Pangaea, Pancakes and the Wilson Cycle
        (...Plate Tectonics's indigestible offering...)

Fig.2.  The Wilson Cycle - subduction kinematics. (a) Plate movement (driven by a plume from the other side - big arrows) has assembled Pangaea on one side of the planet. (b) The plume stops and another rises under Pangea, splitting it (diagrammatically in three coloured parts) and driving these fragments back again to the other side of the planet (where the first plume stopped) (round the back), when the cycle begins again.  Note that assembly and disassembly is invarible, and that the continental fragments just yo-yo backwards and forwards across the planet, driven by 'plumes' - the uprising leg of mantle convection at the spreading ridges, ... or subduction, the downgoing leg of mantle convection at the subduction zones.

 

"The driver being a rising convection column ('plume')..?  That's what Plate Tectonics *used* to say, but with no explanation how heat generation manages to switch the plume from one side of the planet to the other..

However since now it is not the rising plume, but subduction that is the major driving force, consider with Plate Tectonics that the continents are assembled as one - like a pancake - on one side of the planet (a very unstable situation by any measure).  Panthalassa (and the 'Tethys') is an ocean taking up the remaining two thirds of the world's surface.  In order for the pancake (Pangaea) to rupture, subduction (being the driver in the consensus hypothesis) must initiate around its perimeter.  But how?  Did the perimeter of the oceanic plate just reach critical coldness and start sinking, ..helped by the continental lithosphere 'forcing it down' far enough to convert to eclogite? ...or did it just spontaneously start sinking? ..or what?"

If subduction is the acknowledged driver for Plate Tectonics (and is pulling chunks off continental crust (/lithosphere) to create back-arc basins ) then it also acts as the radial force (small arrows) in the figure pulling Pangaea apart.  So it is not the ascending plume that has to switch from one side of the world to the other (once continental landmasses have been assembled) but subduction zones.  And how does a subduction zone switch to the other side of the planet when there isn't a continental pancake there to subduct under?

Eh?  That's what I would like to know.

Moreover, if as Plate Tectonics says, Pangaea is a coagulated cluster of earlier landmasses, then it already contains the fracture zones along which it will split ("once a fracture, always a fracture"; "weakest link in the chain", and all that).  These landmass shapes will therefore be essentially invariable shapes which yo-yo backwards and forwards across the planet from disrupting one pancake on one side of the earth to making another on the other side, in what is known as the 'Wilson cycle',  a nonsensical construct that would offend all but the most asinine claim to 'clever', particularly when the generation of transform faults allowing this peregrination of 'plates' is taken into account.

And of course, if subduction is pulling Pangaea apart on a scale that is creating the Atlantic, Indian and Southern Oceans, which it must do by 'rollback' all around the Pacific, then the oceanic plate of Panthalassa is consumed back towards its spherical centre round the back of the planet with the ever-advancing Fiery Ring that subduction supposedly creates, to disappear with a 'plop', as it were, down some kind of ever-reducing storm-drain of volcanism of unimaginable ferocity in the middle of the next newly assembling 'Pangaean Pancake', and for which there is no precedent on the planet.  ...No precedent on the planet, yet it is supposed to be the one end result of the Wilson Cycle which has pertained through geological time like the in-and-out of a squeezebox accordion, ..for no other reason than that Mr Wilson suggested it.

In deference towards some need for decorum towards the public view of science as truth-teller, we will draw a curtain over this particular zany piece of Plate Tectonics, noting only that roll-back and a fiery ring in the Pacific are anyway contradictions in terms, the 'fire' (earthquakes and volcanoes) being caused by the friction of the subduction zone pushing under the continents,  and roll-back being caused by exactly the opposite -  the slab pulling away from the continental buttress and 'dropping'  into the mantle.  Their juxtaposition in the present-day Pacific is tantamount to proof that Plate Tectonics is functionally inoperable.

Well, ... !!   ...   Soft words indeed from Messrs Chatterjee and Hotton reflecting the indictment on this site, for what is surely so much apparent nonsense and so much laying aside of fundamental questions, ..yet Plate Tectonics is hailed as the greatest thing since sliced bread.  Why?  ... All this effort, all this research, all this money being poured down the drain to discover 'mechanism'.  ....And all just to avoid the possibility that the initial assumption (that the Earth must remain a constant size) just, ..just could be, ..WRONG!!

Heavens!  Being wrong is at the very least half of what science should be about!  Being sceptical and trying to disprove - not prove - should be the essence.  Where is the stigma attached to being wrong?  Isn't that what science is supposed to do?  And is it all that hard to discard an assumption that after decades of trying to fit square pegs into round holes simply won't work?

Well, apparently yes, indeed it is.  .. That is exactly the reason.  With so many problems to solve, so many options to choose from and write the next bit of pseudo-science, it's obvious why -  It pays the rent very well, thank you very much.  Everybody gets to be in the same boat if they abide by the rules, ..and woe betide anyone who doesn't and tries to upset it.

Science journals are culpable because they allow their reviewers to push suchlike questions aside.  Contributing scientists too are to blame because unless they really do only have half a brain they are disingenuously avoiding these questions at every turn.  But most of all It is the educational institutions which are to blame by their emphasis on publication over the science in order to maximise their kudos.  Such is the result of the competitive market in education where the institutions with most kudos pride themselves in having researchers who publish most.  The system guarantees quantity over quality, and provides every incentive not to address the fundamental questions.  If it did, they would *be* addressed, but clearly they are not.  It is a classic example of how dumming down and avoidance of the real issues in science wins over honest pursuit of 'truth' (/reason), and spreads obfuscation and misinformation, then represents it as Emperor's New Clothes.

Society as a whole is the loser. All power to the journalists who write to expose these charlatans (eg 1,.. 2) for the scientists themselves manifestly will not.  And arguably cannot, without severe career repercussions.  However perhaps exposure should be more directed to the system, and the institutions that determine it, than to the scientists themselves who are very much prisoners of it, albeit willing enough.

Who, among subductioneers, ..will bell this craZy cat?

(None, of course.)