.....The Ocean Floors as 'Rubble'

Fig.1.  Terrain model of part of the Gorda Plate off the Western American coast showing the intensity of fracturing related to spreading ridge fractures and transform faults.  The fabric running up the page is fossil spreading ridge faults as the ocean floor grows.  The breaks running across the image are transform faults.  So many faults reduce the ocean floors to little more than rubble - geologically speaking.  Oriented rubble, but rubble nonetheless.  (Courtesy of Seafloor Mapping Limited.)
 

Fig.2

The oceanic lithosphere is described as the brittle outer shell of the mantle - the part we get earthquakes in, ...a coherent plate that extends from the spreading ridge to the subduction zone, that is supposedly pulled by the subducting slab down subduction zones by 'slab pull'.

But in reality  there can be no coherence, ..and no pulling.  The ocean floors are so broken by the accummulation of spreading ridge fractures and transform faults they can be little more than a heap of rubble.  Piles of dross.  Slack, ..if you burn coal.  Hardly a good-sized piece amongst it.

To maintain that this heap of rubble will hang together all-of-a-piece as it gets dragged down a subduction zone by an even looser pile of rubble (looser because of the hundreds of Earthquakes going off every day for millions of years) is just facile nonsense.  Once a fault, always a fault, and any one of them (or more likely all of them) would open to give an ocean floor far more complex than the ones we already have.

Plate Tectonics maintains that the oceanic lithosphere, the brittle bit with the fractures in, is only about eight kilometres thick at the spreading ridges (because that's how deep the earthquakes are there), but about two hundred kilometres thick by the time it gets to be a subducting slab because that's about how thick the turned down oceanic lithosphere is.  But in between, really,  it has no discernable thickness at all, because there are virtually NO earthquakes in it to judge.  Look at it any day of the week, month or year in the same time-frame as the spreading ridge and the subduction zone, and see that it's as quiet as a mouse - with no earthquakes in it at all.

How?  With all those earthquakes at either end, ...all that supposed moving, and all that broken crust in between, there are no earthquakes?  How?

The answer is simple.  Because it's NOT moving, and the earthquakes at either end are NOT related as opposite ends of the same dynamical system in the way that Plate Tectonics says.  Subducting slabs are NOT pulling and intrusions at spreading ridges are NOT pushing.  Spreading ridges and subduction zones are NOT related in the way that Plate Tectonics says. How else to explain that after a lifetime of career-building by bullshitting about Plate Tectonics, esteemed living treasures, retired elements of the system, now with nothing to lose because they are long past their use-by, are doing a volte-face in the interest of the science, rather than their career:-

 
Proposing rotation as "an important part of the mechanism"  implicitly dismantles the work of a lifetime of professional researchers - probably his own as well.  Well, ...all power to Mr Hamilton.  Would that others did as much service to the science, now that they have milked it for what they're worth.

Is that unfair?  Not half as unfair as career building by leading generations of young aspiring ingenue geologists up the garden path with a lifetime of 'authoritative publications' for which one wins prizes and "departmental kudos"