Re: falsification - trying again - no slide rules please.


Perplexed in Peoria wrote:
"don findlay" <don@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:1150114561.835920.213010@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Perplexed in Peoria wrote:
"don findlay" <don@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

Ok, I'll try to play your game. First comment is that the hypothesis
is not yet specific enough for refutation or falsification. Did the
Earth double in radius, surface area, or volume? It matters.

Radius.

Ok, so that means that area went up by 4x. So presumably you mean a
little less than a doubling of radius, because I'm pretty sure that
modern continental crust covers a bit more than a quarter of the
Earth's modern surface.

I'm using the maxim of plate tectonics (that the continental crust is
not destroyed) and I'm prepared to go along with that.)


So, I claim that the following argument constitutes the geological
refutation you are looking for:

You say that the Earth used to be small, like an orange, but now is
large, like a grapefruit. Ok, draw a map of the globe on a grapefruit
and carefully cut out the skin corresponding to Africa and South America.
Now try to place those cutouts onto the surface of an orange. You will
note that, due to the larger radius of curvature of the grapefruit,
that the skins cannot be warped to fit on the orange. There is too much
material around the perimeters of the two continents, or perhaps not
enough material in the interiors.

That means that you are saying that there must have been compression
in the interiors of those two continents over the past 400 million years.

No, ..no compression. Simplistically, the crust opens to the new
curvature with the pivot close to surface (i.e., not deep) ergo no
compression. (If it was deep then you might expect compression.) (and
there might well be pieces of the crust where it *was deeper, like
that, ...but..) The 'but' being an in-principle thing. It's more
complicated than that, The new curvature of the (continental) crust
comes about largely by pull-apart and listric faulting as it collapses
on to the new curvature (in the ambital region) In the polar regions
it's different. The Tarim Basin in China is a good example of really
large scale listric faulting (repeating the Tibetan region as Mongolia.
(Or the Basin-and-Range in North America.) So you see, ..extension,
not compression.


Or else that there must have been stretching of the crust around the
perimeters.

Yes. The upper mantle adjacent to continental crust is tectonically
different from that of the central ridge (growth) domain. It's upper
mantle and asthenospheric *homogeneous spreading*, which in turn
fractures to allow extrusion of the lower mantle. Of course,
gravitational adjustment rounds everything off, and you get a seismic
profile overprinted on that, to again reflect the shell structure of
the planet. (It must be tricky to seismically interpret that stuff -
especially using the framework of Plate Tectonics) That must be a real
bummer.


I see no geological evidence of ancient mountain ranges
in the interior of those two continents and no evidence that the
perimeters have been stretched.

You have to lay aside the idea that mountains are formed by crustal
compression. This is another myth of plate tectonics. They are not.
And geomorphologists have been saying so ever since geomorphology. You
are just witnessing the blinkerdom of 'good' ideas from nasty facts.
(Good for plate tectonicists) They are eroded plateaus, and plateaus
are not formed by crumpling of the crust by plate collision. It's a
moot point what they *are formed by. I predict (*PREDICT*) that
consensus will come to see these as I advertise on my site, that they
are the remnant curvature of the smaller Pangaean Earth, collapsing (to
give crustal crinkles, e.g.:-
http://users.indigo.net.au/don/to/iranrope.html )

And, if the perimeters had been
stretched, then the two continents would no longer fit together along
their Atlantic margins.

It is interesting, isn't it, .. that the continents do fit so nicely
along the Atlantic margins.
http://users.indigo.net.au/don/skate/index.html
which goes to show that coastal erosion in (supposedly) about what?
200m years? has been so little.


My conclusion, from geological evidence only,
is that the two continents may have moved, but they have moved along
the surface of an Earth of roughly constant radius. New oceanic crust
has been created in the Atlantic, but a roughly equal amount of oceanic
crust has been destroyed (by subduction) in the Pacific.

Hope I've given some indication why I do not agree with you.

.

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