusion.

However with no return of oceanic lithosphere to the deep mantle Plate Tectonics is placing itself in the invidious (and envious!) position of not only being a proponent of Earth expansion, but of Hollow Earth theory as well! And by its own hand!  "Envious"? Sure, .. Two daft theories instead of one. That's some achievement for a worldful of scientists.

Now that really does qualify for a Nobel Prize - a Big Wooden One
( A 'BwwWoOOOoo") (..as well as a 'Bb-b-Wwwaaaaa! ')

(Dozie dafties.)

Fig.2 Shock and aftershock = 'collapse during' (off the Marianas ridge.)

[ See also Expanding Earth blog at
http://www.earthexpansion.blogspot.com/ ]

Levitating Lazarus

2011-04-15T22:09:00.000-07:00

.. and the dead body of Plate Tectonics
( Blog for website at http://users.indigo.net.au/don )

How do you explain something for which there is no mechanism? The short answer is, you don't. There is no need. The thing itself is explanation enough of its own reality. Take it as "what you see is what you get".

Imagine levitating a dead body for example; this guy with long hair and a beard a white robe and some charisma comes into the room and says, "Ok, Lazarus, ..up you get." And Lazarus gets up, everybody gasps, and before you know it he's playing football and his mother's calling him for dinner. You can make up all the explanations you like, but it doesn't alter the fact that now we have Lazarus playing football where before there was just a dead body. You don't need an explanation to account for the fact - an explanation like, say, a substitute took over when everybody raised their eyes to heaven and gasped in wonder, and shoved the cadaver down the gurgler before they came to their senses.

Likewise you don't need an explanation to account for two thirds of the Earth's surface being covered with ocean floor that is filling the gaps between continental crust that has separated to accomodate them - which is another way of saying, "an Earth that's doubled in size". You don't need to think up an ocean floor that got substituted in the blink of an eye for one that conveniently got shoved down the gurgler in order to explain the reality of massive mantle extrusion that is plain to see, just because you can't accept the evidence of your own eyes, even if the scale of the evidence offends your logic. "No mechanism" is an indictment more of homocentric hubris, than of Nature. Nature has many mechanisms to which we are not privy, but they do not deny the fact of substantial existence.

If the congregation witnesses the elevation, and the guy can do it every time, then "No mechanism" is no reason to be sceptical of the fact, no matter if you don't understand how he does it. Sure, theorising *how* he does it (which is of course different from understanding) might be philosophically satisfying (especially if you got it right) and could be fun, but would do nothing to clarify the fact of levitation itself.

And so we approach the point of theory in relation to understanding, which (unlike theory) is the foundation on which things are built.

It is all very well for there to be a dead body in the room, and for a guy with charisma to be able to raise it up, but if you want to copy him, then a good place to start might seem to be with a theory how he does it. But of course the problem with theorising is that, if you have to (theorise), then you are not in possession of all the facts. For instance, ..is Lazarus really dead? Is he drugged and just looks dead? Or is he in cahoots with the white guy and just maybe lying doggo? And what about the white guy anyway? ... There's all sorts of things we could do with, to know about him, particularly his record on levitation. In other words, it's a really good idea to know as much as you can about the related physical *elements* of a phenomenon, before you start theorising about corporeal existentialism.

Now, .. it is said that a good theory is predictive. On the surface that sounds fine, but I've always been a bit sceptical about that, because if you think about it, a good theory negates prediction, because a really good theory (based on all the facts) axiomatically leaves nothing to predict. What you have instead is a full *description* of the situation and how everything works, which would trump any need for theory. The thing would speak for itself.

So, the dead body of Plate Tectonics, .. How much do we know about it? Well, we know it's a theory (and therefore bereft of many facts), supposedly to explain how certain aspects of geophysics might explain global geology, but really we don't know a lot about the facts that the theory is predicated on. What we *do* know is that all the facts that it does take into account support Earth expansion as well as Plate Tectonics (better in fact). We also know about a number of facts that Tectonics does not take into account. For example :-

1. It does not take into account one of the *major* features of the ocean floors, namely the difference in length between the spreading ridges and the continental margins as they originally parted. Now, this is no small beer. It is every bit as important an element as the spreading ridges; one could even say as important as the fact of continents and oceans floors themselves, so the fact that Plate Tectonics ignores it is of the highest importance. This length difference shows that the spreading ridges grow along their length as well as across them, which in turn shows that the spreading ridges grow up, which in further turn negates subduction, which means Plate Tectonics is dead in the water on that score alone.

2. It does not take into account the plateau surfaces from which mountains are carved, that would entirely negate Plate Tectonic theory in regard to colliding plates crumpling the crust and building mountains. Plate Tectonics is dead on this score too.

3. It fails to recognise that the Pacific Ocean was once closed as part of the same pattern of closure shown by the Atlantic, Indian and Southern Oceans (which it does recognise), and thus that Pangaea covered the Earth's surface in Mesozoic times without the need for any Panthalassa. (Dead again.)

4. It does not try to rationalise its many contradictions, but instead accommodates them by doublethink, the simultaneous holding of contradictory explanations for the same phenomena. (Lobotomised /brain dead before expiration.)

5. It does not take into account in any logical way the massive imbalance of energy released between the spreading ridges and the subduction zones.

6. It fails to recognise that the morphing of subduction to "flat subduction' all around the Pacific negates Plate Tectonics anyway simply on account of there being no return to the deep mantle (no convection to drive the "machinery"). (Suicide. One up on foot-shooting.)

By this six-gun measure alone (we could add many others) we would have to say that Plate Tectonics is a pretty lousy theory (whenever it's pretending not to be dead anyway.)

How the Earth has got drammatically bigger since Mesozoic times however is not a theory, but a demonstrable geological fact predicated on the evolution of the ocean floors. A theory of how this *might* have happened (to include additional facts at a scale not geologically observable) would be a nice additional extra to have, but it would appear to be venturing into the realms of qantum physics and is not a necessary ingredient to validate the geological fact of enlargement; no guys in white or navy blue needed, even if they do have charisma. No medal handouts as proof of validation either. Geologically speaking, expansion predicated on the above failures of Plate Tectonics is self-evident to the point of sticking out like the proverbial sore thumb. Indeed in the future it will be agonisingly painful for those who have invested themselves in denying the fact of Earth expansion to consider the grounds on which they did, particularly those yung'uns just starting out, confident in their learned, tick-the-box consensus. Faced with a viable theory as support for expansion (if they consider one is needed) they're going to have a hard and embarassing time ditching the smelly cadaver of Plate Tectonics they insist on carting around and showing everybody like some prize won at a fair..

But of course a theory is not needed. The fact of global enlargement speaks for itself in the existence of the ocean floors and a proper description of the architecture thereof (not the mickey mouse plate map they pass around, nor the technicolour one one showing the ages of the ocean floors) - proof apparent of expansion if ever there was - in fully two-thirds of the Earth's surface - that Lazarus is indeed, raised from the dead.

Remarkably, it is virtually always creationists who pick out the *problems* with Plate Tectonics. I say "remarkably" because falsification is supposed to be the essence of science, yet the problems of Plate Tectonics are *never* pointed out by those purporting to represent the consensus scientific view. This failure is tantamount to the suicide note, because if Plate Tectonicists leave this particular failure to creationists to highlight then they might as well shoot themselves in the head. If they do not pull the finger out and own the problems of their own creation (in the name of falsifiability of science) (which is what science is supposed to be about) then - in the name of science - they deserve to take second place to Creationism in schools, and would have NOTHING to complain about: in addressing the problems Creationists are being more scientific than Plate Tectonicists - who are peddling rubbish anyway.

Plate Tectonics needs to put its house in order. But who is going to do it? Certainly not those who have built their career on it, who see it as "The Gift that Keeps on Giving" and are just pegging out for their retirement. Nor those recently graduated and all fired up with enthusiasm for their success in ticking the right boxes at the right (exam) time under the right tutelage, .. and who see it therefore as a future sinecure guarantee. This has to be driven by a groundswell of public criticism (and cynicism) for the misuse of public funds, especially in protest against its cavalier and self-congratulatory use by prestigious teams, intent on big-noting themselves and shoring up their credibility by claiming it to be a framework for understanding earthquakes that claim the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.
They could do to be a little more circumspect in the face of the death that Plate Tectonic theory (with its omission and many contradictions) oversees, .. the six-gun salute (above) that threatens to blow them away, and the suicide note, which they have already written by their own hand.

It is very much on borrowed time, ever since Hess declared his "philosophical dissatisfaction" over Earth expansion's ability to solve his three most pressing problems of the ocean floors.

[ See also Expanding Earth blog at
http://www.earthexpansion.blogspot.com/ ]

Plate Tectonics gilds the lily

2011-04-10T18:02:00.000-07:00

..with a deceptive puce
( Blog for website at http://users.indigo.net.au/don )

Fig.1. Plate map of the Indian Ocean. The red lights of Plate Tectonics.

Red. Good colour for drawing your attention, is it not? And here we have red lines defining the plates. And if you look closely you can see the green defining the transform faults. The green is ok, but it's the red we're taking issue with here, particularly marking the line between India and Australia.

They're not bad colours, for red-against-blue.. But the red is not all red. Some of it's a bit off-purple. The difference? Well one (the red) marks continental *di*-vergence, and the other (off-purple) marks continental *con*-vergence.

(Ah, Dear, .. that *con* in there again.) Tch-tch! I don't know about you, but if it was me trying to depict the difference between the di and the con, I would pick colours to show it, like that nice icy-blue colour to show the subduction zone contrasts with the red of the spreading zone. What about a nice lime-green, say, instead of purple? That would do. As it is, you could be forgiven for taking that puce colour for red, particularly on a line thickness of 1 (instead of 3 as I've shown in the figure to make it stand out.)

On a line thickness of 1 they are not that different, are they.. I mean, with all the people looking at that map you'd think the USGS would try to avoid confusing them, wouldn't you.. But have a think about what exactly it is that line between India and Australia is supposed to represent. It's an oceanic *con* vergent boundary. That's the ocean floors converging, .."crashing together", if ocean floors get up to the same high jinks as continents do when building mountains lik the Himalyas. But Australia on the same plate is barrelling north at a great rate of knots, into Papua New Guinea - while at the same time pulling away from India.

So according to Plate Tectonics Australia is going in two directions at once, while its substrate, the ocean floor, is going in a third - and in exactly the opposite direction to the pulling-from-India one. Some mobile Earth, eh? Wonder why they didn't stick a Big White Arrow label on the ocean floor just in case we get confused. What's that? They do show one? Oh Ho-O yes, .. So-O-o they do! Hee! I see, .. up at Christmas Island there's one, showing how the ocean floor is actually going in the same direction as Australia. So the collisional plate boundary is not colliding at all, .. It only *shown* as colliding. A different thing is it? Well there we go, .. a holdie-hand, .. just in case we try to make what we can of that "oceanic convergence" off-purple coloured line, that almost looks red, but should be a nice icy-coloured lime green, just so we can see the significance of it. The one that should be building Himalayas but isn't, .. the one that is only *shown* as colliding (but isn't).

Or are we maybe not supposed to think of the significance of it? After all, some plate maps don't show it. And maybe, with reference to the figure below, we can see why. But then they're only on cruddie old websites like this, the USGS carries a certain august respectability.

Fig.2. Plate Fantasy: the India - Australia plate boundary. Sheer fabrication. What precisely defines it? Other than the wishful thinking that there should (or could) be a boundary, nothing defines it. Note particularly how it transgresses the spreading ridge on the left, and is offset by the edge of the Maldives Rise. And what's the dog-leg in the middle supposed to be about? There may be something of shaky-pen geophysics about it, but whatever it might be, there is certainly nothing geological about it according to terrestrial features. (Image courtesy of Google Earth)

Not a skerrick of evidence for any line at all. So, who do they think they're kidding? Kiddies?

One could be forgiven for thinking there are interests at work here, .. interests in maintaining a story about colliding plates, ... interests with a whole lot of money and a media cheer squad to support them drawing funny lines on the Earth to show everybody, while I (me, that is) have to make do with just a website and none, to try to put an alternative view. It's not fair is it? Costing them (that is, you) so much money, while I can get away with just paying a service provider. There's a lot of people get very offended about that, .. about me getting away virtually scot free promoting Earth expansion, while they have to pay so much money for so many people to keep promoting Plate Tectonics. Still, it's not theirs (the money), so I don't supposed they (the ones spending it) are very concerned about it (the money getting spent and spending it). (Gee, ..is there a simpler way to say that?)

Previous experience shows there's a whole lot of people don't like this enterprise of mine, .. putting forward an alternative view, .. and would like me to shut up because it interferes with letting them get on with theirs. See what they said about Alfred Wegener? (passed into history - Google it up). And what Richard Armstrong reviewing Sam Carey's book," Theories of the Earth and Universe," for the American Scientist said about him?

"His arguments are exemplary of the failures he sees in others, but not in himself-the blind eye to contradictory data, the resort to fallacious arguments, and the mustering of nonunique "explanations" of data. Students of tectonics can only stare in disbelief and amazement as he assaults the "myths." His discussion denies volumes of modern and ancient literature on mountain belt structure, decades of study by seismologists, deep seismic profiles, deep-sea drilling results, and endless lists of quantitative models of stress and strength distribution, lithosphere bending, earthquake source mechanisms, gravity field measurements, and virtually all of geochemistry and petrology."

Carey knew Plate Tectonics inside out having taught it for nigh on twenty years, and did an exemplary job of finally demolishing it in favour of Earth expansion - and got beaten up for his trouble. (The bully-boy herd instinct lifiting its head?). Armstrong, so affronted by Carey's arguments, .. and after saying too:-

"His detailed view of sea-floor expansion in 1958 preceded and was not much improved upon by the views of Hess or Deitz in the 1966s. Carey has a right to feel slighted here. And he correctly analyzed marginal basins and arcuate orogenic belts decades before others discovered the truth and accepted credit for it."

By saying the second bit before the first bit, you have to wonder where he's coming from. (Good cop - Bad cop bully-boy tactics) Carey was a geologist. These guys, if they could concoct such a thing as Plate Tectonics, were apologists for the subject. And Moores (same blog article a bit further up the page)

"I believe that S.W. Carey must be given the credit for "pushing Hess over the edge." In his article, Hess suggested that the oceanic crust was chiefly serpentinized mantle peridotite, that the mid-ocean ridges were the loci of upwelling and divergent motion and that the continents were passive riders on mantle material."

It's the same crew nowadays drawing plates on the map and colouring boundaries to confuse you, and painting Big White Arrows on the ocean floors as well to keep you on the right track in case you don't know what to think. And putting up red lights to warn you which way not to go.

Well, the web is a great democratising medium, much to the chagrin of many people as Wikileaks has demonstrated; the regular crop of safely-coralled, handie-holded journalists don't like this democratisation at all, going by the way they sledged Asssange once it dawned on them what he was actually saying about them not doing their job. Well, I don't think Earth scientists are doing theirs either, when you, dear reader, have to resort to this blog of mine to find out what's wrong with Plate Tectonics. That, truly, is a shocking state of affairs that highlights the sterility of the Earth sciences today.

How come, if science is about falsification, that nobody on the Plate Tectonics' side of the fence is doing anything about questioning the contradictions? All we get is the litany (dictum obscuratum), "The Earth is segmented into a number of plates..", when it is not. The concept of plates (and "moving") is mistaken. And silly. There is only the continental crust that is being broken apart by the extrusion of the mantle (read "oceanic lithosphere") - and continental crustal segments (as Plate Tectonics is at pains to tell us), are not plates. Plates are 'lithosphere' (the brittle shell of the Earth) comprising continental crust + upper mantle. The word 'plate' is the currency that keeps Plate Tectonics in business, .. but it is not worth a zac.

Oceanic crust is thin, where continental crust is thick, with deep roots - mountainous roots, if you turn them downside up. It is highly arguable if a chunk of continent in the middle of an ocean (like Madagascar say), can be considered to be part of the (oceanic) 'plate' that surrounds it and be carried (supposedly) to wherever it is supposed to be going, to 'crash' eventually into another continent on another 'plate' . Or Australia, a bigger one. Or Antarctica, bigger again, Or Africa, much bigger again. All of them (continents) moving into the centre of 'the plate'? How do they ever get to crash into anything? The whole notion of oceanic crust carrying continents around is *extremely* questionable at best. And saying it that way is just a
polite concession to all those who have been blindly led up the garden path. It's a travesty really.

Africa is surrounded by spreading ridges. What's it doing, moving away from them, .. shrinking? The Mediterranean is clearly extensional too, so subduction there is inadmissable. Since the fifties, well before Plate Tectonics, the mountain belts of the Alps have been accepted as gravitational collapse structures . The mountain belts are collapsing over the Mediterranean, not Africa moving north to collide with Europe. (And the Himalyas are now (finally at last) being spoken of as collapsing over India.) In the name of "philosophical satisfaction" Plate Tectonicists ignore this geological evidence and simply deem that Africa *is* moving north, shoving the collective sum of peripheral oceanic growth down the Mediterranean gurgler. That for more than half a century they have continued to do this in the face of clear evidence to the contrary, is indeed (after all), tantamount to "Massive Academic Fraud".

Plate Tectonics is a shocking state of affairs. But on what grounds can it change? Are we really to accept that for all its faults there will *be* no change, that it is indeed The Compleat Tectonics of the Earth, to be forever finagled, and will continue to be so till somebody comes up with "a mechanism" to trump Plate Tectonics? Surely nobody can be naive enough to think that if a credible mechanism for expansion is theorised, Plate Tectonicists will jump ship and become Earth expanders. All that will happen is that 'theory' will be argued, evermore, .. for enquiry will be removed to the discipline of physics and will be complicated, and nothing of the geological story will change. The questions underpinning it are profound. Unable to participate, geologists who have never known anything other than the litany of tick-the-box answers, who have had their hands held and never been encouraged to think for themselves, and who have been led to believe that expansion is a theory (instead of a demonstrable fact), will find themselves at sea. Professional educators will be mired in geological limbo, unable to establish any firm base for enquiry and unable to get their articles passed by peer review as they get hung up on the forever-swinging pendulum of contradictions. Unless they get a grip, and take a stand to argue the geological perspective before some Clever Dick comes up with an arguable mechanism, their careers will be buggered. (Compromised then, .. if English must be plain.)

[ See also Expanding Earth blog at
http://www.earthexpansion.blogspot.com/ ]

Sparking the neurons and feeding the mind with CLOOJ !

2011-04-02T18:21:00.000-07:00

( Blog for website at http://users.indigo.net.au/don )
Berkeley.edu - Telling it like it is.

Berkeley.edu offers an excellent definition of Plate Tectonics, for which it should be applauded :-

"What is Plate Tectonics?" "Plate tectonics is a framework for understanding many geophysical observations, including the distribution of seismicity. These resources provide insight into the theory of plate tectonics and how it is used in research today. The USGS online publication "Earthquakes" is a nice, general introduction which includes information on the hows and whys of earthquakes. " http://seismo.berkeley.edu/faq/plate_0.html

..and with which I would wholeheartedly agree, for it is exactly that : just what you can squeeze out of a shaking pen with your imagination, .. a loed of oeld wank, in other words, .. stirred with a mythical Panthalassa for good measure.

It's what I keep saying: - nothing to do with the geology. No geological connection necessary. No boots. Just get your tsunami suit on, and get down to the beach. Show everybody how to surf that big wave. Then once you've got the confidence of that one under your belt, show everybody how the big seismic one ripping through the crust throws up mountains.

Well! It can certainly knock them down if the houses and rotted bedrock on them is anything to go by ( La Paz ). Are we really supposed to think it can build them up? .. Plates, defined by the distribution of Earthquakes... Plates that move.. Move how? Because cold nights are cooling them down? ..so they sink? And in the sinking, leave in their wake a trail of earthquakes that knock the bejasus out of the planet?

I mean, have you ever heard such rubbish? No wonder our institutions are crawling with institutionalised, .. getting fed such pap. How do they get away with it?

What garbage, eh? ("A framework for geophysical observations".. )    Eh? Well, that it *most certainly* is, which may be why I am thinking what a parlous state the Earth sciences are in when all mention of the surface geology of the planet can be omitted from his definition of what Plate Tectonics is about. What a Berk (shoving geology under the carpet like that). Well, on second thoughts maybe he's extending the hand of friendship in fact, by implying that in the science stakes geology is not to be compared with geophysics, and that if we are informed enough to want to talk about a framework for understanding *geological* observations, then Earth expansion is what we should be talking about. If that's what he's trying to say then I agree wholeheartedly too. Is he? Somehow I don't think so.

This is exactly why the wikipedia talking about Earth expansion is in such a tizz with nothing useful to say about it. Have you read the 'Discussion' tab? They think Plate Tectonics is something to do with geological theory, when it isn't. As the man says, it's all about geophysics - a theory that tries to bind geophysical observations. Earth expansion on the other hand (when practised with empirical geological methodology) is a FACT. Heck! I see they've even deleted those references I mentioned!. How could they do that?  Carey doesn't even get a mention in their bibiliography!  Back then, all the guys supporting Earth expansion were *the* top-line geologists of the day. How it got usurped by then no-name geophysicists is a tale of scientific woe that remains to be properly told, and that 'History of Science' journals should be very much interested in. Thus far we've only had the media-fashion cheer squad, and a mob of tailcoats conned by it and the chance of a ride on a gravytrain. (Well, ..wouldn't you?) (Gravy train?)

Would you?

"Subduction", .. huh! If they think subduction's their lynchpin, they ought to give some thought to what happens to their ocean floor *before* it gets to their subduction zone - and what happens even before that, implied in the fact that the spreading ridges are longer than their equivalent continental margins, ..a GEOLOGICAL FACT conveniently ignored by Plate Tectonicists (and one which I don't see mentioned anywhere else except on my site). Which means that the ridges grow *UP* - and keep growing up. Which means *and can only mean* that since their inception the Earth has kept getting bigger. It's why those ridges keep falling down on account of all those extensional listric (so-called "new-class" 'transform') faults along them, that keep chopping them up so.   Just like the mountains do on land (keep falling down). It's what mountains *do*: they don't grow up, ..they fall down!

Well, ..I guess that little bit of a conundrum (about mountains falling down instead of building up) will confuse the bibs off those gravy-trainers for sure. So maybe meanitme, till they're ready for the next dose of spectacular scientific erudition we should just let them hold on to their belief in a shrinking cooling Earth, .. and how cold dark nights are making the ocean floors sink, which is sending shock waves through the planet to batter the buggery out of it and build up mountains. (Dozy clowns.)

Cod liver oil and Orange Juice!   Anybody for some CLOOJ? Come on, .. get with it. You can't build neurons on Pee -Tee, no matter how much you stew it up like soup in a pot.

Aren't they real doozies, these PTeros? (Bloody dinosaurs, ..in their tsunami suits.) (Doomed forever to extinction.) (And serve 'em right).

[ See also Expanding Earth blog at
http://www.earthexpansion.blogspot.com/ ]

Hollywood, Bollywood and Kung-Fu Cinema..

2011-03-30T00:19:00.000-07:00

... and Plate Tectonics - where fantasy heroes survive all odds, .. unscathed.
( Blog for website at http://users.indigo.net.au/don/ )

Fig.1 Earthquakes of the Mediterranean region, 2004-2010. Seismically speaking, Europe is a war zone, whilst the northern part of the African landmass - Libya and Egypt - is not. Active crustal dynamics belong to the European side. Africa is passive, gravitationally stable, and despite the hype of Plate Tectonics' plate movement symbolised in the big white arrow in Fig 2, is (according to earthquakes) not moving at all.

Fig.2. Detail of Fig.1 -Turkey - Greece. The Big White Arrow of African plate collision gets buried under the massive tsunami of European crustal collapse.

Contrary to Plate Tectonics crumplecrust view, it is not logical that Africa should suffer no collisional effect in, geologically speaking, what is tantamount to a zone of mutually assured destruction. The only place where this happens is in Hollywood, the Mecca of fantasy heroes, surpassed only by Bollywood and Kung Fu cinema. Africa, in other words, should have a few battle scars - Earthquakes. Plainly it doesn't. Moreover, the Mediterranean is a zone of extension showing incipient exposure of the mantle, continuous through the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf with the mantle of the Indian Ocean, and to the west (with the Atlantic closed) with the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean.

In the face of such obvious potential for African crumpling mirrorring that of Europe is begged the question, who wrote the script for this state of affairs?

For an answer to which we must turn as before to the pivotal thematics expoused by Captain Harry Hess of Princeton, though perhaps we should acknowledge more those crediting him with it. The wikipedia states: "...priority belongs to Hess who had already distributed an unpublished manuscript of his 1962 article by 1960". However clarification of the context of this is given by Moores (2003, A personal history of the ophiolite concept. Geological Soc. Amer., special paper 373, page 22.) (if you scroll down to 'Moores', and read the quote there beginning "late in 1959..") (which is nearly the 1960 being referred to.)

It would appear that following Carey's exposition, and in the retrospective credits written by others, Hess has been authorised to claim the crown of Plate Tectonics from both Holmes and Carey, who by 1960 had been teaching it for decades, and the latter given it up as unworkable (and who, probably with some sheepish embarrassment on account of misadventure, would gladly have handed it over). Hess's 1962 "Essay in Geopoetry" (History of the Ocean Basins), .. has since become cherished as a holy text of Plate Tectonics, but in fact in essence did little more than restate the by then (1962) popular understanding of convection and continental movement which had been current since 1944, as set out in the last chapter of Holme's book, "Principles of Physical Geology".

A clear case of angelic pussyfooting, if you ask me, but soundly scientific in cementing what was by then the commonly accepted memic appeal of convection. Solutions to 'rough edges' would be claimed by others keen to get a seat on the bandwagon on the new gravytrain, notably Tuzo Wilson who would claim the integration of transform faults as "a new class of faults" (which are *not* as he says), .. and claim as well that peculiar peregrination of plates from one side of the Earth to the other, and thither again in a never-ending kalaeidoscopic replay of to-ing and fro-ing, in what has come to be known as 'The Wilson Cycle".

To me, the 'Wilson cycle' symbolises the whole nonsense of Plate Tectonics - 'the faults-but-no-faults' doublethink necessary to understand transform faults in a context of convection, and the reverse gear changes invoked for convection cells to make the cycle of plate collisions and crustal rupture from one side of the Earth and back again (and repeat indefinitely) work.)

I don't know who would be foolish enough to lay claim to being the originator of 'fold mountains' . That one would appear to buried in the memic memory of geological myth, and there it should rightfully stay. But it is an extremely powerful one, .. given substance by the boisterous behaviour of tablecloths and carpets under the disruptive influence of unruly children, which to some extent we all were once upon a time - which is why it has such appeal, I guess.

Speaking of which we return to the war zone illustrated above and reiterate: it is Europe that is collapsing south, not Africa that is advancing north. And the USGS's big white arrow getting obliterated by the tsumai of earthquakes is something of poetic justice: if the mob of Plate Convectioneers won't do the job of setting things to right, then Mother Earth will do it for them.

G-g-g-g-go for it, G-g-g-g-gaia.

[ See also Expanding Earth blog at
http://www.earthexpansion.blogspot.com/ ]

Plate Tectonics for kids.

2011-03-26T18:04:00.000-07:00

( Blog for website at http://users.indigo.net.au/don/ )

An explanation children can use in class and for homework to describe Plate Tectonics using soup.

Beginning at the beginning.

Basically, Plate Tectonics is a theory that compares what's happening on the surface of the Earth to soup in a pot, with the stuff on the top making a skin and the juice underneath going round and round, pulling the skin on the top, making it go from one side of the pot to the other. But scientists like to complicate things to make it look like they're clever, so to understand how clever they are we need to begin at the beginning. You need to understand the first bit before the second bit, .. so go out to play any time when you feel like it, and come back again when you're ready. If you're in school you can talk about it with your friends in class if you need to do homework.

So, ..begin at the beginning.   ....   (The first bit, .. it's like this.)

The earth is a big ball of stone, rock-hard and crusty on the outside, sort of mushy hot rock on the inside, and a core of really, really hot metal right in the middle We know quite a lot about the outside, because we can walk about on it and see it, but we don't really know much about the inside, only what we can imagine from what we see from the outside, and what earthquakes tell us. Hot lava that comes out of volcanoes tells us that underneath the outside shell of a crust the rock can be so hot it runs like water, though nobody is very sure how much the Earth is really like that inside, because stone is funny stuff when it's hot and liquid and full of gas, and under pressure, .. when it doesn't even have crystals formed in it. Also, by the time it gets to the surface it's lost most of its gas, and it's begun to crystallise, ..so even what we see coming out of volcanoes is not really what it's like down below, when it's under pressure.

Now that's about what we can tell directly of the inside, from what we can see. If we get right back to the real beginning, when the Earth formed, most people think it formed from a lot of much smaller broken pieces of stone out in space, asteroids and meteorites that were pulled together by the force of gravity. Gravity is what the Earth uses to pull apples from the trees, or pull you down to the ground when you trip instead flying off into the air. It's a really serious force on a big scale. It's what makes the Earth round, and, with the sun and all, it's what makes weather, and rubs mountains down, and all the water stick on the Earth, and ships float, so pulling you down when you fall is not really difficult. Lumps of stone as big as the Earth can pull quite hard. It's what keeps the Moon going round. If the Earth was only as big as the moon, which is a lot smaller than the Earth, it wouldn't hurt nearly as much when you fall. If it were a lot bigger you might not be able to get up again, it keeps pulling you down so hard. The bigger it is, the harder it pulls. This is why some people think that dinosaurs long ago could only move around if the planet was a lot smaller, especially those that could run - because being a lot smaller gravity would have been a lot less and it wouldn't have pulled them down so much. They could jump around like the men on the Moon in space suits, and run really really fast if they liked.

Now, ..some people think that all those pieces of stone coming together, some of them very big too as we can still see from the collisions on other planets like the moon, smashing into each other for millions and millions and millions of years, made so much heat that all the stones melted, and got to be just like the lava coming out of volcanoes, and eventually, over just as long a period of time or perhaps more, cooled to give the Earth like we have today - only way back then - with a crusty outside shell, a soft mushy mantle underneath because it was still hot, and an iron core which was really very very hot still.

Now when it cools down, it sorts itself out into different stuff, just like when Mum boils a chicken and you get the lighter fatty stuff on the top, a lot of juice in the middle and some sludge down the bottom. So the stoney liquid when it gets cold makes a light-coloured scum on the top that is a mixture of light stoney stuff like silica ( and metals like sodium aluminium and potassium) on the top all mixed up in crystals, and underneath there is a lot of dark soup with less silica and heavier metals like iron and magnesium, and then right at the bottom, no silica at all, just iron right down to the middle of the Earth.

And just like Mum's soup when you break the fat on the top and pull it apart so you can see the juice underneath, so when you break the Earth's crust it's the same, you can see all the heavier stuff, the 'juice', ..the mantle, underneath. It's like, the Earth's crust is broken into a whole let of pieces which have been pulled apart, and below you can see the mantle - which is frozen of course, into rock.

Now, scientists find a very surprising thing. *All* over the world, the crust has been broken, spread apart, and the in-between gaps are filled with the 'soup', which has frozen to make the sea floors. In other words, by the look of it, it seemed that the Earth had got bigger by all this soup which has somehow splurged out from the inside.

But this is the important bit: it didn't just *look* like it had got bigger, .. it looked like it had got a *lot, lot* bigger, like .. twice the size. It looked like the Earth had got twice as big as it used to be, and what's more, it looked like this doubling had happened very recently (geologically speaking), .. like .. last week, compared to when the Earth was formed zillions of millions of years ago.

This 'getting-a-lot-bigger', so quickly, so recently, had scientists very puzzled, because they couldn't think how it could possibly have happened. Where could all the ocean floors have come from?   And so they put their heads together and concocted a story how it couldn't. And they called it Plate Tectonics. So Plate Tectonics is not a story about what *did* happen, ..,it's a story about what *couldn't* have happened. It's actually quite a lot like telling lies, but we don't like to say that about scientists, because scientists are not supposed to tell lies. But anyway, ..they've been changing the story ever since, the bits that they think might make people think they were telling lies to begin with. Whenever they come across something that makes it look like the Earth really has got bigger, they change the story again a bit to make it still seem that it hasn't. That way they can make everybody think that they're clever, and not dopey for not being able to think how the Earth could have got bigger. That's why they're telling lies, .. like some children do to cover up in case people think they're dopey (not you of course.)

So, .. Plate Tectonics - It's a story all about soup in a pot, to stop scientists looking really dopey. It's really no more than a kind of game, like what you do when you play "let's suppose". They begin by supposing that the Earth can't get bigger, and saying that the Earth only *looks* like it has, but it hasn't really. They say, "Instead of it getting bigger, let's suppose it hasn't, and that it's always been the same size (because they can't think how otherwise). So if the Earth seems to have got bigger by the amount ocean floors that we can see, it must mean (if your imagination is any way good) that there used to be a lot of old ocean floor that got pushed out of the way to make way for the new ones. It's like the soup in the pot where the stuff on the top breaks up and moves apart, ..soup keeps appearing in one place (where the continents move apart), and getting covered up in another. So the ocean floors come up and appear in one place, and disappear in another. And where the 'juice' goes down the skin on the top gets pushed up against another bits of skin, and together they get folded and pushed up.

So basically that's it, .. all a story about pieces of crust (called plates) getting moved about on the Earth's surface by the heat in the pot underneath, which goes round and round on a roiling boil, .. pulling the crust apart and exposing the mantle in one place where it comes up and pushing pieces of crust together again where it does down, which crumples the crust and makes mountains - "plates of crust moving about on the Earth's surface driven by convection in the mantle, exposing the mantle in one place and crumpling it in another."

There. That's it. That's all about Plate Tectonics, a story that scientists use to avoid looking silly.   Now go out to play and come back with a question.

("DaaA-aad, can I be a scientist?" ... )

???

[ See also Expanding Earth blog at
http://www.earthexpansion.blogspot.com/ ]

Big Lie #11 - Mountain building by plate collision

2011-03-11T13:14:00.000-08:00

( blog for website at http://users.indigo.net.au/don )

..In which we continue the dismantling of Plate Tectonics by the rejection of so-called 'fold mountains'

Current consensus recognises five types of mountains. Not being at school any more I can't tell if this is so or if it is just a joke. Here they are:- 1. volcanoes (which are self-evident examples of a 'built' mountain), 2, 'dome' mountains apparently pushed up by igneous intrusion, 3. horst mountain formed by an uplifted block of crust (or a crustal block bounded by downfaults), 4. fold mountains formed by elevation by crustal crumpling, and 5. plateau mountains, formed by erosion of plateaus. This last is frequently referred to as 'pseudo-mountains' because they are a topographic curiosity formed by weather, and not orogenic aspects of crustal formation. Not real mountains at all, in other words (in the consensus view).

Now, this classification strikes me as odd to say the least - so it could be a joke, though if it is then with 25,800 google-entries on the net at the time of posting, it's a bit stale by now.  I certainly don't remember there being any such division when I was at school (though it's been a while) - a mountain was just a mountain. What's the deal ? It's a land form, not a geological one any more than a hill, a valley, ..a plain, ..a cliff etc etc., (..a waterfall?). We wouldn't dream of classifying hills or cliffs as 'geological' features. Besides, ever since school, I've always thought hills and mountains were formed by erosion - by rivers cutting down the land, forming ravines, gorges, valleys, and finally, with what was left as attrition continued, mountains, hills, and finally a peneplained surface, where no more erosion was possible.

Well, ..weren't they? ..   ??     Apparently no. It seemed that was only half the story. The other half lay in the reason for the elevation of the land in the first place, which was deemed to be due to crustal crumpling by continental collision. ..hence 'fold mountains', while the other lot, 'plateau mountains', those formed by the erosion of a peneplained surface, were designated not really mountains at all (since they were formed by erosion).

Now, .. it used to be wrongful practice in geology to name elements according to one's perception of how those elements came to be formed; 'genetically' so to speak (rather than morphologically, i.e., how they physically are). I guess, however the first classification, 'volcano', seems to be ok. It's in that middle ground, being formed by a build-up of volcanic detritus, which is 'geological stuff', rather than being formed by weather - like the other mountains. Nevertheless, the word refers to the physical description of the edifice, not the fact that it can spew lava. It may seem a bit like splitting hairs, but it is an important distinction within the broader perspective that differentiates taxonomic aspects from genetic ones. Dinosaurs for example are classified by their descriptive characteristics of size and bone structure, not because they could run fast or ate meat or vegetables. The second is an inference dependent of the former.

Similarly in tectonics. So we shall set aside 'dome' and 'block' mountains, in order to consider the two main categories, which are 'fold' mountains and 'plateau' mountains. However the caution just mentioned regarding taxonomy v. genesis has come to be overlooked by Plate Tectonicists to the extent that 'fold mountains' (23,600entries) are considered today, not to describe mountains that look like folds, but mountains that are formed by folding. And 'plateau mountains' are thought to be formed by a continuation of the erosion that formed that land surface. The second is true, the first is not; with cursory examination it can easily be seen that both are really the same thing, namely 'plateau mountains'.

As we have seen it is simply wrong to link folding with mountain 'building', and it requires no more than a casual Google Earth traverse of the Earth's surface to show it to be wrong. All regions of the Earth from whence 'fold mountains' are described, are in fact eroded plateaus ('plateau mountains').  Once upon a time it took adventurous people to climb mountains and look to the horizon to verify this, ..and then write about the implications of what they were seeing using the concepts of orogensis, taphrogenesis, and epeirogenesis, developed over decades of study of regional geology. These days children can do it with the passing ease of Google Earth before playtime, and even though they may not easily understand the meaning of those terms, they can at least easily see the common heights of the mountain tops, and with a little help from the teacher and a sketch on the blackboard, know that the mountains have been carved from a planed surface, and not formed by the folding.

Fig.1. Blackboard sketch. Mountains formed by erosion; folding predates the erosional surface. The jagged surface of mountains is unrelated to the folding in the rock.

So, if children can do it (before playtime), .. (see that mountains wherever we look are erosional features carved from an earlier peneplained surface), then what are Plate Tectonicists up to, maintaining the myth of colliding plates heaving and shoving and pushing up mountains? Which is it? Are mountains formed by pushing up? Or eroding down? And which authority would *you* rely on to tell you? - those putting it around that mountains are formed by the collision of colliding plates? Schoolchildren before playtime? Me? Or your own eyes, as you too load Google Earth, and see for yourself - that the surfaces from which the mountain belts are carved were once flat?

What they up to? What they are doing is a combination of building on sand (taking the simplisitic picture of rumpling tablecloths as an analogy of folding that they learned as children), telling lies by omission (ignoring the peneplanation that typifies the high tracts of the planet in order to support their contrived model of Plate Tectonics), and drawing the long bow. They are relying on institutional kudos to pull Joe Public's leg to get grant money to research faeries up the garden path with smushy chicks. Are we to believe that they do not know that a conformity of rocky peaks derives from a once-flat surface? ... either peneplained or directly exhumed from the sea? Look, ..these are guys at the most prestigious institutions in the world, and they are ignoring the fundamentals of erosion that are taught virtually in primary school, and using that ignore-ance to obstruct investigation into the most profound question of the Earth sciences that's been around for the last more than sixty years, "What is it, that is causing a massive blowout of the planet to create the oceans of the world?" And at the same time, at the cost of billions of dollars of taxpayer's money, they are giving oxygen to the supposed rationale for investigating 'Plate Tectonics' on other planets, .. when through the imaginary lens of so-called 'fold mountains' it doesn't even exist on this one.

( "We are a community of scientists." .. ?? )

That's big bikkies if you ask me (the lies, and the wasted expenditure in the name of so-called 'science'). And you thought it was just the financial sector that could work out ways how to rip you off?   How do you feel about that, .. spending your money just to shore up their ignore-ance.

'Fold mountains' ? ...   The term epitomises the nonsense of Plate Tectonics that was an adaptation of a convenient and naive sketch of the analogy between folding and crumpling tablecloths learned when they were children before school. They are hoping the same meme will help it work on you too - like pot-of-soup convection, ..both of them contrived to by-pass a problem that was (and still is) profound, which was (/is), "What is the process that has caused the outward movement of the Earth's surface from an equilibrium condition on the ocean floors or of zero erosion near sea-level, to the highest elevation on the planet, ..and that accounts for the extrusion of the mantle that is everywhere young?"

An Earth that is expanding provides the answer, and, in the context of the choice that faced Plate Tectonicists in the beginning   - the only answer. But no, geophysicists back then chose to look at the problem from the oceanic side, from aboard the Big Ship trolling the oceans with a black box which they believed would tell them what to think, .. and *philosophised* in a 'whilst-this-and-whilst-that' way, about tablecloths, mountains and the continental crust, rather than looking at the problem from the continental (field-geological) side (of geology and geomorphology - of mountains, plateaus, and peneplains, ..of orogensis, taphrogenesis, and epeirogenesis).    And (dammit!), they just plain got it wrong. What doozies!! (?) Well, not for the bad guess, ..anybody can get the flip of a heads-or-tails wrong, ..but for their determination to maintain that wrong in the face of the obvious right.

"...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.

<Bang, bloody bang.>

"Are they nuts?"
"Have to be."
"Why?"
"Sitting in the dark."
"Sucking blood?"
"Yeah.."
"Weird people."

No, .. not nuts, ..not weird, ..just cognisant of the need to build and maintain a consensus in order to ease publication /grants /careers. Is that science? For the bereft many, sadly it is.

So take a trip on Google Earth and check out the high surfaces of the planet from which mountains are carved (not 'built'), and find them to be incised peneplains. These days children can do it in class (before playtime). But to understand why Plate Tectonicists cannot, we have to recognise the decades of baggage that have to be off-loaded, but which they cannot do without copping a whole lot of egg-on-face, because their mistake was apparent from the beginning. For "philosophical reasons" they deliberately chose the option that contradicted the geological facts, rather than further investigate those facts.

(" When thoughts, logic and facts have the potential to humiliate and frighten, they will always be ignored. " ~ Mister Supernatural )

Fig.2 The uplifted floor of the Upper Triassic sea, known now as the Italian Alps ('Dolomites'). The floor was already essentially flat, so, ..minimal erosion on emergence. You can see it, can't you (thanks to Google), ..the water washing over it. It almost still looks like a rocky coral shore with the tide out. (It's been eroded a bit since of course.)

However it is not the *mistake* that will be the future focus of attention, but the reasons why so many could get it so wrong and for so long (and still persist in doing so). In short, Plate Tectonics will go down as the biggest con-job in the history of Earth science, if not science as a whole.

Fig.3. Close up of the rocky shore above. Makes the sea-shore a bit more difficult to see because the sea-shore is a point in time, whereas the build-up is over many millions of years. ("Build-up?" Do we mean this is how mountains are built? No, .. but by the logic of Plate Tectonics it might as well be,) (image courtesy of wikipedia )

[ See also Expanding Earth blog at
http://www.earthexpansion.blogspot.com/ ]

Big Lie #10 Subduction 2 - The Fundamental Flaw

2011-03-08T03:48:00.000-08:00

(blog for websiter at http://users.indigo.net.au/don )

One of them any rate (there are numerous ones.).

(I think it is a fundamental flaw anyway.) It's this. Gravity works to pull the Earth into a round shape, i.e., reduce its surface to flatness; we see it in the operation of all Earth surface forces. From avalanches in mountains to the transportation and deposition downstream, to the settling of sediments on the sea floors, the imperative is to reduce everything to flatness. If there is any build-up as a result of this, such as floodplains or sediments on the sea-floor to compensate for removal of material elsewhere, then it operates under the imperative of flatness.

Flatness rules.

Therefore, nothing that arises *as a result of* gravitational force will act against that principal force of gravity with its tendency to flatness, and push the Earth's crust upwards and crumple it. And that includes convection and the movement of plates.

It is said that gravity drives convection, convection drives plate movements, plate movements crumple crust. Crustal crumpling is therefore twice removed from convection, and thrice removed from direct gravitational action. Whatever is causing the crust to deform, it cannot be anything that derives from the force of gravity in any sense that we normally understand that word. No confirming mathematics are needed, only consideration of scale dependency of forces, which tell us that plate movements are too weak to crumple the flatness that is the primary mark of gravity.

Plate Tectonics, with its dependence on crustal deformation by convection, fails on this simple thermodynamic consideration alone. For the crust to *de*form after it has formed (even if it is mantle crust) an extra input of energy is needed. No process that is subordinate to gravity - particularly one that is twice removed such as crustal crumpling by plate movement, is going to break that crust up - or crumple it. It will stay flat - and all-of-a-piece. Anything that pushes the crust up and buckles it does not operate on account of gravity or its derivative forces.

Plate Tectonics is running on hot air - quite apart from all the silly contradictions it expouses (above link). It is ready enough to shout down Earth expansion with the cry "no mechanism", but this is simply to detract from the fact that Plate Tectonics itself has no credible mechanism either. The only difference is that Earth expansion admits to having none and advocates looking for one, where Plate Tectonics is happy to hide behind its illogical fantasy of subduction, ..or as is increasingly being recognised, " *Flat slab* subduction".

Flat subduction of course implies no return to the deep mantle, which presents Plate Tectonics with an excruciating conundrum, for if there is no return of mantle crust ('lithosphere') to the *deep* mantle then what is the process that is manufacturing continual extrusion at the ridges? "Where is the *extra material* coming from." (Or is there simply a hole being created down there? An underground hydrosphere perhaps? Is Plate Tectonics the Hollow Earth theory in disguise?)

"No Mechanism!!" "No mechanism!!" ???

What we are witnessing here in the accumulating evidence that Plate Tectonics is itself providing, is a convergence of Plate Tectonics with Earth expansion, and the gradual realisation that the corner Plate Tectonics has painted itself ever deeper into, whether it likes it or not, *is* in fact Earth expansion.

(But by Jeez, ..it needs extensively rooted and remodelled to come anywhere close to Earth expansion.)

[ See also Expanding Earth blog at
http://www.earthexpansion.blogspot.com/ ]

Dracula's Blood cuts the mustard?

2011-03-04T06:39:00.000-08:00

(Blog for website at http://users.indigo.net.au/don/ )

This is not about the science

If I were to write a nice little smiley note to all believers in Plate Tectonics in a bid for hearts and minds, .. you know, to win friends and influence people, this is what I would say:- "There is light at the end of the tunnel of your philosophical dissatisfaction. There is a simpler paradigm. Your trials, ..your tribulations, are over. Your calls for "more research needed", are now thankfully redundant. Ocam's razor, sharp as it ever was, is telling you all conundrums besetting Plate Tectonics are explained in a single cut. The mustard has been sliced and you are saved the bother. The jigsaw is done. There *is* no more research needed. You can all go home."

"So far so good?"
"Nah, mate, ..failed the first hurdle."
"What? what's the first hurdle?"
"The heart - you just drove a big wooden stake right through it."
"How? Isn't it good to have a problem solved?
"Did you come down in the last shower of rain or what?"
"How?"
"Coz there's a whole lot of people whose whole existence is all about solving problems, doing jigsaws, and they just love doing them in the dark. Don't you know? It's their job to keep telling everybody just how dark the place is. Shine a light on them with a solution and it's worse than cock-crow to Dracula."
"You mean they're not interested in solutions?"
"Of course not. You tell them the jigsaw's done an', .. well, .. what are they going to do for an encore?"
"Well, couldn't they do something with Earth expansion instead? .. in the daylight so to speak?"
"You mean after telling everybody how fascinating the dark is when it comes to jigsaws?"

(I guess that's it, isn't it - people expressing their philosophical dissatisfaction with daylight are hardly likely to change hats at the drop of one and advertise it just because somebody switches a light on, ..are they? )

"Does that mean I'm wasting my time, .. trying to wheedle Plate Tectonicists into seeing they're trolling around a dead Dracula?"
" 'Fraid so."
"Is that why they're not speaking to me?"
" 'Fraid so."
"Blood?"
"Yeah.."
"Jeez, ..if that was me, ..I'd ditch it like a shot."
"Yeah, ..but not everybody's an empirical rationalist enchanted with daylight. There's a lot of currency in dead Draculas, provided you can keep them dark and the blood warm. There's a whole industry peddling them."
"EeeEEyukK. What's the going rate?"
"A sinecure, ..a lifetime's career, mate."
"Wot? ..Sucking blood in the dark?
"Yeah, ..in the dark.."

(Plate Tectonicists - pushing shit uphill maybe a better way of putting it, .. or rather, up a mountain. Condemned forever to have the shit (and the mountain) roll back down on them. The ancient Greeks tell a good story about that, but didn't quite have that additional bit about the mountain falling down. Guess they didn't know then about the Earth expanding and the propensity for mountains to do exactly that or they would have added it to the plot, ..given the uphill strugglers being such a mendacious mob deserving of burial.)

"Gee, that's no way to win friends and influence people."
"Wot?"
"Telling them they're a mob of mendacious bloodsuckers."
"So what do you suggest I do call them,"
"Well, be nice. Tell them their labours are appreciated."
"But they're not."
"Tell them anyway."
"They'd see right through me."
"No they wouldn't. They'd just love people to tell them what a great job they're doing."
"Sucking blood?"
"*Withdrawing* blood. It's to prevent illness and disease and promote the healthy balance of humors."
"*I* don't think it's very funny."
"They've been doing it for at least two thousand years."
"Yeah? Don't people die?"
"Well, .. that's exactly the point:- Really spectacular prevention wouldn't you say?"
"Sure, .. I'll say. Ok, I suppose we can build around that, ..about the spectacular prevention of illness and disease."
"Good. You're getting the picture."
"What about lobotomy, can we throw that in as well?"
" < &%&^#$$@ >

Plate Tectonics bleeds Joseph Blogs

( Winning friends and influencing people)

[ See also Expanding Earth blog at
http://www.earthexpansion.blogspot.com/ ]

Hill Buildies, the Footsoldiers of Plate Tectonics

2011-02-24T05:41:00.000-08:00

( Blog for website at http://users.indigo.net.au/don/ )

If I were a student doing geology, coming at it cold so to speak , .. well, not exactly cold because I would have seen some stuff about it on the telly - I would have been primed as it were, ..already 'set up', ..I would find Plate Tectonics highly appealing (because I would know a bit about it already, .. having been set up). I would be positively disposed, I would have already internalised it, appropriated it as 'mine'. I would own it, ..and would view anybody who tried to disabuse me of my internalised belief as a crank. (Must be, ..going against what is already known to be true; I saw a program on it on telly after all.)

Well, it's how it works isn't it?   Get the kids. Get them young. Set them up. Bob's your uncle. It's how it's done. From the military to suicide bombers [1] . [2], ..where's the difference? (which is most organised? Which is most committed? It's the whole point of school, isn't it, .. to prepare children for the world in which we live.

Just reading an article here where it says about 13% of teachers advocating creationism in the classroom. and about (which is more disturbing) the cautious 60%, afraid to let their advocacy show. How, amongst that lot, do we encourage the child to develop to independent rational adult assessment, when we drag the baggage of childhood impressionability and belief along?

Now I don't know anything much about biology, nor quantum mechanics, but if I were in a classroom as a child with a teacher telling me, I'd be inclined to believe what he was saying, because he's a teacher, and particularly when there's an exam at the end of it all which says, "This is stuff you need to know." And implied would be, not just for the exam, but for it's own sake. It's school after all. You know nuthin'. They're teachers. You learn stuff. Because it's right. I mean, ..they wouldn't be telling you rubbish would they? But it's not really presented as an opportunity for discovery of the mind and what you might think about for yourself. It might masquerade as that to begin with, but you'd better all end up at the same place, or else.   There's a box to tick, ..and you'd better get it right.

I'm an old guy now, but I remember when I was at school a defining moment when I just about jumped out of my skin (maths class) because the teacher (I still remember his name - rest his soul) had thrown a duster at me, .. one of those hard-backed wooden things that if it hit you would have been bloody sore, but he was a good shot and it just rattled off the desk, as was no doubt his intent. He came up and stuck his red old face right in my young and lovely one, and said (and I still remember it, verbatim) (one way to impress kids, eh?), ..he said, "You, Findlay, ..the trouble with you, ..you're a why-man, ..and you'll find out this world doesn't LIKE why-men."

I could not for the LIFE of me work out why he suddenly had reason to say that. I was absolutely shaken. But he's been dead right (all these years). It upsets people when you ask why. And often upsets you when *they* tell *you* why. Especially when you don't ask in the first place and they just tell you anyway, because they think it would be somehow good for you to know - whether you like it or not. Like here.

But it's been asking why that's led me down this road of Earth Expansion, as answers to why after why have kept clicking like tumblers on a fruit machine, and when Plate Tectonics keeps throwing up combinations that just drive you up the wall. Coming at it from knowing a bit about geological perspective (and not as a child having been instructed in the finer arts of plates) I find it mindboggling that Plate Tectonics can be taught in the classroom any more, to the point where I have to recognise that the veracity of the science is not the issue here - it's about the politics of the classroom - about the 'curriculum' and "maintaining standards", .. whether (scientifically) right or wrong.

Which reminds me of another article I came across recently (I don't remember how recent it actually was), ..the gist of it was that a law had been passed (New Mexico, I think) that gave teachers the right to tell the class (if they wanted - because it seemed like they didn't have it before) that alternative views existed, to whatever it was that was being taught, but I think they still drew the line at discussing what those views actually were. I remember more one of the comments, which said "It is more important for teachers to teach the curriculum, than to have any personal views on the subject." (and presumably say what they were), which it must be conceded is difficult to argue with.

All of which leads us to arrive at the question, when it comes to the Earth sciences, who sets the standards for the core curriculum in schools (and universities)? ..because it seems that Plate Tectonics gets more than a casual mention. And the further question, in whose interest is it - the students', ..the school's, ..whose? Because from a geological perspective it might just as well be creationism being taught, as Plate Tectonics. Plate Tectonicists just don't have a leg to stand on, when it comes to occupying the high ground of scientific respectability. Nothing wrong with the core geology of course, just the theory, but these days it's quite a challenge to unravel the fact from the fiction.

"Get them young, learn 'em up, and Bob's your uncle..."

<Boom>   Canon fodder. Just having a gander round cyberspace, there are a lot of suicide bombers lighting themselves up in defence of Plate Tectonics. For whose benefit? Certainly not theirs, (..trolling that baggage around.) Whose then? Teachers? I don't think so. I'm sure many emphasise the theoretical aspects, but I'm also pretty sure they must find the fact/fiction thing a bit difficult, going by the many articles that describe that model. So whose then? In whose interest is it, that this nonsense gets taught in schools? It's fairly easy to identify the multifarious interests of the Christian Right in the case of the 13% creationism, but what cabal is it that occupies the remaining 87%, given the importance of 'institutional kudos' to university administration boards?

[ See also Expanding Earth blog at
http://www.earthexpansion.blogspot.com/ ]

Doing the Hokey Cokey with Shen-Su Sun on the Great Wall of China

2011-02-18T18:54:00.000-08:00

( Blog for website at http://users.indigo.net.au/don/ )

Following on from that last post about Shen-Su Sun blowing the whistle, I never knew that, ..about the expanding Earth getting a hold in China. From the media hype I thought it only existed as a fringe idea in the west. But then I'm not connected to any academic circle, much less a Chinese one. I guess there are some others who are, or would be. If so they are remaining very quiet about what's happening on that side of The Wall. With all the hype about the need for scientists to communicate better with the public, it's surprising that what's being said in China about Earth expansion is not getting an airing here in the West.

With such exorbitant paygates excluding the public from the results of research the way they do, it's not true of course, .. about scientists communicating with the public. All we get are vignettes through the popular press, which has an agenda (much like Rupert's, the facts for which we have to rely on Wikileaks) to aggrandise science with references to 'Teams' at prestigious institutions, so that us hoi polloi are led to believe they're doing a great job. However, with views from the inside that better than 90% of the money invested is being wasted, it is hardly in the interest of scien*TISTS* to advertise that fact. Of course the science itself and the public suffers but for the majority of scientists that's a dichotomy we should leave them with, ..to face every morning when they get up.. "What if, ..Plate Tectonics is all wrong? Should we direct attention to how that could possibly be? Or do we deny the possibility, shout down loudly, and try harder to shore up what we've already got? It is after all so secure (is it not?) .. do we really need to bother to question it on grounds that we might not have all the answers?" Well, if that's the case then everybody working in physics can all go home, because so far as our understanding of the connection between material stuff and mass is concerned, we know all there is to know. Don't we?

If Earth expansion is as big in China as Shen-Su Sun says (and he should know having academic connections, and reading the journals) then it would seem there's a huge omission going on in western scientific literature (Orwell ~ "The biggest lie is the lie by omission") Yes/no? Shen-Su complains about a paper dated 1996 :-

"..More than two years ago I was amused as well as alarmed to find that there is an abstract in the 1996 Beijing International Geological Congress (IGC) abstract volumes suggesting that the Earth radius in the late Archaean (about 2500 million years ago, compared to the age of the Earth of about 4550 million years) and Cambrian (about 545 to 490 million years ago) was ~80% and 94%, respective to its present radius. The silly idea of expanding Earth has a group of strong Earth scientist supporters in China too!

..He doesn't say who, but since it's abstracts it could well be the same person writing this in 2000.
http://www.scichina.com:8080/kxtbe/fileup/PDF/00ky0304.pdf

"The expanding earth tectonic dynamic hypothesis was advanced clearly by Hilgenberg in1933 and it was in vogue from the 1950s to the 1960s. As there were no convincing explanations for the expansion, compressional structure, periodic character of the tectonic movement, etc., the hypothesis was then substituted by the theory of plate tectonics. In recent years some problems the theory of plate tectonics run into had no satisactory solution[1 4], and the facts and evidence on which the plate tectonics theory is based are accordant with the expanding earth hypothesis, so the expanding earth hypothesis has been active again since the 1980 s and it is accepted by more and more people[5 7].

Surely it's newsworthy in the Earth sciences that an idea getting such short shrift within the academic community here in the west, is alive and well in China, as also should be the reasons why this is so. I find this particularly interesting because the person writing it, Chen Zhigeng, is the only other I have read in English - apart (importantly!!) from Hess (1962) - who acknowledges the apparent reality of expansion, but notes that it is trumped by the ignorance of the day.   Everybody else since has swept that particular acknowledgement under the carpet, choosing instead to gloss over it with the blanket denial of "no mechanism", as if not having one is a perfectly good reason not to bother trying to look for one.

So, ..ignorance, backed by financial support to maintain it, should trump scientific endeavour? What sort of Earth scientists are we dealing with here in the west? Not ones who are interested in exploration, ..that's for sure. Zhigen's remark about the problems of Plate Tectonics is precisely the reason why the Phoenix is rising today from the ashes of its previous existence. However this time it is backed by greater clout given by the empirical evidence for the progressive process dynamics from equatorial to latitudinal dilation, in a way that incorporates the Earth's rotation and links a cause for expansion to celestial mechanics, as explained on the header-linked site.

Though there are reasons to support both, the stuff on that site about asteroidal impact or Moon capture is of course sheer speculation, a sop to the cerberus of people's insecurity of being unable to live with the unknown, and not directly germane to the point of expansion. Not so inconsequential however is the link between convection and Plate Tectonics, because without convection Plate Tectonics could not exist : Plate Tectonics *is* convection; it has no support whatsoever from the empirical geologic facts other than those that axiomatically describe expansion.  But the transition from Pangaean equatorial mantle breakthrough to Present Day longitudinal rupture and spreading is in a class of facts quite different from, and quite superior to that of speculation of material properties of the Earth's interior based on hypotheticals derived from our (possible) understanding of seismic velocities. Latitudinal to longitudinal rupture is EMPIRICAL GEOLOGICAL FACT constructed of what we can directly see, not speculative hypothesis based on what we cannot.

Well then, so, ..for those who like me did not know of the Chinese connection, I'm making it news - , ..and I wish I could read Chinese so I could make it more news. Want to keep up with the news why Plate Tectonics is going down the gurgler? ..and Earth expansion is in the ascendancy? Then tell your pals to Google up Don Findlay's Blog. Unfortunately it seems to be the only one around with anything much on the empirical geological support for expansion, ..or refuting Plate Tectonics, which given the bluntness of its cutting edge is a terrible indictment of all the sheeples (thanks Michael). :-)   this side of the Great Wall of China. Sheeples Me-e-eEHHe-ing gobbledegook about Plate Tectonics. On your Money, 90% (at least) of which, if predicated on Plate Tectonics, is going down the drain.

[ See also Expanding Earth blog at
http://www.earthexpansion.blogspot.com/ ]

Shen-Su Sun blows the whistle.

2011-02-18T03:49:00.000-08:00

(Blog for website at http://users.indigo/net.au/don/)

Just like me, Shen-Su Sun is blowing the whistle. Only I'm blowing it about the Plate Tectonics situation this side of the Great Wall of China, while he's blowing it about Earth expansion on that side. What he's saying is that in China The Expanding Earth is getting a really good grip amongst younger geologists, who are using it to manipulate guys of the older generation for their own career ends.

"The silly idea of expanding Earth has a group of strong Earth scientist supporters in China too! It does not surprise me that the leading scientist of this group which promotes the expanding Earth idea in China is from the eldest living generation and thus, he can be excused for being out of touch with the rest of the world. Howver, this excuse should not apply to his followers (or protégés), many of whom are believed to have some overseas experiences in the recent past. "

"Similar cases can be found in other institutions in China. The fact that these younger followers (or protégés) are helping, or perhaps "encouraging" (manipulating?), the elder-generation scientists to promote ideas like expanding Earth means that they either truly believe in these ideas, or they have no idea themselves. Either case they are doing so for their own gain (i.e. getting huge grants, building up their own power bases, accelerating their academic promotions, and perhaps eventually getting themselves elected to the prestigious Chinese Academy of Sciences). Sometimes, I cannot help wondering about the possibility that many of these younger people are academic opportunists who surf on the political tides and these old gentlemen have been simply used by their followers (or protégés) as cat’s paws for the power game. After being briefed by a number of reliable sources plus my own observations, I have the impression that in some places the manipulation of scientific information and people involved in present day China has reached the extent of dishonesty or even worse." http://www.geochina.org/forum/printpage.asp?boardid=1&rootid=2&id=3

Must say, I'm not big on his dismissal of Earth expansion as a silly idea, because I think it's on the money - for the simple reason that the Pacific closes, but I applaud him wholeheartedly for his observation of the personal-political subtexts. Hey! I couldn't have said it better myself - except I'm saying it about the younger crop of Plate tectonicists this side of the Great Wall, whilst he's saying it about Earth expansionists on that side. Seems when it comes to 'science', the personal /political is universal.

The science is not the main game is it? If it were, there would be dialogue. But where is there any amongst the paid cabal of 'researchers'? We hear nothing from Plate Tectonicists about the geological aspects of Earth expansion, only the "no mechanism" shout-down, which does no more than highlight the ignorance of scientists to explain the massive mantle blowout that has occurred in the recent geological past, and an unbelievable refusal to look at the documentation that supports it in Pacific closure ? (For if the Pacific closes, Plate Tectonics is dead, and there are a lot of people either out of a job or out of hats to change, and some who must fall on their sword because of the way they've written up their own epitaphs.)

I was astonished to find, when I wrote that note on the Hollywood Cowboys, that Dick Armstrong's review of Carey's Book Theories of the Earth and Universe, 1988, was hosted (and only hosted) on a Chinese website. So astonished was I (I was, was I) ..that I did a quick google-search using a number of wordstrings, and confirmed it to be the only one. Now when I do the same, the article by Shen-Su Sun pops up. Seems in the interim it's something to do with Reocities resurrecting old posts from Geocities - or maybe I just omitted to search the omitted results.

Doubly astonished because despite the Sino-singularity, the editors of American Scientist (the journal giving space to Armstrong's review) considered Armstrong's article to be worth an extra allocation of space:-

"American Scientist editorial footnote: Richard Lee Annstrong’s review of Theories of the Earth and Universe continues the occasional publication of essay-reviews that treat topics at greater length than our space limitations ordinarily allow. "

However in attempting to strike a balance between fairness and sledging, Armstrong also gives tacit acknowledgement to Carey being the real father of Plate Tectonics, .. so no wonder *no*- body this side of the Great Wall wants to mention or acknowledge that review.

Bit of a blooper, ..eh? Wouldn't look very good of George, .. between going fishing with me and attending reg'lar dooties, ..to be handing out medals to someone from the other side of the world while the local crop of strugglers get nuthin' because between them they could only muster a geological model that was already well known for more than twenty years (at sophomore level) before they set sail on the high seas ..now would it?

A very diplomatic man was George when he was Prezz, with a gift for language to go with it. ( 'Swhy I like going fishing with him.)

[ See also Expanding Earth blog at
http://www.earthexpansion.blogspot.com/ ]

Big Lie #9 Subduction 1

2011-02-12T23:10:00.000-08:00

(Blog for website at http://users.indigo.net.au/don )

"We need to return to the geological path signalled by Wegener, and jettison *ALL* of Plate Tectonic theory, which is framed essentially around failure to understand a mechanism for the sudden and rapid breakout of the mantle bubble that caused the global enlargement we see today, manifest in the creation of the ocean floors."    That's me, quoting me, from the last me-post. (Well, if you can have i-this and i-that, and Ya-tube, i don't see why WE can't have the odd bit of *me* too, out there in hyperspace. Going by the blogs on Plate Tectonics there aren't too many of me around. So in the interest of evening up the narcissism score, here we go (I think it's true anyway - about jettisoning.)

Convectioneers, ..sailing the Big Ship, ..thinking that if they all line up under the flag and chant the "Wot abaht subduction" mantra it will keep them walking on water for the rest of the year. Or six inches above it more like, if your read their litany. Maybe they just want to insist on looking at it from the ocean side because that guy they've nailed to their cross, .. their sacrifical lamb, .. their *Hero* (along with some flanking others) Harry Hess, worked in the navy. (Don't know what that's got to do with anything about Plate Tectonics. There's a *B*' of a difference between admiral and admirable. I worked as a milkman once, ..and people put glasses of milk next to plates, ..but I guess that's another issue.) (Ennyhow, ... )

So he did (navy) *but* this is a CONTINENTAL argument, not an OCEANIC one. Big difference.

The jigsaw of Plate Tectonics might be about OCEANS. But the jigsaw of Earth expansion isn't. It's about CONTINENTS. Oceans are all young and make the Earth bigger when they make their way through the crust. (So I don't know what sort of a jigsaw Plate Tectonicists think they're doing anyway). It's the continents that Earth expansion is talking about. You have to take the oceans out of the picture and do the jigsaw thing with the continents out of the way.  Then if all the pieces fit, you have to accept it. Or at least you have to accept that it is a jigsaw worth doing, ..a picture worth looking at, ..something about not-knowing and trying to *get to know*, a thing about SCIENCE, that is.

You can't pull a disingenuous fast one as PT-ers want to do and say, "Ok then, ..we'll take the oceans out of the way," and then with some hat-magic sleight of hand substitute another imaginary one for which there is no evidence and say, "Hey, ..look everybody, see? ...it still doesn't fit. No finding out needed."   'Coz that's exactly what they do.

Plate Tectonicists want to keep the argument sloshing about in the water, where people can't get a grip of it, rather than beach it so people can. ...Bunch of bloody mermaids, bamboozling folk with their tales, trying to subduct MEN OF HARD ROCK to their nether regions with all that talk about sucking and pulling. ... Wish somebody wou...

'Course the bloody jigsaw fits - from the *CONTINENTAL* side. Easy too. What else would it do?   If PT-ers have a problem trying to make it fit from the OCEAN side that's their problem (trying to shove a whole Panthalassa into a non-existent hole..). But they *don't* have a problem because they don't *WANT* to make it fit. Confucius he say, "No fit, no problem", and if there's one thing about PTterologists, it's that they think they're pretty wise guys. But in fact if it fits, then they're out of a job. That's why they're so vocal about subduction, ..and trying to keep whole schemmozle WET, bamboozling everybody, ..keeping them at sea. Those Pteros, they can't avoid the fits in the Atlantic, Indian and Southern Oceans, they even need them, ..but push their Pacific button and tell them that fits too and whoh-hoh, ..hear them squeak!

This guy on this wikipedia says, "Without subduction, plate tectonics could not exist". Well he's dead right, of course. Neither it would. But subduction is not the issue, and it's a bit myopic and silly to think it is, really. The mantle can swirl and birl and twirl as much as it likes underneath the continental crust, ..can convect like a witches cauldron, ..subduct nineteen to the dozen, ... twenty seven-and-a half-even, if it likes, .. it doesn't make one whit of a difference to what's happening upstairs. So what if the mantle's *is* subducting? It proves / disproves absolutely nothing about crustal tectonics, plate tectonics, blobtonics or any other kind of tonics. So why should it make any difference if it's happening underneath the continent, or at a crack in the continent, or on the edge of one, when that edge is just as legitimately the edge of continental lithosphere, as it is the edge of the oceanic one? There's *two* sides to that there edge. Pteros find it convenient to disregard that, .. it's not the oceanic crust returning to the deep mantle that's going on, but the continents sliding out over the mantle that's happening.   They even say so themselves when they use the word 'overriding'.

Anyway, ..more and more the word is not "subduction", but "FLAT SUBDUCTION" or "flat slab subduction". Google 'em up and see. Subduction, meaning the return to the deep mantle, is a furphy. All around the Pacific (the only place there is any going on), the buzz is now "flat slab subduction". Under the Himalayas as well, lifting the Tibetan Plateau up. .....the flat bit going down and along the asthenosphere, i.e. the continental crust leaning over the oceanic crust as the curvature of the Pangaean hemispheres (du Toit's 'Laurasia' and 'Gondwanaland') flattens off. No return to the deep mantle. And so long as the crust and mantle are detaching, .the crust collapsing and skating on the mantle, ..you know, with the Earth rotating and all that, and lagging west into the bargain, you can forget all about satellite measurement meaning anything as regards convection / plate movement.   Anyhow, what's twenty years of satellites against two hudred million and more of the real crustal thing? Do they think just because they're angels they have some sort of passport to higher authority than common sense? Like belief? (That's for Ray, if he's reading this.) Hi Ray!   :-)

These Ptero-guys, ..they really just don't have a geological clue, ..or a leg to stand on when it comes to subduction. Showing 'slabs' in their articles, ..indeed. Doesn't it occur to them it's just the mantle turning down against the continental lithosphere? .. which is wot dense stuff *does* when less dense stuff floats on top of it - ..it turns ... (everybody, ..all-together-now) ..."DowWWn" ... (YaAAyyyy !!!)

Subduction? My Aunt Fanny.

(Wonder what it would look like, if you floated a lump of rock in an even denser rock...) (or even metal, say...)

Fig.1 Oceanic deeps mark the subduction zone as cold heavy metallic mercury subducts beneath the ancient continent of Reginia, . Or if we prefer to stretch a point and turn it around, Continent HMS (the unsinkable) Gold Pound Coin adrift on a sea of mercury, proves once again (beyond a sea of doubt), that material properties are critical in the search for substances that can support Plate Tectonics assertion that mantle convection is the modus operandum for global tectonics. ("The owl and the pussycat went to sea, in a beautiful gold pound coin.." ; Mermaids, ..the souls of owls and pussycats, drowned at sea.. ) Image courtesy of the wikipedia, reproduced here in the interest of informing all schoolchildren (and others who may be interested), in order to focus on the critical point of oceanic deeps that develop subduction zones when oceanic crust (blue-grey) subducts beneath the UK (gold)... "Mantle, which is also blue-grey.. has the property of mild steel.."

[ See also Expanding Earth blog at
http://www.earthexpansion.blogspot.com/ ]

Big Lie #8 Oblivion - The Hero's Journey

2011-02-03T05:18:00.000-08:00

The most powerful lie is the lie by omission (~ George Orwell) ( Blog for website at http://users.indigo.net.au/don )

Let's be very, very clear about this. The reason why Plate Tectonics was developed as a theory did not come from any astute evaluation of the geology. It developed precisely *in spite of* astute geological evaluation. It developed because Hess could not accept expansion despite it removing his three most serious dificulties in dealing with the evolution of the ocean basins, claiming it to be (according to him) "philosophically unsatisfying" (on account of a lack of a mechanism).

Hess, (1962):-
"..While this [expansion] would remove three of my most serious difficulties in dealing with the evolution of ocean basins, I hesitate to accept this easy way out. First of all, it is philosophically rather unsatisfying in much the same way as were the older hypotheses of continental drift, in that there is no apparent mechanism within the Earth to cause a sudden (and exponential according to Carey) increase in the radius of the Earth. .."
[The second reason was about the extra water needed - see Hollywood Cowboys post]

...and so he tarred it with the same 'no mechanism' brush as had previously been done with Wegener's observations of palaeogeological reconstructions for continental displacement ( 'drift' by the way was the term others attached to Wegener's work). Hess's reason was "philosophical dissatisfaction", ..nothing to do with the geological facts which Hess, according to his admission that it would explain his three most serious difficulties, clearly found appealing in itself.

An interesting point for today's Plate Tectonicists to consider, ensconced as they are in the certainty of Plate Tectonics, is what would have happened had Hess overcome his "hesitation" and accepted those points. Not only would his view have aligned with that of others who favoured expansion, notably Carey, but also with that of Heezen, Tharp, reportedly Jack Oliver; Tuzo Wilson (before his capitulation to the Plate Tectonics camp), and no doubt others who would then have seen which way the wind was blowing. The Earth Sciences would almost certainly be fifty years further advanced in the direction of expansion. There would be no Plate Tectonics theory, and no derived, abortive geological explanations - no mountains built of colliding plates, no plates even, possibly not even any convection. It would also have forced the physics community to address their destitute lack of understanding of the physical processes that caused the Earth to rapidly extrude a mantle bubble the like of which there was no precedent in Earth history. And possibly by now there would indeed be understanding of a 'mechanism'.

Or would it? Was Hess that big, that he could have had such an influence as coercing the physics establishment to put their house in order and find one? As it was, Hess's "hesitation" ( /" philosophical dissatisfaction") led him to choose the 'lose-lose' option : "We (/I) can't think of a reason; you can't have your geology".

It is difficult to assess the full legacy of this. On the theoretical side certainly, there is half a century of misadventure in the Earth sciences (and a commensurate waste of resources) that will need to be revised. Economically could be included the dearth of supply to the labour market following the drop in enrollments leading to the closure of geology departments, because students see little point in studying a subject that has little more than kindergarten 'soup-in-a-pot, rumplecloth' appeal underpinning it, ..that has arrived at its destination and has nowhere else to go. As well there is the stymying of research in physics that might explain a rapid massive mantle blow-out of the planet.

Who knows?... Given the drama described by Moores at Carey's lecture, Hess's 'hesitation' may well have included an element of the 'not invented here' syndrome. Hess was a geophysicist and concerned with the geophysics of the ocean floors. Carey was a geologist of global orientation who had not only been teaching Plate Tectonics for twenty years but had with good reason discarded it as unworkable, and moved on to convincingly demonstrate that from a geological perspective expansion was the only viable option.

So what was going on? What *is* going on still? Hess with his 'convection' in 1962 after all was essentially just making a pitch for the standard status quo of continental drift that had been in Arthur Holmes book Principles of Physical Geology since 1944, and which was a standard student text (and Carey by 1956 had been teaching for twenty years). What subtexts were at work that made Hess turn away from Carey's forward position that would overcome his (Hess's) three main problems, and choose the lose-lose option?

Here's what I think is the reason. Almost certainly Hess would have placed himself in an extremely precarious position had he accepted Carey's conclusion. And would have known it. Right or wrong was not the issue. Carey was a free-thinking flamboyant maverick of a geologist with a big idea and even bigger geological data to support it, and was visiting from the other side of the world. Hess, a geophysicist, was by all accounts much more reserved and conservative, and was reportedly struggling to understand his ocean-floor data, which only clicked when the penny dropped with the publication in 1960 of Bruce Heezen's work in the Atlantic (who favoured expansion). (For the resistance Heezen's work generated, and the pivotal role played by Marie Tharp, read this.) It was all very well for Carey to propose expansion (and even soundly support it with empirical geological data). It was quite another for a resident (geo-) physicist "to catch that particular infection" (Armstrong quote in 'cowboys' post), and have to cite it to a funding body on his home turf as a basis for research. Such would almost certainly have been committing what some saw Carey (albeit from the other side of the world) as already having done - "professional suicide".

"..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. (By Robert Dean Clark, Society of exploration geophysicists).

Why should Carey have been perceived as "committing professional suicide"? After all, according to Moores, Carey had blown their minds with his exposition of palaeomagnetism and polar wander paths to the extent of obviating all further discussion on the point, and Moores and Armstrong both conceded Carey's pivotal role in formulating Plate Tectonics. What Carey had done, surely, was the stuff of the cutting edge (what's more, he followed it up by writing three books on the subject). Why should that have been regarded as professional suicide? Far from it, Carey's place in the history of Earth science is assured.

And why was Tuzo Wilson himself warned that he "was headed for the wrong side of the scientific tracks" by choosing geology over physics? "at [a] time [when] students were told what they could bloody-well do"? [And, by inference, what they couldn't]. Whatever it was, it would certainly seem to shed light on the scientific establishment's intolerance of innovation, and the importance of 'institutional kudos'. Funding is perhaps not uppermost in the public's mind when they think of science and scientists, but it most assuredly is for those who have chosen it as a career.

And here we must reflect briefly on this much: Science is a thing unto itself and chooses the people who do it, by setting a high bar of commitment. Those who choose the science often abuse it like pimps do a whore.

It is very important here to recognise the schism between the 'geo' and the 'physics' on which this argument for expansion turns. The positive arguments for expansion lie in the empricial geology; refutation lies, not in any positive achievement of physics (or geophysics), but in the FAILURE of physics to understand how it can happen. 'Geo' - 'physics'. (+ - ) = 0 (Neutered.)

Surely we can (and must!) commend Carey for his geological acumen and commitment to his conviction of global expansion, ..for speaking up forcefully for geology, ..but we must also spare a thought for Hess and see the difficulty he would have been in had he adopted Carey's position. It was all very well for a geologist to talk, but for a geo*physicist* to give it legitimacy would probably have been fatal to his career. In my view it was this realisation that focussed Hess's mind keenly on the *absolute need* to reject expansion. He had little choice. Even today it is an area that invites professional suicide, for those career artists who might venture into it.

Thus we can understand the "hesitation" (denial even), from a physics point of view. But not from a geological one. It is not cloth-headedness that makes geologists go along with Plate Tectonics, but pure expediency. Few would take the route Carey did for the sake of geological principle, and Carey might not either had his position in far-off Tasmania been less than secure. Expediency is often necessary; Carey did after all withdraw elements from his thesis, that as a graduate student he knew if included would have cost him his degree, ..though one could argue if, within the system, that was to the benefit of himself, or to the science which had chosen him. Carey well knew the heat in the potato he was holding, and the challenge it posed to the establishment in general, and to Hess in particular, and would therefore have also well undertstood Hess's dilema. Whether he was sympathetic or not is another matter. My guess is he probably was, though with some natural misgivings regarding what we might call the 'workings of the system'.

I do wonder therefore, ..was Hess doing the heroic thing under the circumstances and talking in code, when he conceded that expansion would remove his three most serious problems? After all, he needn't have said that. Was he in fact throwing out a message-in-a-bottle so to speak, to the geological community when facing his moment of truth and the realisation that in having to choose the lose-lose option he was going to have to scuttle his Big Ship, or, which amounted to much the same thing, have it fated to sail the geological seas like the Marie Celeste, a ghost whose geophysical achievements would be forever consigned to oblivion in the face of the geological storm that appeared to be looming on the horizon? That concession from Hess of a 'three-problems solution' was no small thing. It is one too that subsequent comment has gone to considerable trouble to eradicate: to the best of my knowledge all retrospectives focus on Hess's "rejection by no mechanism", and ignore his coded (?) "acceptance of expansion" that would solve his problems in understanding the evolution of the ocean basins.

The most powerful lie is the lie by omission - George Orwell

Lie? Certainly one that Hess could not explicitly state. It is also one that the current crop of Plate Tectonicists would do well to consider when contemplating the foundation of their 'no-mechanism' position. "No mechanism" has no place in geological enterprise, concerned as it is with the collection (and collation) of observable empirical facts, and no geologist should be conned by that mantra. To cite "no mechanism" over the geological evidence is to support the wall-eyed ingorance of physics and to advertise ignore-ance of the geological facts - and the principles on which it is founded.

Hess, by putting the + and the - together like that was laying bare his dilema, and by both = 0 thereby stating that he had virtually no option but to stay with the status quo and reject expansion, for otherwise was to commit the hara-kiri Carey was perceived to be doing. From a geological perspective of course Hess would have been doing no such thing, but from a physics perspective he was. Was this why he jumped from his seat in agitation? Bruce Heezen (geologist / oceanographer) working in the Atlantic had already published on the huge dilation there and, Hess knew, supported expansion. Indeed it was that very work on which Hess built his own. But then it wasn't Heezen providing the grand synthesis and bludgeoning the audience with it. Hess would probably also have known the trouble that Heezen's work was landing him in ("read this" link above).

What was Hess to do? What he in fact did (in terms of mechanism) was to simplistically restate convection in terms already well known, and attempt to taint others' views in terms identical to those levelled against Wegener forty years earlier - of "continents ploughing through the oceans etc etc."

Hess:-
"..The continents do not plow through oceanic crust impelled by unknown forces; rather they ride passively on mantle material as it comes to the surface at the crest of the ridge and then moves laterally away from it."

...exactly as Holmes had stated it in 1944 (and earlier in 1928). Hess was saying nothing new here. In my view it was wrong of him, in 1962, to represent by then current views of convection the way he did, but in context we can see why he might have done so - and why others in review might have allowed him to; indeed might have tacitly encouraged him to. For all the ostentatious trumpeting, invention of a new vernacular, and prize-givings etc., that have gone on since, convection as represented by Hess - indeed even as it is understood today, is little different from Holmes' day. The way I see it, it was an attempt to tart up the 'geo' element of geophysics in order to deflect attention away from the destitute-in-knowledge 'physics' part, by people who didn't seem to have much of a clue as to the Pandora's Box of geological conundrums they were opening by doing so.

Or perhaps they exactly did, .. and were far more willing to face the geological conundrums than consequences of the physics ones.

And that is the reason why I think Plate Tectonics exists today, a blousy old lush of an empress, tarted up in incongruous geological rags for anyone who fancies having their geophysical way with her - a mute lush for all seasons, stood over by an ignorant pimp. Seen against this background the prizes for Plate Tectonics and calls for prizes are little more than a cop-out, .. sustenance for scientists afraid to face the unknown when facing it spells oblivion for whoever does. The receiver is the fall-guy, the sacrifical lamb. It is the audience that applauds, who benefits.

Basically, geophysicists are in a bind. They cannot use geological evidence to support expansion even if they believed it, for basically the same reason Hess couldn't. It's actually in a double bind because of the way that physics operates. Physicists proceed from hypothesised mechanism (as many as are needed) to explain the facts (and Plate Tectonics embodies many that are contradictory). Geologists proceed from the facts, and using the Principle of Uniformitarianism, conclude mechanism (if mechanism must be known). But the lack of known mechanism in no way subverts the arrangement of the facts, if that arrangement is made according to sound logical principles.

So long as geologists allow the tail of physics to wag this dog, there will be no advance. Everyone will be the loser.

Plate Tectonics as an achievement? (I think I'll go fishing...) (..with me mate George.)

:-)

[ See also Expanding Earth blog at
http://www.earthexpansion.blogspot.com/ ]

Big Lie #7 - Sign writing

2011-01-29T16:06:00.000-08:00

For the believers in "Plate Tectonics going on...")
Ignore-ance, and forcing a square theoretical geophysical peg into a round empirical geological hole.
(Blog for website at http://users.indigo.net.au/don/ )

Where spreading ridges and subduction zones are readily understandable ("..if you believed Plate Tectonics was going on..") as the matched expression of mantle overturn on a global scale, transform faults on the other hand, which constitute one of the most extensive and most obvious sets of structures on the face of the planet, are surely one of the most puzzling aspects of the ocean floors to come to grips with, ..if not *the* most puzzling. They present Plate Tectonics with many questions, the most important of which surely is why should they exist at all? Here are some of the questions that occur to me; no doubt you may have some too (if you do, we can add them) :-

==========================
Why should the spreading ridge be cut across by reams of faults when beyond the small offsets on the ridge the cycle of mantle return is unified on the scale of the whole Earth?

Why should active offsetting be limited only to the small, ridge-bounded sectors, beyond which there is none? Why should faulting stop on a dime, as it were?

Why should there be so many of them (or so few, depending how you look at it)?

What determines their spacing (which is highly variable)?

Why is transform faulting restricted to the 'coming up' part of the convection cycle, and have no part to play in the 'going down' at subduction zones - especially when the system is supposedly driven by the going-down part? In other words, how does subduction drive the formation of transform faults at the spreading ridges? And how does ductile flow cause brittle failure anyway?

Why do these faults in brittle mantle crust have such a different expression from faults in brittle continental crust ("..a new class of faults" .. ~ Tuzo Wilson)? How are stresses that build up in mantle rock different from stresses that build up in continental rocks, to give such a different expression of faults on the ocean floors compared to faults in the continental crust?

Why should all displacements on the spreading ridge occur globally *before* Plate Tectonics gets underway - if we are to believe the popular animations? What causes the offsetting in the first place?

Why, once the continents are driven together (by convection) in a coagulated assembly on one side of the planet, should convection all switch to the other side, to happen again underneath this new coagulation? What role does transform faulting (as "the third boundary of plates") play in this?

Why is the San Andreas Fault in the continental crust cited as a type example, when it's the ocean floor (mantle) that's riddled with them, ..and the San Andreas anyway is nearly at right angles to those on the ocean floor and parallel to suites of faults along the Western American Seaboard, which are not transforms? In other words, why choose a fault in continental crust as a class type, for structures that riddle the mantle?

And why, on the Plate Tectonics side of the fence, is nobody addressing these questions?
==========================

Plate Tectonics has no answer to any of the above questions. Any attempt at an answer is to merely restate the fact of their existence and describe them as "the third boundary of plates", when in fact the active boundary that they do describe is so short (only their ridge-to-ridge extent) as to be inconsequential.

(Earth expansion accommodates *all* of these questions by the way - at a single stroke.)

So how are we to read Plate Tectonicists' claim to be 'Masters of the College' when it comes to explaining global geology? And how are we to read their claim that Plate Tectonics has undergone "detailed testing, modification, and embellishment", when that claim can be just as easily read as ad hoc goalpost shifts to cover inconsistencies of which there are many.

I read it that with few exceptions Plate Tectonicists are in denial of their own ignorance. Or perhaps its softer, more literal meaning, 'ignore-ance', might be more acceptable. Perhaps ignorance might seem a hard word to use taking into account the iconic status in which those developing the theory are held today, but frankly I can't think of another. 'Honest lack of knowledge'? .. Well, most certainly there is that, ..since the whole invention of Plate Tectonics in the first place was specifically to accommodate the lack of knowledge that led to the "no mechanism" jibe directed at the geological construction that was Earth expansion.

So, ..'ignore-ance' and speculation was (and still is) a very substantial ingredient in Plate Tectonics, and should be acknowledged as such to define its theoretical geophysical origins from the more empirical, geological origins that lead the Earth sciences in the direction of Earth expansion. Plate Tectonics claimed that the ocean floors simply moved *away* from the spreading ridges, thus causing the separation of the continents. But this ignored the geological fact, that the spreading ridges are longer than their equivalent continental margins - marginally so in the Atlantic, more obviously in the Indian and Southern Oceans and still more in the Pacific, an increase directly in proportion to the ages of these ocean floors. Clearly the ridges have increased along their length as well as across them.

The only way to rationalise this length increase was /is if the spreading ridges have moved up, or, to put it on a flat Earth for the benefit of Flat-Earthers, if the ocean floors have moved *towards* the spreading ridges (not away from them). Independent confirmation of this lies in the stepped offsets of the start-points of the transform faults [which so far as I am aware is an addition to the geological lexicon exclusive to my site since the early part of the decade (2000)]

Understand the dichotomy this way. Go down to the seaside and stand on the shore, and contemplate ridge-continent displacement - "Does the continent move away from the ridges, or do the ridges recede from the continents?" It is surely an obvious point to consider when standing on the shore, 'close-up' to the question as it were. But maybe not so obvious when you stand back and address it for both sides of the ridge simultaneously, for the conundrum emerges: "How can the spreading ridge move towards itself? Surely there is no space: the ridge is closed. Surely the continents *can* only move away from the ridge?"

Well, ..no. The ridges can move up. They are ridges after all, ..and they *are* moving up. So where is the problem? There *is* no conundrum. Upwards movement of the ridge necessitates gap-fill, where the ocean floors on both sides of the ridge move in to take up the developing space.

Now, here's where we witness the ignore-ance - Bigtime. It would be facile nonsense to suggest this option would not have been explored by those making up the theory of plate tectonics, or even by those since (the linked site at the top of the page making exactly this point has been up on the web for the best part of a decade), ..or that the support for it, namely the increased length of the ridges compared to the severed continental margins, would not be recognised. It is simply not credible that the receding-ridges, 'UP' option, with its necessity for extension along the ridges, would not have been recognised. What is credible however, is that it would naturally be ignored because of its implications for expansion, given the revelation of ignorance that it would trigger.

Moreover, it is now known that the continents are deeply rooted, making the concept of continents being ferried around on 'plates' no longer tenable. Plate Tectonics maintains the theoretical dogma in the face of the empirical geological fact.   More ignore-ance.

Some science!

So what do we do? Give Plate Tectonicists the benefit of the doubt and say that they *haven't* recognised the upwardly moving ridges, and consider them ignorant dummies all? Or credit them that they *have* recognised it, and accuse them of wall-eyed, disingenuous ignore-ance?   Either way the aptness of the word rests.

Ignorance.

To be fair, these differences in lengths may not be so obvious in the Atlantic where separation is relatively recent and the difference is less, but it is glaringly obvious in the Indian and Southern Oceans which are older, and so extreme in the Pacific as to be virtually unrecognisable to the unaware eye. So perhaps they can claim *some* degree of unawareness. But not a lot.

In an effort to avoid talking about what they don't know (so that they can try to get to know), they have instead been talking nineteen to the dozen about what they think they do know to avoid exposing their ignorance of what they don't. But though tricked out as Nobel Prize material, this has been an abysmal failure, amounting basically to no more than admission that there is an elephant in the room that can't be talked about because by tacit agreement it must be ignored. Their way of addressing the problem has simply been to hang a sign on the door saying "Elephants, no admittance", and "Please ignore the Elephant in the Room", and to award themselves prizes for their ingenuity in devising this solution, hoping that the less aware won't notice the space problem (and the smell) when they enter, ..a ploy, it must be said, that has been stunningly successful. Not, however, on account of the ingenuity of the signwriters, so much as the cloth-headedness of those entering the room.

[George Bush dishes out prizes for sign-writing.]

More prizes:- "The development of plate-tectonic theory certainly warrants a Nobel Prize," said Dr. Marcia McNutt, president-elect of the American Geophysical Union. "There is no doubt that it ranks as one of the top ten scientific accomplishments of the second half of the 20th Century."
http://ftp.kermit-project.org/cu/pr/00/01/vetlesen.html
[Last paragrah - bottom of page.]

Well, ..   At least George can lay claim to having a "going fishing" thought-bubble on his mind, but that hardly applies en bloc to the Union of Geophysicists. (Or does it?) Nobel prize for sign-writing? ..to keep empirical geological elephants out of the room? I don't think so... You?          :-)

"I wouldn't go in there if I were you."
"No?"
"No, ..there's a big elephant - ..talk about 'piled higher and deeper!' "

[ See also Expanding Earth blog at
http://www.earthexpansion.blogspot.com/ ]

The Plate Tectonics Cowboys go to Hollywood

2011-01-24T04:54:00.000-08:00

I'm just wild about Harry..

(Blog for website at http://users.indigo.net.au/don/ )

Fig.1. Harry Hess in the role of Clarke Gable doing the derring thing in the Pacific. This was the war years. There would be another fifteen at least before Hess would write his "Essay in Geopoetry" officially underpinning convection as the modus operandum for Plate Tectonics, which he would term instead "sea-floor spreading", by which time Arthur Holmes' book, Principles of Physical Geology 332pps, published in 1944 and advocating convection for continental drift, would run to fifteen reprints. (More on H^3.) [D.F. - For image modification, see end of post]

Those words from Jack Oliver's obituary have really got me : "All of the pieces suddenly made sense if you believed plate tectonics was going on", ..because I mean, ..why wouldn't you (believe)? Given the certitude in which Plate Tectonics is held today, what was different way back then that was holding them up? Those guys constructed the model after all. What were they alluding to then by that qualification, that today's crop of hangers-on don't know, or have forgotten, or find more convenient to forget, or have just never properly understood?

What they were alluding to was the young age of the ocean floors, and the implication that held for Earth expansion, but to properly understand how that would have appeared to those at the time we have to read between the lines of what they wrote, realising that one cannot talk about what one *doesn't* know, ..you can only talk about what you *do* know. What *was* (becoming) known was that the ocean floors were everywhere young and dilating the crust, which carried the implication that the Earth had got bigger - doubled in size. What was *not* known (and therefore couldn't be talked about) was how this could happen.

Since you can't talk about what you don't know, this is precisely the reason why the question of expansion has been - and still is - summarily dismissed, as was Wegener's continental displacement decades before, with the mantra, "no mechanism". It was (and is) a con job pure and simple, put around by geophysicists in America to deflect attention from the 'geological how' of expansion to the 'physics why' of it, ..in other words to deflect attention away from the geological documentation that would support the fact of Earth enlargement, towards the ambit of theoretical physics where there was nothing to talk about. It was an exercise in power, prestige, institutional kudos, and who controls the debate. And one in which geologists for some reason I frankly can't understand given the glaringly obvious geological inconsistences that have lined the road of half a century of geology like so many crucifixes, have been inexcusably compliant. On the one (geological) hand the facts of enlargement were there to be talked about, but on the other (physics) hand, nothing to say. It was a masterly dialectical stroke that supplanted an honest attempt at empirical geological reason with ignorance bred of overweening hubristic conceit and arrogance of the "what we don't know isn't knowledge" sort.

How's that for a triumph of 'science'? Everybody knew expansion was there to be talked about - but there was nothing to say. Some elephant indeed, occupying the room!

But what *was* already known, that *could* be talked about and linked to the newly emergent realisation of the young age of the ocean floors, was laid out in the last chapter of Arthur Holmes' book, Principles of Physical Geology, published in 1944 and summarising twenty years of teaching before that, which was entirely about mantle convection and continental drift. In 2000, Cherry Lewis, Holmes' biographer writes:-

"..Holmes, however, was one of a small group convinced from the start of the theory [continental drift]'s validity. His work on radioactivity, geological time, and petrogenesis had led him to a profound understanding of processes in the Earth's interior. Consequently, he was the first to propose that incredibly slow-moving convection currents in the mantle caused continental breakup, seafloor formation, crustal assimilation, and continental drifting. Despite his theories being ignored, he still taught them to his students for the next 30 years.

Hess would of course have known that Arthur Holmes was a staunch supporter of continental drift. In fact, by the time Hess published his seminal paper in 1962 , Holmes book, a standard student textbook of the day and by then running to fifteen reprints, clearly set out the means by which the continents were carried passively on convecting mantle, providing the mechanism for continental drift, exactly as it is understood today as Plate Tectonics. Exactly in principle, that is, ..but in reality it doesn't work, for continents are deeply rooted, and no continents exist on oceanic mantle crust that could be said to be carried by convection.

Holmes, (1944):-

p.306:- "..Currents flowing horizontally beneath the crust would inevitably carry the continents along with them.."
Preface:- "..While I have not hesitated to introduce current views, since these reveal the active growth of the subject, it should be clearly realised that topics such as the cause of mountain building, the source of volcanic activity and the possibility of continental drift remain controversial just because the guiding facts are still too few to provide a formation to more than tentative hypotheses. It is my hope that recognition of some of the outstanding problems may stimulate at least a few of my readers to cooperate in the attempt to solve them."

Hess (1962, p.607)

"..Long ago Holmes suggested convection currents in the mantle to account for deformation of the Earth's crust (Vening Meinesz, 1952; Griggs, 1939; 1954; Verhoogen, 1954; and many others). Nevertheless, mantle convection is considered a radical hypothesis not widely accepted by geologists and geophysicists. If it were accepted, a rather reasonable story could be constructed to describe the evolution of ocean basins and the waters within them. Whole realms of previously unrelated facts fall into a regular pattern, which suggests that close approach to satisfactory theory is being attained."

Carey (1988), in a retrospective is more inclusive of earlier workers exploring convection:-

"..Convection currents in the Earth were propsed in 1881 by Osmond Fisher, in 1906 by Otto Ampferer, in 1928 by Rudolph Staub in Switzerland, and in 1935 by C.L. Pekeris, later of the Weizmann Institute in Israel, and particularly by Arthur Holmes in Durham and Edinburgh, by Felix A. Vening Meinesz in the Netherlands, and David T. Griggs in Harvard as the main driving force in Geotectonics generally, and latterly in respect of Continental drift. Keith Runcorn of Newcastle adopted convection as the main cause of continental displaement, so did Harry Hess more recently.

By skirting Holmes' exposition, by referring to it as "long ago", by not including Holmes in his references, and by delegating authority on the matter of convection to the community of geologists in general, Hess appears to taint earlier views of convection with a certain irrelevance, which is reinforced by his use of the words 'nevertheless', radical', ' not widely accepted' as if, were those views to include the right ingredient which he was about to propose, convection would be respectably instated in its proper place. Convection causing the crust to ride passively on the mantle was certainly current by the time Holmes wrote his book, and if it was also radical then it would be a topic of some discussion, and widely promulgated. Or should have been. If it were not, then that, surely, was the fault of the grey polloi of geologists whom Hess would appear to vest with authority on the matter.

So was Hess, as Holmes hoped, "cooperating in attempting to solve outstanding problems"? In my view he most certainly was, but unfortunately seems to be somewhat ungenerous in not recognising others as the foundation on which he was building. Well aware that the current views of Holmes (and others later) did refer to the crust being carried passively on the mantle, here's how, in 1962, Hess represents those earlier views of convection:-

Hess, 1962

"..The mid-ocean ridges could represent the traces of the rising limbs of convection cells, while the circum-Pacific belt of deformation and volcanism represents descending limbs. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge is median because the continental areas on each side of it have rnoved away from it at the same rate-1 cm/yr. This is not exactly the same as continental drift [read Holmes' convection]. The continents do not plow through oceanic crust impelled by unknown forces; rather they ride passively on mantle material as it comes to the surface at the crest of the ridge and then moves laterally away from it.

"Ploughing through oceanic crust" was hardly a fair representation of what either Holmes was saying, or what was by then current views, which Hess was effectively restating, but would represent by the term "sea-floor spreading", ..a well worn technique of appropriation; change the language, and hope it will be seen by the less aware (who are usually the more vocal) as changing the facts. Carey (1988, p.104) comments somewhat acidly, "Although any loose statement denigrating continental drift got easy passage to publication during that period, anyone unwise enough to speak for it was rejected by referees and editors with snide comments."

So what was unsatisfactory about convection before Hess, that was satisfactory by the time Hess came to write about it? Seems to me it was mostly because it was Hess doing the writing. And his pals doing the reviewing.

====

But all of this talk of 'convection' was emerging because of what, largely, could *not* be talked about, namely expansion.

Hess, 1962, History of Ocean Basins , p.610 :-

"..Egyed (1957) introduced the concept of a great expansion in size of the Earth to account for apparent facts of continental drift. More recently Heezen (1960) tentatively advanced the same idea to explain paleomagnetic results coupled with an extension hypothesis for mid-ocean ridges. S. W. Carey (1958) developed an expansion hypothesis to account for many of the observed relationships of the Earth's topography and coupled this with an overall theory of the tectonics of the Earth's crust. Both Heezen and Carey require an expansion of the Earth since late Paleozoic time (ca. 2 x 10^8 years) such that the surface area has doubled. Both postulate that this expansion is largely confined to the ocean floor rather than to the continents. This means that the ocean basins have increased in area by more than 6 times and that the continents until the late Paleozoic occupied almost 80 per cent of the Earth's surface. With this greatly expanded ocean floor one could account for the present apparent deficiency of sediments,volcanoes, and old mid-ocean ridges upon it. While this would remove three of my most serious difficulties in dealing with the evolution of ocean basins, I hesitate to accept this easy way out. First of all, it is philosophically rather unsatisfying,in much the same way as were the older hypotheses of continental drift, in that there is no apparent mechanism within the Earth to cause a sudden (and exponential according to Carey) increase in the radius of the Earth. Second, it requires the addition of an enormous amount of water to the sea in just the right amount to maintain the axiomatic relationship between sea level-land surface and depth to the M discontinuity under continents, which is discussed later." (PETROLOGIC STUDIES: A VOLUME TO HONOR A. F. BUDDINGTON, PP.599-820 NOVEMBER1962 History of Ocean Basins, H. H. HESS, Princeton University, Princeton, N. J.)

Hesitating to accept expansion in the face of it overcoming his three most serious difficulties, does not sound like honest rational appraisal. In citing "No Mechanism" Hess was merely reiterating the objection against continental drift, and with respect to the elephant in the room (expansion) was dismissing it on grounds no more substantial than that he could not think of a reason why it should be there. His other objection, the question of water, does not seem to me to be an issue; if water is seen as part of the mantle and manufactured commensurate with mantle extrusion, then the 'plimsol line' *must* be globally invariant, except for local crustal disturbances (advance /retreat /isostatic adjustment) due to curvature correction.

Eldridge Moores casts an interesting light on Hess's 1962 paper (2003, A personal history of the ophiolite concept. Geological Soc. Amer., special paper 373, page 22.)

"Late in 1959, the Australian geologist S.W. Carrey came through to deliver a lecture on continental drift and earth expansion. His ideas on expansion have been widely discounted and detract from his contributions to continental drift, however*. Carey's contribution to the contiental drift debate was to construct a spherical table, ~2m in diameter, on which he plotted the 500 fathom contour, rather than the coastlines, as had Wegener. Carey gave a three-hour spell-binding lecture, ending completely spent, covered with sweat and chalk dust. At the end we all filed numbly out of the room. Halfway througth the talk, however, Hess bolted out of his seat and started pacing up and down the aisle. Thereafter in Advanced General Geology, there was no more talk of problems of palaleomagnetism and polar wander paths. Within two months Hess was circulating a manuscript entitled "Evolution Ocean Basins [sic], which was eventually published as "History of Ocean Basins" (Hess 1962). This was the key insightful paper that gave rise to the new unifying model of ocean floor spreading, just as Kuhn (1970)* suggested would happen in a scientific revolution. I believe that S.W. Carey must be given the credit for "pushing Hess over the edge." In his article, Hess suggested that the oceanic crust was chiefly serpentinized mantle peridotite, that the mid-ocean ridges were the loci of upwelling and divergent motion and that the continents were passive riders on mantle material."

[*D.F. - "However" - I know of no-one who has in fact discounted Carey's analysis other than in terms of Hess's "No Mechanism". Carey does in fact provide a mechanism in the penultimate chapter of his book Theories of the Earth and Universe, (p.325) but states, "I must of course attempt to explain the accelerating expansion I have described. However, if the explanation I offer should turn out to be invalid, that explanation should be rejected, not the reality of expansion."]

[*DF. - Moores is not representing Kuhn correctly. Kuhn suggests that insights that create the paradigm shift are made by people who are either very young or new to the field and know very little of it (often both). This hardly applies to Hess, departmental head at Princeton, who by 1962 would have been fifty six years old.]

Eldridge Moores' above comment in regard to Carey is supported by that of Richard Lee Armstrong, [ Book review, Theories of the Earth and Universe: a History of Dogma in the Earth Sciences. Warren Carey. 414 pp. Stanford University Press, 1988. $45. Geological Sciences, University of British Columbia, Cananda. It was published on the American Scientist, Volume 77, 382-384, 1989.] [See also http://www.geochina.org/forum/ShowAnnounce.asp?boardID=1&RootID=6&ID=6&skin=0 ]

" ..Carey and I met 30 years ago at Yale, where he taught the graduate structural geology course in a way that has never been done before or since. He was there at a critical moment in the development of tectonic ideas in North America and clearly has to be credited with planting the seeds of the plate tectonics revolution in many places as he promulgated the gospel of continental mobility and ocean expansion. He was newly arrived at the inspiration to explain everything by accelerating earth expansion, but most of his audience did not catch that particular infection. Many, including Hess and Wilson, were persuaded to give a serious look at mobility, and, as they say, the rest is history. Being a skilled orator and able to manipulate his audience like a magician did not hurt his cause.

"The ensuing three decades have flooded us with information and new interpretations of geologic processes. The plate tectonics model has undergone considerable detailed testing, modification, and embellishment. Meanwhile, Carey has gone on to champion earth expansion from ever-more philosophical and universal perspectives. But his views on earth expansion have changed little since 1959. The new dogma he espouses is largely a static one-the same arguments, the same fallacies, and the same points of debate are repeated here with little accommodation to new discoveries. Of course Carey was nearly 100% right in 1958 about what was going on in the oceans. His detailed view of sea-floor expansion in 1958 preceded and was not much improved upon by the views of Hess or Deitz in the 1966s. Carey has a right to feel slighted here. And he correctly analyzed marginal basins and arcuate orogenic belts decades before others discovered the truth and accepted credit for it. His feelings sometimes show: "The precocious visionary bears a sinister taint, and the accolades for the great advance are worn by the nouveau-wise."

" But the essential flaw in Carey’s view of the world is his firm belief that compression in mountain belts and subduction of the ocean floor are "myth" "illegitimate faith" and "spurious concept" He minces no words in his dismissal of these essential components of the plate tectonics hypothesis. His arguments are exemplary of the failures he sees in others, but not in himself-the blind eye to contradictory data, the resort to fallacious arguments, and the mustering of nonunique "explanations" of data. Students of tectonics can only stare in disbelief and amazement as he assaults the "myths." His discussion denies volumes of modern and ancient literature on mountain belt structure, decades of study by seismologists, deep seismic profiles, deep-sea drilling results, and endless lists of quantitative models of stress and strength distribution, lithosphere bending, earthquake source mechanisms, gravity field measurements, and virtually all of geochemistry and petrology.

The last paragraph of Armstrong's critique is broadbrush denigration that in my view is without foundation. Anyone who takes the trouble to read what Carey has to say cannot doubt the compass and depth of his analysis, particularly when compared to the superficial responses of his detractors. We give the last word to Carey in respect of his assessment of the catch-up Johnnies-come-lately, and reflect that surely Carey would far rather be known as the father of Earth expansion, than as the (real) father of Plate Tectonics.

"By this time (mid-1970's) the global tectonic revolution in North America had routed all opposition to the gross dispersion of continents and had reached what I had been teaching my students in the early 1950's, but I was disgusted that the "new global tectonics" had gone only halfway. It still assumed axiomatically, notwithstanding the patent rapid growth of new oceanic crust, that the size of the earth had remained essentially constant. Hence it had to go back to the mechanism I had adopted in the 1930's and 1940's of swallowing great areas of crust down the ocean trenches, but which, after 20 years of working with it, I had found by 1956 to be unworkable on a global scale. Hence my Elsevier book [1976] set out to quash this subduction myth" (S.W.C., 1989, Theories of the Earth and Universe, extract, preface, p.x; the book in question reviewed by Armstrong.)

Make of it what you like. To me, Hess's appropriation of Holmes' and Carey's work represents a changing of the guard in the Earth sciences from geology to geophysics, in which over the last five decades, far from Armstrong's representation of the plate tectonics model as having undergone "considerable detailed testing, modification, and embellishment", we have witnessed instead ad hoc goalpost shifts designed to obscure an incredible, breathtaking, inexcusable failure to address the inconsistencies that ("..if you believe that Plate Tectonics is going on") have arisen.

There's a certain unfortunate irony in Hess being left holding this baby of what will surely turn out to be the biggest con job in the history of modern science (Plate Tectonics), because to a certain extent he was probably the fall guy for a good number of others, but it would seem he did rush in where angels feared to tread. Holmes on the other hand, in the last paragraph of his book, was extremely circumspect regarding convection, despite probably having more authority than anyone to promote it.

"..It must be clearly realised, however, that purely speculative ideas of this kind, specially invented to match the requirements can have no scientific value until they acquire support from independent evidence. The detailed complexity of convection systems, and the endless variety of their interactions and kalaeidoscopic transformations, are so incalculable that many generations of work, geological, experimental and mathematical, may well be necessary before the hypothesis can be adequately tested. Meanwhile it would be futile to indulge in the early expectation of an all-embracing theory which would satisfactorily correlate all the varied phenomena for which the earth's internal behaviour is responsible. The words of John Woodward, written in 1695 about ore deposits, are equally applicable to-day in relation to continental drift and convection currents: "Here," he declared, "is such a vast variety of phenomena and these many of them so delusive, that 'tis very hard to escape imposition and mistake." .. " [End of Book]

...against which background the following reads somewhat poignantly, which is presumably also from Cherry Lewis although appearing on an anonymous website:-

("..Holmes made another significant contribution to geology. Years before the scientific community accepted Alfred Wegener's theory of continental drift, Holmes hypothesized (correctly) how it could have happened, through convection currents in earth's mantle.) Yet plate tectonics would not be widely accepted by geologists until after Holmes's death, and Holmes himself confessed in 1953, "I have never succeeded in freeing myself from a nagging prejudice against continental drift."

"I have never succeeded in freeing myself from a nagging prejudice against continental drift." ... Such an illuminating statement indeed from someone who had taught it all his life! For why should Holmes, by 1953, in the best position of anyone to assess the veracity of a convective mechanism for continental drift, appear to be distancing himself from it? Seems to me the reason is in the pages of Holmes' own book - Principles of Physical Geology, for those principles if applied correctly to the evolution of the surface of the land, particularly with reference to scale and in relation to the incision of elevated erosional surfaces from which mountains are carved, practically spell out Earth expansion. Almost certainly Holmes did not entertain that exact intention to begin with, but writing focusses the mind powerfully well, .. and Holmes almost certainly could not ignore what would occur to any casual observer reading his book if they came at it already cognisant of the reality of expansion, ..that the many illustrations in his book are testimomy to the point of expansion.

Was Holmes by then moving away from mantle convection towards the same path as Carey? Given the paralllel life-times, the impingement of Carey's ideas on his own, and the very documentation of expansion that Holmes himself had set out in his book, and the inevitable realisation of what the flat tracts of eroded plateau surfaces must represent, I think it highly probable. From a geological perspective there is no alternative.

"... And Harry's wild about me..."

[D.F. Image modification - 2011/01/26. The above image of H. Hess was from the wikipedia commons and may have been removed by Google. I am not reposting it in case there may have been an inadvertent infringement of copyright since I did merge it with that of Clark Gable (remaining), with the intention of space-saving. The juxtaposition of the two was by way of acknowledging the apparent importance of Hollywood in the American psyche and the part that might play in the public perception in tying Hess's naval career (as captain and later admiral) with his academic career as one of the founders of Plate tectonics - since he's easily as good-looking as Clark Gable (in Mutiny on the Bounty), which in itself is surely worth a plate or two. (Vivian Leigh by the way didn't understand swashbuckling at all, if all she complained about was bad breath.) .. .. (Those cheroots from the Caribbean, ... some weed...) ]
P.S. 2011/08/19 The black warning sign has just appeared (within the last couple of weeks or so), confirming that it was a Google take-down. The original was up for about three days before it was taken down, since when it it has been an empty frame until replaced by the above.

Karaoke with Carmen

[ See also Expanding Earth blog at
http://www.earthexpansion.blogspot.com/ ]

Jack Oliver and the Passing Parade

2011-01-20T18:27:00.000-08:00

(Blog for website at http://users.indigo.net.au/don/ )

"All of the pieces suddenly made sense if you believed plate tectonics was going on"

The above quote from the obituaries noting the recent passing of Jack Oliver, the last (?) of the fathers of Plate Tectonics, is a rather illuminating one for the uncertainty couched in the qualification in the tail of the statement, which makes it perfectly clear which way round the status and logic of the present consensus of Plate Tectonics should be read, and for which the current generation of Plate Tectonicists will probably not thank him. But then the Grim Reaper has a way of extracting honesty when he makes his rounds.

[D.F. - The posting says, "All of the pieces suddenly made sense if you believed plate tectonics was going on," said Larry D Brown, a professor of geological sciences at Cornell who was a former student of Oliver.
<and this from Lynn R. Sykes>, " I had been told as an undergraduate at M.I.T. that good scientists did not work on foolish ideas like continental drift,” recalled Lynn Sykes, an emeritus professor of earth and environmental sciences at Columbia. <...>    Dr. Sykes said he thought that his adviser, Jack Oliver, was also not a believer in continental drift. ."]

Well, ..of course "all the pieces make sense if you believe Plate Tectonics is going on".   So do all the presents that appear under the Christmas tree make perfect sense too, if you believe in Santa Clause. And the shiny coin under the pillow if you believe in the tooth fairy. And crop rings if you are into UFOs. There is no end to the power of belief in making things make sense. And rightly so, since it underpins the religious institutions of the world.

Belief however is not a credible foundation for science You begin with the facts, and for all that the facts are notoriously difficult to divorce from one's perception of them, you try your hardest to do exactly that. Belief, if ever that disposition should be allowed to colour the scientific mindset, develops only by the most critical (and honest) analysis of what you think you know, and why you think it, and should always be held at arms length in any case; rational thought, not belief, is the hallmark of science. Belief is for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. It has no place in science.

He puts it very well, does he not? ...and no doubt very intentionally so too. To my way of reading it highlights the uncertainty that the fathers of Plate Tectonics must have felt when trying to grapple with a problem that most nowadays don't give a second thought to since we already have an answer packaged and supplied, which was the implication that followed from the realisation that the ocean floors were everywhere young, ... that the Earth must have enlarged by the extents of the ocean floors since Mesozoic times. The force of this must also have been emphasised by exactly this position being vigourously asserted by Sam Carey <also Google-up>.

However, rather than confront the detailed geological evidence that supported this (as described by Carey), the grapplers took the shortcut as they had done before with Wegener, and took refuge in their own ignorance claiming "No Mechanism", and in a classic case of narcissistic reversal, heaped the substance of their ignorance on the victim, saying in effect, "We can't think of a mechanism and you can't either, .. and what's more, ..we are masters of the college", a claim given some weight at the time by the awe in which physics was held following the recent advances in understanding the atom.

And in essence that is the state of affairs of Plate Tectonics today, a triumph of ignorance in geophysical understanding of the interior workings of the planet (that we can't see) over the empirical surface geological facts that result from it (that we can see), which are telling us in no uncertain terms the Earth has indeed got bigger. Very suddently. Very recently.

Or maybe not, if you are a paid-up member of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Doctrine of the Faith and "believe Plate Tectonics is going on..."

For even then not everyone involved in the "New Global Tectonics" did, notably Bruce Heezen and Marie Tharp who put together the maps of the ocean floors. It is a brave voice however, that is prepared to make a stand for certitude bred of ignorance, ..that for which we have no explanation today, but for which we may have an explanation tomorrow. It smacks too much of religious faith.  Evidently that was not a course the Big Ship of physics was prepared to chart, .. to admit ignorance in the face of the facts and leave clarification to the future, and so it invented a solution and adjusted the facts to suit.

Facts lacking explanation do not easily find their way into scientific debate, but by the same token, whatever their beguiling colour, shape or form, explanations should not be held paramount over the facts. Facts rule, ..particularly when they are geological ones that embrace all scales, compared to the raw facts of geophysics, which when boiled down amount to little more than the trace of the shake of a shaky pen at the end of a seismograph when an earthquake happens - fertile ground indeed for all sorts of imaginings and hypothesising, ... "if you believed plate tectonics was going on."

..The trace of the shake of a shaky pen...    A fact? Or a representation of a fact. And what value then the pyramid of assumptions and assertions balanced on its inverted tip?

(Belief, ..the opus moderandum powering the Big Ship, ..The Noah's Ark for the Congregation of Plate Tectonics. One has to wonder where it's 'Mount Ararat' will be, ..when the waters run off from underneath it, and leave it high and dry, and it finally has to face the reality - of run-off from a once Big Flat Land.   Was Mount Ararat really a mountain? Or the sea floor.... ??

[ See also Expanding Earth blog at
http://www.earthexpansion.blogspot.com/ ]

Big Lie #6 - Misreading the continents too

2011-01-17T18:32:00.000-08:00

(Blog for website at http://users.indigo.net.au/don/ )

Fig.1. Mountain belts of Europe and Asia formed by Plate Collision. Africa with Europe to crumple the Alps; India with Asia to crumple Asia - from China to the Russian Peninsula.

Africa collides with Europe to throw up the Alps. India collides with Asia to crumple that part of the crust, with, as can be seen in the picture, evidently much greater effect, ...crumpling the crust from the Himalayas to the Russian Peninsula and raising the question, exactly how is this difference achieved? What makes little India such a powerful crust-crumpler, where Africa is not? For an answer to this perplexing question we visit one of the more respected institutions of pre-collegiate learning, and see what they have to say, noting, unfortunately, that standards appear to be falling below the rest of the world...
-----------------------------
"Isn't that right, Teach, .. continents collide and push up mountains?"
"Yeah, Africa, ..colliding wi' Europe an' shovin' up the Alps. Ah learnt that frae ma aul' dad. They were teachin' it when he wuz at schule. They're still teachin' it. . Must be right."
"Yeah? ... How long ago was....   "
"That's correct. It's one of the fundamental tenets of Plate Tectonics. Plates collide and crumple the crust to form mountains. Now carry on, everyone, ..in pairs, but with a little less noise, PLEASE."
"Yeah, Look at Africa. Made a right mess of Europe, didn' it... .   Huv ye ivver seen a truck hit a lamp post? Knock the shit right oot o' it."
"Quieter Please."
"Sorry Teach. But this is excitin' stuff, isn't it no, Matt ?
"Sure is."
"But whit aboot the Med? How's that? S'in between. An' it's extensional. How does a collidin' continent pushin' up mountains manage tae pull stuff as well?"
"Well, ..it must have bounced off. Hit it first and crumpled it, then bounced off and pulled it with it."
"Ye mean, ..the lamp post, ..like?"
"Sort of, ...yeah, .. If it just nudged it kind of, you know, ..and then bounced off it, ..and the lamp post fell over."
"Aye, ..ower the tap. ..Huv ye ivver ridden yer bike intae a lamp post? Ah huv. Didnae bounce very far. Ennyhow, how did it no jist barrel on right ower the tap? It's no jist me an' mah bike. Tha's Africa, ..a Mercedes truck!"
"Well, like I said, maybe it just nudged it a bit and rebounded, and that's how there's not that much damage."
"Jeez. Looks a lot o' damage tae me. Ennyhow, isn't it supposed tae tak a dive intae the pavement when it hits, an' drag the lamp post wi' it? That wid account for the lamp post fallin' ower the truck."
"Yeah, ..that's what I thought. We'd better not ask Teach, ..we're supposed to know this for the exams coming up. Anyhow, look at India in that figure if you want damage."
"Shit, .. I never noticed that...."
"QUIETER please."
"...Jesus! China, ..rattled right tae the back teeth. So it did. How though? ...   I mean, .. well, ... how *did it? How come Africa sae big only made a dunt, and wee India, ..such a frantic heid-job on Asia?"
"Horns. India's got horns, And all these plates are independent. They can move any way they like."
"They're moving the same way though."
"Well it's like you said, .. about the lampost."
"That wisnae me. That wis you."
"Well, I mean, ..different speeds. bouncing off or barrelling over, ...Isn't that right, Teach?"
"Mmmh?"
"India colliding with Asia to throw up mountains."
"Yes that's correct. The generally held view is that the collision of India with Asia caused deformation of the crust right to the Russian Peninsula. It's called 'far-field tectonics". India is moving because of incremental insertions of dyke material at the spreading ridge. If you go to university and are interested enough, you will learn more about orogenesis and the various expressions of tectonics.."
"Jeez, ah doan' know. Ye know, .. Ah wuz lookin' forward tae that, ..but they trebled the fees.   Ah think ah'll huvtae drive a truck. Think Ah'd rather ennyhow. Avoid thae lamposts. Show 'em how it's done. Whit aboot you?"
"Yeah, you can get a fair bit off the web anyhow. I came across a guy talking about collding cars making mountains, and the speed of collision. And he's been,"
"Where? The mountains?"
"No, ..uni."
"Well, ..there ye go. Uni. Wha needs it? Whit diddie say?"
"I copied it down. Here it's. He says, "...Most mountains are pushed upward, their rock beds wrinkled like bedsheets or tilted like stacks of newspapers. <...> The plates bump each other's edges in a slow-motion Demolition Derby, and that's where mountain ranges get their start. <.....>   "Mountain belts are typically formed by plate tectonic activity, specifically continental collision."   (From - Andrew Alden, 'Arm-wavers of the centuries - landforms and features',
"Gee, Is that so? There we go. Bedsheets an' newspapers, eh? Magic, the stuff you learn at uni. A' ye need tae know.   He's got a real smooth way o' puttin' it as well. Ah like the demolishing bit, ..but Ah'm getting mah license next year, an' might go for wan o' they whatsits, .. rather than a truck. Or drive a bulldozer. .. Get up a bit o' speed an' show 'em. how tae push stuff around proper like."
"Hey, Jimmie, ....You jist keep aff the road, you. You're a disaster."
"Naebdy's asking you. Where d'you come frae ennyhow wi' a nose-job like that? ..Barlinnie? D'ye want anither?"
"That's enough now. Two minutes to the bell. Collect in all the books please, And don't forget your homework for Monday.."
----------------
And here, with some reflection on how governments stymie the hopes of youthful aspiration (but not the tectonics of testosterone) we must leave this edifying excursion into the workings of global tectonics, noting in passing the value of the web and Google's brilliant service of it which allows all knowledge the opportunity at least of exposure to the general public. In passing we should also note the best efforts of science journals to thwart this by imposing exorbitant paygates to access the results of research, which in most cases the public has already paid for. (Another con job, if you ask me, exactly along the lines of fee-trebling - to deliberately exclude the public (and more popular media outlets) from asking hard questions of the value of much of research being done. Both education and access to it are becoming (again) a closed shop gravytrain, paid for by public money, but to which the public effectively does not have access.

Mountain building by plate collision?   Not when I was at school. Even at mine where nose-jobs were commonplace, they were described as due to the erosion of plateaus, in which folds in them (if any) predated levelling of the land surface.   What about yours?   Newspapers and bedsheets?

[ See also Expanding Earth blog at
http://www.earthexpansion.blogspot.com/ ]

Big Lie #5 - Misreading the ocean floors

2011-01-10T05:11:00.000-08:00

(Blog for website at http://users.indigo.net.au/don/ )

Spreading ridges, Continental margins - and jigsaw fits. Looks simple, doesn't it? There we have Africa clipping into America, ..Greenland fitting back to Norway, ..the Arctic ocean closing no problem, .. It's all easy. And look, you can close the Red Sea easiest of all. (Gets a bit wide down the bottom there, but no problem.) And you can probably do something with the Persian Gulf - and certainly something with the way India fits to Africa. (Or is it the way Africa fits to India?) Top position or bottom position, ..no problem, there's a fit ennyhow, .we can argue about it (till the cows come home; and a research project in it for somebody). Madagascar back to Africa looks good, and look at that - Antarctica and Australia. Awww, ..a shoe in.. Hey, .. this is easy we're sailing! Hoist the Jolly Roger, ... Uh, .. simple, ...Who's got the beer? Crack us a can and give us a fag. The Pacific? We'll deal with it later. And if Big Arthur shows up, torpedo him.

Simple? Well, ..Uh, .. no. .. Not that simple. Because there are two options in this business of closing the oceans, and the implications of both are entirely different. And the 'other one' is not explored in Plate Tectonics,.. because...? *IT* - *IS* - *ITS* *_NEMESIS_* - a damoclean sword hanging by the threat of Pacific closure. If the Pacific closes ... (Enter the 'suspect terranes' debate, ..and more special pleading) ..then it's the Big Ship down to Davey Jones' Locker.

Does the Pacific close?
Of course it does.
What's the evidence?
Right under your nose.

But it is more of a struggle to ignore it.

First option (read as above) the continents move away from the spreading ridges. Transform faults are like tramrails reflecting flow in the mantle underneath; shows the movement. The Earth' surface stays a constant size (= Plate Tectonics).

The other (second) option. Using the same data (also read as above); the spreading ridges move away from the continents. The only way they can do this is if the ridges keep moving up. Keep moving up means they keep getting longer. Over time the 'keep' bit adds up and the ocean floors keep getting bigger (while the continents don't). Since the ocean floors are everywhere young means that two thirds of the Earth's surface (which is ocean floor) have kept getting bigger. From nothing to two thirds of its present surface area since the Mesozoic, ..that's a lot of getting bigger, ..with the ridges moving away from the continents. (= Earth expansion).

Earth Expansion? Well, .. Not according to the third special pleading option offered by Plate Tectonics in the spirit of disingenuous 'real' science - putting up a hypothesis to be disproved, and then ignoring the proven failure by putting up another special plea.

Special pleading option? Yes, ..the ridges (says Plate Tectonics) can still get longer without moving up - if the ridge is moving too, i.e., it's not only spreading, but moving. For example in the Atlantic, not only would America be moving away from Africa, but the ridge would be too (Africa fixed). The trouble with this interpretation is the further complication implied.

The first complication is conceptual - where (at what level) in the mantle is the heat source driving the convection? And what would cause it to move? (= multilayered convection; another convection cell beneath the one doing the moving, but moving more or less the same way? = more research? Note that the topic would be based on an avoidance of the simple explanation that the spreading ridges, which are the biggest uplift on the planet didn't just stop moving up when they broke through the crust, ..but kept moving up. The evidence? = the geological reconstruction on the site in the header above.)

And the 'another special plea? is the (highly unscientific) assertion that there is nothing in the theory of Plate Tectonics to say that ridges can't move. But there certainly is in the geology, ..which says that there is no reason to think that spreading ridges have been anything other than fixed since they were intiated (there is no need to invent faeries simply because they can't be disproved).

The second complication is empirical - that the ocean floor off the eastern coast of the Americas is longer again than the spreading ridge, and so too is the equivalent lenth of the Americas compared to their African counterpart - by the extents of the Texas Gulf - Caribbean Sea region and their continuation as the northeast coast of South America. Whatever would be causing the spreading ridge to move (and take the Americas with it) is not only spreading everything out in a westerly direction ( and spreading it more the further west we go), but also spreading it north-southerly as well, which is a surface enlargement greater than would occur with a simple linear westerly movement away from the ridge.

The Americas have extended parallel to the Atlantic spreading ridge, but in fact when we look more closely, *this* lengthening is in the direction of the transform faults that lie just south of the Hump of Africa (because the northeastern coast of South America which is the transform fit, tells us so), in other words transverse to the ridge, i.e., there has been substantial rotation of the continental crust, detaching South America from the mantle substrate. This means (in this special pleading hypothetical) that the leading dynamics of ridge-lengthening belong to the American side, and incorporate a lengthening of the Americas parallel to the Atlantic ridge and an accompanying rotational detachment of the crust from the mantle. All of which is to effect an extension parallel to the Pacific margin. To put it in simpler terms, the Americas and their substrate got stretched when they approached the Pacific margin.

Which means in turn that the ocean floor being subducted on the Pacific side (of the Americas) is associated with significant extension in the overlying crust along the length of the subduction zone. How come?

A complication in Plate Tectonics, but none at all in Earth expansion. The Americas getting longer are easily accommodated in Earth expansion simply by them being stretched over the burgeoning extrusion of the Pacific mantle bubble and unhinging about the Caribbean Pivot.

Plate Tectonics has no explanation for American lengthening other than the initial special pleading mentioned above, used to negate the more obvious interpretation - that the biggest uplift on the planet didn't stop moving up when it broke through the crust, ..but has been moving up ever since. In other words, Earth expansion explains it, where Plate Tectonics can't.

Question. How can something so obvious (like the spreading ridges moving up) (and getting longer) be ignored by a worldful of geologists and geophysicists?

Answer. It's not ignored. It's deliberate. But to admit it would upset the comfortable status quo that ensures the steady passage of publications aboard the gravytrain of free lunch.

If anybody thinks special pleading is valid in science under the guise of erecting hypotheses to be falsified, they're wrong today just as they ever were, though in the days of pre-Copernican astronomy it kept a lot of people on the right side of the Church with butter on their bread. What made the mantle move up in the first place could be argued to be convection, but what makes it keep moving up cannot. It is more like explosion. What's the difference between convection and explosion? Rate of application of the heat source. Maybe the next question, "Why was there an increase in the rate of application of the heat source during the Mesozoic?" should be more like, "Why did it begin to be felt during the Mesozoic to the extent of mantle breakthrough?" What were the precursor events that heralded it? And what was the nature of the addition of heat that broke up a terrestrial crust that covered the entire planet? Because if there was a crust already formed as a pan-global Pangaea (and Pacific closure) says was the case, then something energetic that got transformed into heat must have been added. The question is, .. when?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_impact_hypothesis

Close the Pacific? Sure, .. it's just a bit more difficult to see than the others, .. and been messed about more. That's the thrust of the argument, ..the Pacific closes, just like the others, and the ocean floors are young.

Which means the Earth is getting bigger.

[ See also Expanding Earth blog at
http://www.earthexpansion.blogspot.com/ ]