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-Cretaceous 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 - like wot plate tectonics says it does ("ridge push").  But why should it?  Because it cools?   Why should cooling make it fall to the side?  Because it's being carried on a conveyor belt?  But plate tectonics says now that there are no 'conveyor belts'.   So maybe the reason why it keeps falling to the side is because the spreading ridge is moving up -  the sides keep falling off because they become gravitationally unstable.

Plate tectonics doesn't really have a good reason for very much at all, much less what's happening at the ridges.  Its simple model of spreading is wrong, and the reason why - quite apart from admitting anyway that there is no 'conveyor belt' -  is obvious.   And simple.   Look at the inset.  Look how the ridge is longer than the continental margins.  This is the clue to the correct choice of option that confronts plate tectonics:-

• Does the ridge move away from the continents?
• Does the continent move away from the ridge?

...and that plate tectonics glosses over and ignores and chooses the wrong one because it suits its notion of convection.   The notion that it admits it has had to abandon in favour of 'slab-pull' - the idea that the ridges are there because the sinking mantle (half a world away) pull it.  And that 'sinking over there', is causing the mantle to splurge up 'over here', sort of like when you put your hand in the sink and the water rises.

The correct option is simple as indicated by the arrows in the inset, ...namely that the spreading ridges grow away from the continents (otherwise Africa shrinks!).    Not only Africa shrinks, but all the other continents as well.   And whilst the Clever Dicks of plate tectonics have been able to conjure ad hoc explanations for every problem their model throws up, they have as yet no explanation for shrinking continents.  Such is their dedication to their nonsensical model.   And note that 'Dicks' is in the plural here, ..It's not just one guy, and one or two others.  This is a worldful of them.  (Slab Pull)  (Dicks.)

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.  Well, we know that the ridges do grow up, because that's how we see them and how they were, and how they will be tomorrow, ...so what's the problem?   For Earth expansion?   No problem - it's what Earth expansion is all about.   For Plate Tectonics though?   Big problems - "More research is needed".   Bullshit.  What you see is what you get, and that's that!   Convection? Subduction? Transform fault  movement?   Nope.  Just growth.   It's what the Earth 'does'.   Why?   Ah, ...Now, ... there we really do have it: "More research is needed."    It's time to start addressing that issue.  It is here that plate tectonics should really begin, by taking into account the elements that it has hitherto ignored:-

• helical symmetry of transform fault aggregates.
• Stepped offsets of transform terminations (transform insertion).

It's time to start making up a hypothesis that takes into account the evidence that thus far has been ignored.