....."Look Ma - No Plates!..."
             (...not in the sense meant by Plate Tectonics anyway...)

Fig.1 "Like the seam of a baseball, ."  is the way that the spreading ridges encircling the Earth are popularly described.  Just like the red stitching on the ball is to the suture,  so the active sectors of transform faults are close to the spreading ridge.  Beyond that the so-called 'plates' are virtually locked as one.  In other words, away from the immediate vicinity of the ridge there is basically only one plate - well, two if you look from the ridge side (one on each side of the ridge), but linked as one round the back of the planet..  What's more, this is explicit in Plate Tectonics own animation of transform fault movement.

 

The spreading ridge (that makes ocean floor), the subduction zone (that swallows it), ..and the transform faults that move it from the making to the swallowing.  The problem for Plate Tectonics is that by its own construction <link above> the transform faults only exist in the immediate vicinity of the ridge as the little 'jaggies' on the spreading ridges here, so that beyond that the limits of those jaggies the so-called plates are all locked all one.  That is, it's one plate that being swallowed down one subduction zone - one subduction zone to swallow one oceanic plate.   And one plate is NOT what Plate Tectonics is about.

Actually it's a bit more complicated than that because the breakout of the mantle (/lithosphere) exists on two levels, one in the Pacific (which includes the Southern and Indian Oceans and a lower one which breaks through the first at the Rodriguez Triple Junction, which includes the Atlantic and the Southwest Indian Ocean, so that's basically two ('plates').  But it's a lot less than, and materially a lot different from, the situation represented by Plate Tectonics which has anywhere between seven and twelve plates (and any number of microplates).

And anyway, even if we grant Plate Tectonics its multiplicity of plates, ..when they all abutt the spreading ridges (with the Atlantic being an offset of the Indian Ocean ridge)  which are "like the seam on a baseball", when their transform faults (movement vectors) are all parallel,  and when there is no rotational displacement between the plates across the entire planet, then clearly independent movement is a nonsense.  And so are the citations on the web describing it, many of them from teaching institutions. It's yet another furphy of Plate Tectonics, ... another piece of rubbish.

You have to wonder why they do it.  It's not rocket science to spot the contradiction.
 
 

 
 

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