Mountain building by plate collision?
            (...erosion, ...accents the horizontal, ..eliminates the vertical...)

Fig.1. Erosion levels of the Tibetan Plateau.    The last survivor of the ravages of ice and snow, the high peak of Mount Kailas, the Holy Mountain of Tibet, is all that remains here of the once continuous sub-sea Mesozoic stratigraphy that formed this region of Western Tibet.  (Image courtesy of  Aus-China Cultural Development Corporation Pty Ltd. photo: Zhou Dan)

 
The evidence for Plate Tectonics' confusion over its own model is in the lingo - in the use the term "Mountain building" when mountains are  clearly not built, but are what's left when plateaus are eroded.  The use of the word 'building' is to convey the central notion of Plate Tectonics, that colliding plates above a subduction zone heave up mountain belts.  The collision of the Indian subcontinent with the rest of Asia is cited as an example, and (less commonly these days) Africa with Europe.

The nonsense of this 'building' could not be more clearly illustrated than by the mountains making up the Tibetan Plateau - the Roof of the World.  On the one hand Plate Tectonicists have the theory of mountain 'building' (by crumpling of the crust as plates collide) yet on the other have the reality of 'no-crumpling at all', mountains of evidence for which stare them in the face no matter which way they look (image above).  Plate Tectonics blatantly ignores the mountains of reality in order to maintain the fiction of the theory, because without it, plate tectonics would not exist.  It's another expression exactly, of having to make the convenient assumption of subduction, and/ or (because it's the same thing) in having to believe in the once-existence of a 'Panthalsassa' oceean (which has been entirely destroyed without trace to make way for the exact-sized, same shaped, present Pacific one), in order to maintain the belief that the Earth remains a constant size.

It would be difficult to find a more obvious example of trying fit a square peg in a round hole.  The obvious alternative explanation, that there is no 'uplift' at all, but merely the falling away of sea-level (as the Earth enlarges) has not yet occurred to Plate Tectonicists, and is not likely to either since it means discarding all of Plate Tectonics.  In a single dollop. Yet next to the creation of the ocean floors this elevation of stratigraphific sequence GLOBALLY is the single most important geological fact that stares us in the face supporting Earth expansion.  There can be no other explanation for it. And it is one that Plate Tectonics simply does not address.   Given the hallmarks of the rest of the nonsense plate tectonics promulgates, it seems it's not cute enough to recognise it, much less explain it.  It seems it's one of those things that can't be seen because it's right under their nose.

This global  'exhumation of stratigraphy' can only mean that there has been a global change in the position of base level of erosion.  And since that is governed globally by the geoidal shape, which is an expression of the balance between gravity and rotation, it must mean that this interplay (responsible for the first-order shape of the Earth and ignored totally by geophysicists in their interpretations of geological structure) is the reason for the elevation of stratigraphic sequence we see in the picture.

Refusing to see this, and having no integrated framework of its own within which to consider uplift, Plate Tectonics invents various ad-hoc explanations for it.

Plate collision  supposedly explains orogenesis (mountain building) by the collision of plates crumpling the crust .  The type example of this given by plate tectonics is India "colliding with Asia to crumple the crust and throw up the Himalyas".  But the facts and the theory stand in direct contradiction.  The crust is not crumpled (figure above), and there is no subduction zone.  So the theory is modified to say that India is sliding under Asia and lifting it up.  Never mind that continental crust cannot subduct because it's too light.  Well, since there's no subduction zone  it's not subduction, is it?  It's just India pushing below Asia (says plate tectonics).   Some see the 'collision' with Asia to be so severe as to cause "far-field tectonics" and "extrusion tectonics" <google links>  But never mind that if India is just sliding under Asia and lifting it up, then it can't be "squeezing it as in a vice" to give either of these 'tectonics'.

Never mind either that if India is "pushing under" Asia then (since there is no subduction and no 'slab-pull') the mechanism must be  'ridge-push' - i.e., all the way from the spreading ridge in the indian Ocean.  What, ...driven by insertion of dykes at spreading ridges?  (Who remembers the debate whether intruding dykes pushed the walls of the crack apart, or whether dykes simply filled in the space created by dilation?)  But again there can be no dilation since there is no subducting slab to pull anything - and no end to any 'convecting cell'.  Or does that mean that India has detached from the mantle and is sliding silently down the slope off the Mid-Indian Ridge?   Never mind either that uplift extends beneath the entire Russian-Eurasian platform, and is of a scale that renders  Indian underriding preposterous.   Never mind all of that, schools teach crumpling anyway, so these objections are merely incidental esoterics worthy of higher authority, that prove the versatility of the subduction model when there is no subduction.  Bamboozled?  Then obviously you are not up to the job of commenting on the Grand Plan of Plate Tectonics.  Laugh with me whilst Pteros work out which way to jump with the next piece of their 'research'.  Me?  I'll stick with the simplicity of face-value in the figure above.  The sea-level has dropped.  Big time.  That's all.   Or how about isostacy?

Isostacy was initially a concept bred of ignorance of what mountain belts were all about in the days when it was thought that mountains were 'built' by thickening of crust by continental collision, and is largely responsible for the 'India-pushing-under-Asia" nonsense, compared to what mountain belts really are all about., namely the remnants of perched equilbirium profiles of a Mesozoic land surface.  Isostacy is also applied to concepts of the land bouncing back up when ice sheets melt off it, and is usually combined with the related concept of eustacy, which is the rise and fall of sea-level according to the melting or freezing of ice caps. With time included, these  two can be manipulated in endless clever permutations and combinations of explanations to do with uplift, erosion and subsidence and the accumulation of stratigraphic sequence.  A kind of exercise in 'weights and measures', of on-loading and off-loading of 'boats afloat' - provided of course the system remains closed - no water vapour lost to space and no water added to the Earth's budget from the interior.  Neither of which are likely premises. ( And in any case, loss to space is a completely different process from production from the mantle, ...meaning the two cannot possibly balance.)   And also provided (of course) that there is no increase in surface area of the planet - which the summation of the evidence says there is; simply put, at face value, to the extent of the ocean floors.  (Isostacy is applied - probably mistakenly -  to the rise of Scandinavia since the melting ot the last ice cap.)

Thermal expansion  is invoked by plate tectonicsists to explain the uplift of oceanic spreading ridges. It goes like this.  Subducting plates are cold because they're at the Earth's surface (which is colder than the Earth's interior), therefore the plates are more dense than the mantle around them, therefore they fall back into the mantle (never mind that they're in a region hot enough to cause partial melting and all the volcanoes fringing the Pacific).  Dropping mantle slabs in subduction zones pulls the crust (right back to the ridges).  Pulling reduces the pressure, causing partial melting at the ridges where the crust was already fractured.  Ergo uplift of spreading ridges.  So, cold plates (because it's cold in space) causes thermal expansion of the mantle and the creation of spreading ridges.  In other words, cold space is cooling the Earth, cracking it up and depressurising it to cause heating at its surface.  The logic of this hardly brooks comment,  and yet this supposed 'thermal expansion' of the mantle is the basis for apportioning time-slices to the ocean floors;  the topographic gradient off the ridges supposedly represents cooling over time.

Ridges are linear uplifts, but areal uplift is required to explain global exhumation of stratigraphic sequence. Plate tectonics has no explanation for areal uplift/ outwards movement of the Earth's crust from the centre.  Neither, incidentally has Earth Expansion, ..only a restatement of the fact.  No explanation appears yet to exist in the ambit of physical theory.   This is the challenge - to find one.
 
 

 

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