For the believers in "Plate Tectonics going on...")
Ignore-ance, and forcing a square theoretical geophysical peg into a round empirical geological hole.
(Blog for website at http://users.indigo.net.au/don/ )
Where spreading ridges and subduction zones are readily understandable ("..if you believed Plate Tectonics was going on..") as the matched expression of mantle overturn on a global scale, transform faults on the other hand, which constitute one of the most extensive and most obvious sets of structures on the face of the planet, are surely one of the most puzzling aspects of the ocean floors to come to grips with, ..if not *the* most puzzling. They present Plate Tectonics with many questions, the most important of which surely is why should they exist at all? Here are some of the questions that occur to me; no doubt you may have some too (if you do, we can add them) :-
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Why should the spreading ridge be cut across by reams of faults when beyond the small offsets on the ridge the cycle of mantle return is unified on the scale of the whole Earth?
Why should active offsetting be limited only to the small, ridge-bounded sectors, beyond which there is none? Why should faulting stop on a dime, as it were?
Why should there be so many of them (or so few, depending how you look at it)?
What determines their spacing (which is highly variable)?
Why is transform faulting restricted to the 'coming up' part of the convection cycle, and have no part to play in the 'going down' at subduction zones - especially when the system is supposedly driven by the going-down part? In other words, how does subduction drive the formation of transform faults at the spreading ridges? And how does ductile flow cause brittle failure anyway?
Why do these faults in brittle mantle crust have such a different expression from faults in brittle continental crust ("..a new class of faults" .. ~ Tuzo Wilson)? How are stresses that build up in mantle rock different from stresses that build up in continental rocks, to give such a different expression of faults on the ocean floors compared to faults in the continental crust?
Why should all displacements on the spreading ridge occur globally *before* Plate Tectonics gets underway - if we are to believe the popular animations? What causes the offsetting in the first place?
Why, once the continents are driven together (by convection) in a coagulated assembly on one side of the planet, should convection all switch to the other side, to happen again underneath this new coagulation? What role does transform faulting (as "the third boundary of plates") play in this?
Why is the San Andreas Fault in the continental crust cited as a type example, when it's the ocean floor (mantle) that's riddled with them, ..and the San Andreas anyway is nearly at right angles to those on the ocean floor and parallel to suites of faults along the Western American Seaboard, which are not transforms? In other words, why choose a fault in continental crust as a class type, for structures that riddle the mantle?
And why, on the Plate Tectonics side of the fence, is nobody addressing these questions?
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Plate Tectonics has no answer to any of the above questions. Any attempt at an answer is to merely restate the fact of their existence and describe them as "the third boundary of plates", when in fact the active boundary that they do describe is so short (only their ridge-to-ridge extent) as to be inconsequential.
(Earth expansion accommodates *all* of these questions by the way - at a single stroke.)
So how are we to read Plate Tectonicists' claim to be 'Masters of the College' when it comes to explaining global geology? And how are we to read their claim that Plate Tectonics has undergone "detailed testing, modification, and embellishment", when that claim can be just as easily read as ad hoc goalpost shifts to cover inconsistencies of which there are many.
I read it that with few exceptions Plate Tectonicists are in denial of their own ignorance. Or perhaps its softer, more literal meaning, 'ignore-ance', might be more acceptable. Perhaps ignorance might seem a hard word to use taking into account the iconic status in which those developing the theory are held today, but frankly I can't think of another. 'Honest lack of knowledge'? .. Well, most certainly there is that, ..since the whole invention of Plate Tectonics in the first place was specifically to accommodate the lack of knowledge that led to the "no mechanism" jibe directed at the geological construction that was Earth expansion.
So, ..'ignore-ance' and speculation was (and still is) a very substantial ingredient in Plate Tectonics, and should be acknowledged as such to define its theoretical geophysical origins from the more empirical, geological origins that lead the Earth sciences in the direction of Earth expansion. Plate Tectonics claimed that the ocean floors simply moved *away* from the spreading ridges, thus causing the separation of the continents. But this ignored the geological fact, that the spreading ridges are longer than their equivalent continental margins - marginally so in the Atlantic, more obviously in the Indian and Southern Oceans and still more in the Pacific, an increase directly in proportion to the ages of these ocean floors. Clearly the ridges have increased along their length as well as across them.
The only way to rationalise this length increase was /is if the spreading ridges have moved up, or, to put it on a flat Earth for the benefit of Flat-Earthers, if the ocean floors have moved *towards* the spreading ridges (not away from them). Independent confirmation of this lies in the stepped offsets of the start-points of the transform faults [which so far as I am aware is an addition to the geological lexicon exclusive to my site since the early part of the decade (2000)]
Understand the dichotomy this way. Go down to the seaside and stand on the shore, and contemplate ridge-continent displacement - "Does the continent move away from the ridges, or do the ridges recede from the continents?" It is surely an obvious point to consider when standing on the shore, 'close-up' to the question as it were. But maybe not so obvious when you stand back and address it for both sides of the ridge simultaneously, for the conundrum emerges: "How can the spreading ridge move towards itself? Surely there is no space: the ridge is closed. Surely the continents *can* only move away from the ridge?"
Well, ..no. The ridges can move up. They are ridges after all, ..and they *are* moving up. So where is the problem? There *is* no conundrum. Upwards movement of the ridge necessitates gap-fill, where the ocean floors on both sides of the ridge move in to take up the developing space.
Now, here's where we witness the ignore-ance - Bigtime. It would be facile nonsense to suggest this option would not have been explored by those making up the theory of plate tectonics, or even by those since (the linked site at the top of the page making exactly this point has been up on the web for the best part of a decade), ..or that the support for it, namely the increased length of the ridges compared to the severed continental margins, would not be recognised. It is simply not credible that the receding-ridges, 'UP' option, with its necessity for extension along the ridges, would not have been recognised. What is credible however, is that it would naturally be ignored because of its implications for expansion, given the revelation of ignorance that it would trigger.
Moreover, it is now known that the continents are deeply rooted, making the concept of continents being ferried around on 'plates' no longer tenable. Plate Tectonics maintains the theoretical dogma in the face of the empirical geological fact. More ignore-ance.
Some science!
So what do we do? Give Plate Tectonicists the benefit of the doubt and say that they *haven't* recognised the upwardly moving ridges, and consider them ignorant dummies all? Or credit them that they *have* recognised it, and accuse them of wall-eyed, disingenuous ignore-ance? Either way the aptness of the word rests.
Ignorance.
To be fair, these differences in lengths may not be so obvious in the Atlantic where separation is relatively recent and the difference is less, but it is glaringly obvious in the Indian and Southern Oceans which are older, and so extreme in the Pacific as to be virtually unrecognisable to the unaware eye. So perhaps they can claim *some* degree of unawareness. But not a lot.
In an effort to avoid talking about what they don't know (so that they can try to get to know), they have instead been talking nineteen to the dozen about what they think they do know to avoid exposing their ignorance of what they don't. But though tricked out as Nobel Prize material, this has been an abysmal failure, amounting basically to no more than admission that there is an elephant in the room that can't be talked about because by tacit agreement it must be ignored. Their way of addressing the problem has simply been to hang a sign on the door saying "Elephants, no admittance", and "Please ignore the Elephant in the Room", and to award themselves prizes for their ingenuity in devising this solution, hoping that the less aware won't notice the space problem (and the smell) when they enter, ..a ploy, it must be said, that has been stunningly successful. Not, however, on account of the ingenuity of the signwriters, so much as the cloth-headedness of those entering the room.
[George Bush dishes out prizes for sign-writing.]
More prizes:- "The development of plate-tectonic theory certainly warrants a Nobel Prize," said Dr. Marcia McNutt, president-elect of the American Geophysical Union. "There is no doubt that it ranks as one of the top ten scientific accomplishments of the second half of the 20th Century."
http://ftp.kermit-project.org/cu/pr/00/01/vetlesen.html
[Last paragrah - bottom of page.]
Well, .. At least George can lay claim to having a "going fishing" thought-bubble on his mind, but that hardly applies en bloc to the Union of Geophysicists. (Or does it?) Nobel prize for sign-writing? ..to keep empirical geological elephants out of the room? I don't think so... You? :-)
"I wouldn't go in there if I were you."
"No?"
"No, ..there's a big elephant - ..talk about 'piled higher and deeper!' "
[ See also Expanding Earth blog at
http://www.earthexpansion.blogspot.com/ ]
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