Axiom 1 - the Panthalassic myth
         (....Garden Faeries - The central pillar of Plate Tectonics....)

Fig.1.  Faeries.  Just because you don't see them (faeries at the bottom of the garden) doesn't mean to say they're not there....   (Go on, .. prove they're not there)  Plate Tectonics seeks to cirucmvent the essence of science - falsifiability - by building its house on the foundation of the disappearance of the Panthalassa.

(Plate Tectonics,
..the bad fairy at the bottom of the garden.)

 
It goes like this.

1. (*Axiom*): "The Earth cannot get bigger (because we know of no way that it can)."  (Tacit acknowledgement of the completeness of physics):-

2. The continents are fixed to the upper, brittle part of the mantle which is broken into what are called 'plates' which 'move' about the globe, pulling apart here and colliding there.  Continents become separated at one end and collide at the other, a bit like ships at sea leaving and docking in port (or smashing into the pier), or cars colliding on a racetrack.  Now this is important for reasons that will become clear later, but it has to be highlighted here.  It is the plates as a whole that sail, i.e. the upper part of the mantle with a continent on top; not continents that sail on the mantle, but the continents and the upper part of the mantle together that do the sailing.

3.  Since the Earth must remain a constant size (axiom1) the creation of ocean floor in one place must be matched by its destruction in another.  Therefore, since two thirds of the Earth's surface is covered by ocean floor which has been emplaced since the Mesozoic, an equivalent amount of surface must have been destroyed to make way for it - the ocean floor of so-called 'Panthalassa'). Destruction is accommodated down the deep ocean trenches bordering the Pacific (the 'Fiery Ring') and their local extensions along the Java trench.  Since none of the other oceans show evidence of destruction around their peripheral margins the summed area of these too is included in this disappearance.  Whilst not stated in so many words, the logic of this (following from axiom 1) is that since Panthalassa no longer exists (as mandated by the eixistence of the present oceans), its invisibility is proof of its once-existence.  This is no more than the classic argument for fairies at the bottom of the garden.
 

And that, basically, is the central pillar of Plate Tectonics' entire thesis: the balanced creation and destruction of ocean floors to account for what we see*.  It is an assumption, based on the false axiom, clearly illustrated in these pages, that the Earth must remain a constant size.  All else of Plate Tectonics is an attempt to rationalise global structure within this wrong framework.

Of course Plate Tectonicists would dispute this, saying it doesn't begin with an assumption at all, but with the well-founded fact of subduction, but that's only because they don't know their own history, and because they haven't thought about it.  What we *can see* is the spreading that we have - ocean floors, spreading ridges, transform faults.  Subduction zones are what we *can't see*, other than by the dead, the destruction and the homeless and the rubble created by the earthquakes in them, and (for those more remote from the mayhem and destruction) the spidery line created by the shake of a shaky pen on a piece of paper (so to speak).  What subduction zones indisputably *are*,  are zones of *earthquakes*  in *brittle crust*, where 'brittleness' depends as much as anything on rate of deformation rather than coldness ("even mud will fracture when you pull it"), not wads of oceanic lithosphere being carried down down into the mantle on the back of convecting cells.  Nor are they 'falling' into the mantle on account of being cold, and driving mantle currents around.  Bent down the oceanic lithosphere most certainly is, but in terms of the process-dynamic, which is active from the continental side as 'overriding' (and not from the oceanic side as 'subduction') it is more accurate to regard the subcrustal lithosphere as bending *UP*', not mantle crust bending down.  This is what all the circum-Pacific earthquakes are about, the release of stress on the upwards-bending subcrustal lithosphere of Mesozoic crustal curvature as it rides out over the already extruded mantle and corrects to the curvature of the enlarging Earth.

It is very easy to lose track of the hierarchy of assumption, fact and conclusion when you think of something and find evidence to support it, as Plate Tectonics has done.  In the beginning the assumption was Panthalassa, and the zone of earthquakes around the Pacific was considered support for its destruction. Gradually 'support' was supplanted by 'proof', then  'fact',

But subduction is not a fact.  The *zone of earthquakes* is a fact, but when all else is taken into account, it points unerringly in the direction of expansion, not subduction, for the reasons presented in these pages.

From a geological perspective Plate Tectonics fails because it doesn't, and can't work.  It is sheer, unabashed, unadulterated geophysical speculation (/nonsense) of high order in an enterprise heavily dependent on empirical observation. Clever it might be, but it is just simply wrong, ..and the wrong way of going about geology, building everything on one-sided speculation of material properties (coldness instead of rates of deformation) (thermals instead of temporals).   Anyone who buys that gobbledegook is nuts.  Something else is needed.  And that something else follows from the logical alternative achieved by simply discarding the axiom of Panthalassa that was faulty in the first place and the tenets that follow from it.  By exploring the rational alternative, which is the meaning of all the continental separation we see *without* the gratuitous garden-fairies-assumption of subduction ( which we can't see) we arrive unerringly at Earth expansion, which by any measure of geological integration is a far, far more elegant and beautiful construct than flung-about Plate Tectonics (with its wooden half-a-leg).

Simple: what you see is what you get. Anybody can do it. Even me.  Now this really *is* kindergarten stuff that we can teach our infants.  None of this hat-magic and plate-spinning to show how clever we are.  All we need now, is for physics to catch up with the wysiwyg
.

The wysiwyg:-
What-you-see-is-what-you-get.
(No faeries, just a beautiful garden)
 

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