,,,,,Plate Tectonics 'Soup-on-the-stove' analogy
              (...is fundamentally flawed...)

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Fig.1  Plate Tectonics'  'Soup-on-the-stove' analogy.   The gradual development of 'hot spots' -  circular, diapir-like plumes of clear-soup surface disturbance rimmed is with bubbly juice from below, which pushes aside the more tomato-rich floating gunk on the surface.  Spreading ridges have no analogue in the developing circular 'plumes'.

Fig. 2.  Floaters and swimmers.  Detail of Fig.1-4. The reddish gunk is floating on the clear fluid beneath.  The white flecks in the clear bubbles are swimming about hell for leather underneath, ..never breaking the surface.  The whitish small-bubbly scum is accummulating, pushed aside as the bubbles grow.  There is no analogue of either spreading ridges or transform faults developing, ..only bubbles and marginal scum

 

Plate Tectonics' 'soup-on-the-stove'  analogy to explain global tectonics (of the Plate Tectonic kind)  is fundamentally flawed because there is no analogue of the principal features of Plate Tectonics - spreading ridges,  transform faults.  Or to put it another way, certainly the images are showing convection, but if suchlike convection is operating in the Earth it is certainly not to produce transform fautls and spreading ridges.  The closest analogue is more like granite intrusion, and in this respect the 'pot-of-soup' analogy is more like granite intrusion.  The shield areas of the Archaean and the early Proterozoic more likely fit the bill.

But Plate Tectonics is not based on the structure of the Archaean, neither is it based on granite intrusion.  It is based on the crustal structure of the last three hundred million or so years - which looks not at all like the bubbly granites of the Archaean.  So we can hardly say that although there are close analogues between hotspots in soup and hotspots in the Archaean that this is proof that convection drives Plate Tectonics.

So we can dismiss the soup-on-the-stove model as an analogy for Plate Tectonics.

Well, ..that was easy,  ...  wasn't it?
 

Fig.2.  No Luck.   Lazarus begs some gravy from the train of food that keeps arriving on Dives' table.

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