Africa shrinks!
(...- Stop press! You wouldn't read about it - except here...)
Africa shrinks!
(...- Stop press! You wouldn't read about it - except here...)
Fig.1. Shrinking continents. The coastlines of America and Africa are shorter than the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Therefore (in plate tectonics) these continents have shrunk as they moved away from the ridge. Note the northeast coastline of South America equates with transform movement and doesn't count for ridge-length equivalence.(Horizontal bars top and bottom represent limiting transforms to the movement of separation.)
| Plate
tectonics requires that the Earth has not increased in size.
The ridge represents the palaeoposition of Atlantic continental fracture.
The continents have moved apart. The ridge is longer than the coastlines
of the present-day continents. Therefore the continents have shrunk
as they moved apart.
Wow!!
Transforms? Look at them. Dozens of them. Which is the defining one making the African plate "slide past" the American plate? What a daft question (?) when they have a map showing exactly which transforms mark the plate boundaries. |
Why those particular ones? You might well ask. If you
say all of them, then you'd be right, but then clearly you'd basically
be talking about 'ridge'.
Well, ..so much for garbage. Now the good oil. Transform faults and spreading ridges are actually just different expressions of the same dilational structure. It's the way orthogonal fracture sets grow on the expanding curved substrate of the mantle - by 'cell-division'. Platies think of them as two separate things - numbers one and two of the three boundaries that make up plates (1 = ridge, 2 = transforms, and 3 = subduction zones). But they're not. They're mutually tied. 1 and 2 are different expressions of the same thing. It's an integrated structure that looks like a zip. See it all as one. An integrated set. So, if 1 and 2 are the same thing, and 3 doesn't exist (is only an assumption), then what's that telling us? About the Sea Floors I mean. (And of course, if we add the Gulf/ Caribbean region, then the length of the Americas has grown much more than the ridges - to accommodate the big burgeoning bubble of the Pacific. <g.bble> |
Ziplocked
The answer of course is that it's not the continents that are shrinking, it's the ridges that are extending - along their length as well as across. That is, plate tectonics is not telling the whole story about the ocean floors: extension is along the ridges as well as across, which is most strongly supportive of global expansion (and most strongly against Plate Tectonics).Platies just don't understand transform faults - and that's that. They're dumb. Not you of course, dear reader. You could never be impuned with a belief in Plate Tectonics. If you're reading my page, you're not dumb. You're clever. Come back again. Help me save the world from Mad Platie disease - Geomatosis.
..Or
have your say..