.....The Law of Earth Expansion
           (...and the implications for Plate Tectonics...)

Fig.1.  Ridicule of Newton.   New ideas are always ridiculed, intensity being in direct proportion to the entrenchment of the status quo they threaten. It is the first test of their durability. (Image courtesy of citation above.)

 

Once more, mass and the gravitational force that it exerts, presents us with a conundrum: the Earth has doubled its size, but there is apparently no known way whereby this can occur. It is exactly in this conundrum where lies the reason and indeed the need for Plate Tectonics' assumption of subduction - that the increase in surface area of the Earth must be matched by a decrease elsewhere (subduction zones), and (therefore) that the Earth must  remain a constant size because we do not know how otherwise - gravity as we know it would be in question.

There is strange irony in the fact that, although the stuff of mass is readily accessible to all our senses (we can see it, feel it, smell it, and hear its disturbances), we are still no nearer (or little nearer)  from Newton's day to understanding exactly what mass actually is.

Through experiments with electrostatics and ionised gas clouds we have come to understand the atom, in that the smallest particle of tangible mass is made of subparticles of a scale so tiny that compared to the size of the atom they are like "peas in a football park", able to penetrate palpable mass as if it did not exist.  The atom when looked at closely seems to shimmer in and out of existence, leaving us only with its particles and the electrostatic charge that binds them as evidence - somewhere around seventy at last count.   If anything this understanding has served to cloud the issue, not clarify it, for we are left with the inescapable conclusion that mass as we commonly know it is only its tangible expression to our senses, not its proper description.   In other words mass properly only exists at the subatomic scale, and that the boundary conditions relating to our perceived reality of it that shape it to atomic, molecular and crystalline forms are like sentinels, guardians to the gate of this mysterious existence.  But if we wish to understand what mass is and how it comes into being, then it is this subatomic scale that must be examined, just as molecular structure and genetics is obviously the scale we need to examine in order to understand life.

'Obviously'?  Perhaps it is when we look at it like that, but this 'bottom-up' approach is not the scale of our current worldly exploration.  Our understanding of terrestrial origins is a top-down planetary accretionist model where the mass budget of the Earth was established in the beginning by the coalescence of already crystalline meteoritic and asteroidal particles, derived from the destruction of earlier planetary masses.  According to Plate Tectonics (except for the continuing negligible infall of space dust) this original mass is invariable -  it cannot change; as it was in the beginning so it always was through geological time, otherwise the Earth would be getting bigger (or smaller), according to processes of which we know nothing.  This is an extraordinarily brutal and hubristic position for science to hold, because it is in effect saying, "We do not care about the supporting evidence (for such-and-such), and because we do not know how such-and-such can happen we can therefore disregard it" as if it had not happened.  In the case of Plate Tectonics  this particular statement of disregard has morphed into, "..therefore it cannot happen".

Just as Newton's observance of the fact of the falling apple to the ground reportedly led him  to formulate the law of universal gravitation, so the observance of the fact of parallel continental margins and symmetrical magnetic striping leads Geology to the 'law' of continental separation.  Which is not the same thing as Plate Tectonics.  Plate Tectonics is a theory of process whereby that separation happens.. moreover one which includes another dependent and assumptive theory (incidentally the seed of its destruction) as its critical part - that of subduction.  Continental separation is (like a falling apple)  a fact of existence: the mathematics of the falling apple do not describe a theory, they describe a fact just as the mathematics of a sphere describe its surface shape/ volume etc.  In other words, we may talk about a theory of gravitation as speculation why mass should exert a force at a distance, but gravity (and the mathematical law which describes it) is a fact ( 1 ).

It is precisely the observance of continental separation in the Pacific region which leads to the 'Law' of Earth Expansion - (by which I mean, 'law':- an observation/ conclusion tantamount to fact, ..a description) . Were Plate Tectonics to recognise that continental separation in the Pacific region is a fact every bit as much as that in the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific regions, and that the continental landmasses can be similarly retrofitted, then Plate Tectonics could not exist.  This is the part that is missing from Plate Tectonics, and because of this inability to recognise it, an omission which has been substituted for by the gratuitous assumption of subduction.

Again, ...that the Earth has got bigger is not a theory, it is a fact.  The process by which it has got bigger, however, remains less than a theory - it is entirely unknown, ..just as the process by which gravity acts at a distance remains to this day, unknown; but the two are aspects of mass behaviour, and are therefore, somehow, related.

Recognising the Law of Earth Expansion provides the foundation for deriving the processes by which the global structural features come into being - successive erosional profiles of the continental crust as sequential corrections to the changing curvature of the Earth; mountains as the most spectacular expressions of this; the extrusion of the mantle (emergence of ocean floors) as a unique event on the time-line of planetary evolution; the oceanic spreading ridges as the  initiation of pan-global crustal rupture, subduction zones as the expression of the peripheral hemispherical correction as the smaller Pangaean hemispheres are forced to adjust to the increasing size of the Earth; transform faults as growth normal faults in the mantle related to expansion and mediated by the Earth's spin.

In other words, through recognising the Law of Global Expansion and the process of oceanisation, i.e., the progressive extrusion of the mantle, everything of Plate Tectonics is up for change; every point on which it contradicts itself is reconciled and explained.  And it is predictive, pointing the way to which geological research is headed, in particular predicting Plate Tectonics' next shift in goalposts to include the way in which the Earth's spin relates to geological structure.
 

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