Over the centuries we have been taught a lot of things
about the Earth, many of which we have come to find out are
totally false. Clearly the Earth is not flat, as we have all
seen quite plainly in recent times courtesy of various space
probes, satellites, and photographs from several space stations.
But are there other things we commonly believe about the Earth
that just may not be true?
There are some things about the Earth that we have come to
accept that we don’t even realize are of fairly recent origin
and are very much unproven. One of these is the operation of
plate tectonics.
It is possible that every grade school youngster has noted
how well the eastern coastline of South America fits with the
western coastline of Africa. In 1915 Alfred Wegener proposed
his theory of “continental drift” to explain how the continents
would indeed fit together like a jig saw puzzle at some time in
the past and are now separated by significant distances.
Paleontologists had also noted that identical creatures somehow
found themselves separated by oceans where there was no rational
explanation for their migration across oceanic distances. So
the explanation of plate tectonic movement to explain this has
become widely accepted. However, there is a problem.
The theory of continental drift as it exists today is based
upon the movement of tectonic plates with the Earth remaining at
a constant size. That is, the Earth’s diameter was established
billions of years ago and has not changed in any substantive way
in the last few hundred million years. As a direct result, for
continents to “drift” tectonic plates not only need to move
horizontally relative to each other, but there has to be plate
subduction as well. Plate subduction says that as one plate is
moved into collision with another, one of the two plates is
driven under the other (i.e., subducted). This doesn’t seem
terribly unreasonable until one realizes there is no known
mechanism that would cause subduction to work on any large
scale. That is, there is nothing about the nature of tectonic
plates that would provide sufficient force horizontally to cause
one plate to be driven under another one. On the other hand
there is an evident force that would cause quite the opposite to
occur.
The theory of how planets form essentially says that they
coalesce from the dust and debris surrounding a newly formed
star. So, billions of years ago the Earth became a clearly
identifiable body orbiting the sun as an entity amidst a lot of
co-orbiting dust that was also eventually swept up by the Earth.
As the our planet grew in size through accumulation of material
the pressure exerted by the thousands of miles of material build
up along with the original temperatures of the material resulted
in high levels of internal heating. Essentially, the squeezing
of the Earth heated it up internally. However, over a period of
time the Earth was also developing a rather solid shell of
cooled and very strong material.
It is commonly believed that the formation of the Earth
consists of a molten core of mostly iron, a viscous mantle of
various materials, and a crust. It is also widely accepted that
the Earth has existed at roughly its present diameter for
billions of years. This allows for the fact that even at
present there are 1,000 to 5,000 tons of meteoric and cometary
debris continuing to add to the Earth on a daily basis. After
all, dinosaur bones don’t tend to be buried just because the
dinosaurs were poor housekeepers. The Earth does indeed still
accumulate matter from space although on a fairly limited basis
these days.
The idea of the Earth’s size being very constant along
with continental drift has given rise to an interesting
interpretation that flies in the face of physics. The
continents do clearly fit together in a way that gives rise to
the belief of an original super-continent that Alfred Wegener
called Pangea and a single massive sea that he named
Panthalassa. However, to achieve this you have to make a
lopsided planet (i.e., high density material piled up in on one
side, and a massive lower density sea on the other side). Then
to get from this situation to the present day, you have to find
a mechanism that fractures Pangea and allows it to “float”
around the planet causing massive tectonic subduction of early
crustal materials. The problem is that the massive subduction
zones are missing, but that’s only the beginning of the
problems.
If we accept the arrangement of Pangea as normally
depicted, then the Pacific Ocean must be a remnant of the
ancient global sea. If that is the case then the floor of the
Pacific Ocean should contain some of the oldest crustal material
on the planet. However, exactly the opposite has been
demonstrated. Both the Pacific and Atlantic Ocean contain some
of the newest surface material on the planet, and they are both
growing. This is in complete contradiction to the theory as it
presently stands.
Despite the contradictions, the study of plate tectonics
has generated a lot of very useful raw data regarding the age of
various parts of the Earth. In fact, rather detailed maps have
been made that show where we can find the newest parts of the
Earth. An internet site that shows some of this can be found at
http://eqseis.geosc.psu.edu/~cammon/HTML/Classes/IntroQuakes/Not
es/plate_tect01.html. While looking through the maps presented
there, you can see that not only is South America moving away
from Africa, but it is also apparently moving away from
Australia. Both the South Pacific and South Atlantic are
growing. Not only that, but the Indian Ocean is growing as
well. Also, the mid-Atlantic ridge and the Pacific ridge are
hot spots. That is, the heat from the interior of the Earth is
leaking at these spots to a greater extent than elsewhere.
These are thin spots in the insulation of the mantle from the
surface.
Maps, such as these, point to an interesting possibility.
If all of these areas are growing, and subduction isn’t
happening, then we are left with the inescapable conclusion that
the diameter of the Earth is not only increasing due to
accretion (material accumulation from space), but it is also
being inflated from inside. No, the Earth is not being blown up
like a balloon. Rather, the upwelling material from the mantle
has cracked the crust along the various ridges, fills the cracks
and is wedging the pieces apart to increase the total surface
area of the Earth thereby increasing the size of the Earth.
Is this possible?
One way to see if this is possible would be to make use of
crust age maps to simultaneously remove newer material while
letting the remaining surface be remapped to a newer and smaller
diameter required by the smaller available surface. This
process could be continued to slowly regress the Earth to
earlier and earlier ages. Neal Adams has done exactly this with
not only the Earth, but also with a part of Mars, the Moon, and
several other planetary bodies
http://www.nealadams.com/nmu.html. Interestingly, when the
Earth is regressed in this manner all of the land masses fit
together perfectly with no need for a hemispherical Panthalassa
sea. Pangea precisely fits on an Earth that is roughly 60% of
the diameter of present day Earth and those portions of present
day Earth comprising the seas simply disappear.
An expanding Earth also causes rather dramatic mountain
ranges to be created. As the crust is pushed apart and the
diameter of the Earth increases, the crust that originally fit
the curve of the smaller diameter has to be flattened out to
conform to a larger diameter. The underside of the crust is put
in tension and the upper surface is put in compression. This
leads to fractures (faults), slippage and folding of the crust
to achieve the new flatter overall shape.
Whether our planet expands or not doesn’t seem terribly
important to us at the moment, but what would the consequences
have been for the early inhabitants of Earth?
Let’s assume for the moment that between the time that the
Earth’s diameter was 60% of its present diameter and now, that
the Earth gained 25% of its present mass from accretion. In
this case an early Earth with 75% of its present mass but 60% of
its present diameter would have a surface gravity of just over
twice what we experience today. Unfortunately, this is in
contrast to claims many expanding Earth theorists make regarding
an early Earth having lower gravity and using this as an
explanation for the size of dinosaurs. The only way for a small
(0.6 d) Earth to have even the same gravity as today would be if
it was less than 36% of its present mass. The more likely
scenario is that when the Earth was small, so were the early
life forms on the planet. It was only very late in the age of
dinosaurs that the larger beasts roamed the land areas of the
planet as gravity approached more modern levels.
Barbara John, a University of Wyoming geologist and one
of the co-chief scientists on an expedition to drill down to the
boundary between the crust and mantle of the Earth (Moho) said,
"Our major result is that we've recovered the lower crust for
the first time and have confirmed that the Earth's crust at this
locality is more complicated than we thought.”
All things considered, maybe the Earth’s crust is more
complicated everywhere than anyone thought.
