Plate tectonics: Spreading ridges grow up!
                 (...and away from the continents...)

Fig 1. Ridge-growth: upwards and outwards  Diagrammatic representation of outward growth.   Zigzag 'springs' depict outwards growth at the ridges;  radial arrows = general outwards growth of the Earth; circumferential arrows = direction of ridge migration relative to severed continental crust (brown)

 

Spreading Ridges:    It's true!  The ridge is a ridge.  A ridgie-didge ridge.  Always was, and always will be (within our post-Mesozoic lifetime anyway, and for a little bit longer yet).   A ridge that's a ridge that keeps being a ridgie-didge ridge can only mean one thing: the 'spreading ridge' is moving up:-

UP!

Unless of course it keeps falling to the side - as Plate Tectonics says it does ("ridge push"), in order that the Earth remain a constant size.  But why should it?   Because it's being carried on a conveyor belt?  Plate tectonics says  that there are no 'conveyor belts'.  Or maybe it is as Plate Tectonic says, "because it cools".  But why should cooling make it fall to the side?  Cooling shrinks it, makes it harder, tougher, more 'arms-and-legs into itself', not predispose it to falling about.

Or maybe the reason is the obvious one for anything that keeps moving up  -  the sides keep falling off because they become gravitationally unstable.  Look at the inset.  Look how the ridge is longer than the continental margins.  This is the clue to the correct choice of options that confronts plate tectonics.  Either:-

The ridge moves away from the continents, or,

The continents move away from the ridges.

Plate Tectonics chooses the second option because it suits its notion of convection, when the correct option is surely as indicated by the arrows in the inset, ...namely that the spreading ridges move away from the continents.  Otherwise Africa shrinks!

In fact by the same configuration of the spreading ridges to the continents not only Africa shrinks, but all the other continents shrink as well - notably Antarctica, whose coastline is very much shorter ('shrunken') than the spreading ridge that surrounds it.   And whilst Plate Tectonics has been able to conjure up an abundance of ad hoc explanations for every problem arising from their model (albeit ones that are mutually contradictory), it has as yet no explanation for shrinking continents.

So that's the choice confronting plate tectonics from the first-order evidence of the ocean floors: either the continents shrink, or the ridges grow - UP. and the Earth gets bigger.

Of course there is no explanation for the Earth getting bigger either and Earth expansion does not pretend one,  but we do know that the ridges *do* grow up, and that the start points of transform faults are virtually definitive of ridges that are growing along their length as well as across, ..so on balance on this point alone, logic favours an earth 'getting bigger' (expanding /'growing').

Spreading ridges that grow *up* (and get longer as well as wider) are axiomatic on an expanding Earth, and the evidence shows that this is the case.  And whilst widening oceans are axiomatic in a Plate Tetctonics model too, ridges getting longer most certainly are not. Plate Tectonics does obviously recognise that the ridges do get longer (inset), and does try to explain it, but thus far with a glaring lack of success.

The 'shrinking continents'  of Plate Tectonics therefore are very much a case of "more research needed" in order to deal with all the contradictions that stem from their basic assumption (that the Earth must remain a constant size) - if a case can be made that it is worth it.  In the last thirty years mainstream literature has done nothing, either to highlight these contradictions or far less resolve them.  In fact every effort appears to have been made to bury them.  This failure in the face of a need to support the assumption, hints at cognitive, logical and moral deficit.  It must be concluded therefore that it is NOT worth it, which raises the futher point: how is the public supposed to gauge the integrity of science, when such bad science (and such bad scientists) as exemplified by Plate Tectonics, is accorded legitimacy?

This in its own right is a serious issue that needs to be to be addressed.
 
 

Fig.2.  Africa bounded by the spreading ridge.  Either the continent moves away from the ridges (and shrinks) or the ridges move up (and the Earth gets bigger).  No mechanism is known for either behaviour, but the evidence of the transform fault - spreading ridge relationship very much favours an expanding Earth.

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