Plate Tectonics to Earth expansion
                (...track the change...)

The transition from Plate Tectonics to Earth expansion is inevitable. This index helps track the change.

Note the blanks in the entries here for spreading ridges and transform faults.  This is because their creation and growth are included in both Plate Tectonics and Earth expansion, and so are not areas where it might be said Plate Tectonics is progressing to Earth Expansion; it is already half-way there in a sense.  However there are very substantial differences in how both see these two elements of crustal structure, so it is not likely that changes in the Plate Tectonic view will happen any time soon.  It will be many decades before Plate Tectonics shifts its position (because to Plate Tectonics it is consensus, not the science that's the issue).

The main difference lies in how both view subduction zones, so the main entries will be in this third column.  The goal that Plate Tectonics must reach towards is the realisation that the assumption of Panthalassa is a myth, and that the subduction zone (not zones, for there is really just one) IS the spreading ridge, ...the initial latitudinal break in the crust that penetrated to the mantle, ...the break that grew away from the continents to the positions that they occupy in the extruded mantle at the present day.

Almost certainly this will happen in four main parts.  The first part will happen through  'Flat Subduction', and the realisation of the extent to which this in incompatible with previous models of subduction promulgated as proof of tens of thousands of kilometres of convective overturn in the mantle.  With the recognition of the falsehood of 'blobtonics', will come the emphasis on overriding' rather than subduction, and the importance of dislocations on the shell-like structures of the Earth (weak zones, asthenosphere etc.) rather than on convective overturn.  Another part, and to accommodate this first part, will be recognition that the spreading ridges must move away from the continents, rather than conversely as now, and therefore that the spreading centres must move UP.   A third part will be the recognition that transform faults record the torsional adjustment to the growth of the ocean floors that is implied in their helical symmetry.  Finally the fourth part will lie in the geomorphology of the planet, in the sequential erosional surfaces that define the drainage patterns of the Pangaean Earth.
 
 
 

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