.....Rubber Numbers Rule OK - You bet?
           (...In which Plate Tectonics argues the case for convection..)

Fig.1  Having answered to his intellectual satisfaction the question, "What keeps fragments of the Earth's crust bouncing backwards and forwards off each other like railcars in a shunting yard", and feeling hugged by a Size 0 Rubber Number, our intrepid convectioneer sets out to explore the contradictions and conundrums of subduction in a bid to answer what gets it going in the first place, fully aware (but hoping nobody notices) he has explicitly chosen colours which, if everything goes belly-up will identify him as a fifth columnist.

"Maybe. Maybe not. I agree that how subduction gets going is an
interesting problem. What keeps it going is a less interesting one. " | link |

The predicament for Plate Tectonics is that despite the many geological conundrums it faces, support centres purely in the dynamics of convection.  Rather than confront those conundrums ever more substances are examined in a drive to find the one which, through the kalaiedoscope of rubbernumber manipulation, may most closely match that of solid rock:-
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"Really? Diffusion works different in ketchup?  Simple fact is one can find regimes where the properties of ketchup remain more or less uniform i.e, the phases don't separate. I was able to find them for corn syrup, silicon oil, all sorts of stuff."   | link |
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In a bid to outsmart the competition, our brave fifth columnist convectioneer volunteers a moniker for Plate Tectonics as a bad case of "massive academic fraud",  thus sticking his paddle through the gunnels of his canoe and seriously compromising his chances of making it over the next wave.

Exhilharated by the thrill of discovery that no subducting slab underlies the extinct northern Kamchatka volcanic arc, and paddling himself with excitement, our bold convectioneer cites this absence as direct proof for catastrophic slab loss, proposing avalanches of subducting slabs into the mantle for good measure.  Commenting on findings in Nature, by an international team of researchers,  team leader Rubbery  Trolley-Dosser said: "Now you see 'em, now you don't.  It's like fairies at the bottom of the garden, everyone knows they are invisible so the fact that you don't see them is overwhelming direct proof for their presence.  With future research we hope to be able to document more areas where slabs are not present, thus confirming our present findings of catastrophic slab loss into the mantle.  We are excited by the prospect that this could put an whole new perspective on the Atlantic and Indian and Oceans, and open up an entirely new avenue for research." <link>

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