tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-54304564763678170752024-03-20T02:43:30.652-07:00Don Findlay's Plate Tectonics BlogDebunking Plate Tectonicsdon findlayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12458072902579491159noreply@blogger.comBlogger15125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430456476367817075.post-16308968345077520692017-10-29T01:30:00.004-07:002017-11-04T04:13:46.573-07:00Holding <br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Yes it does, it just belongs to the <a href="https://earthexpansion.blogspot.com.au/p/blog-page_2.html">Earth expansion part of the story</a>, which is for later, once Plate Tectonics is well served</span></span></div>
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don findlayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12458072902579491159noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430456476367817075.post-71659334445939525022016-11-25T16:17:00.001-08:002016-11-25T16:17:34.454-08:00Under reconstruction. <br />
Check the other one at - <a href="https://earthexpansion.blogspot.com.au/">https://earthexpansion.blogspot.com.au/</a>don findlayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12458072902579491159noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430456476367817075.post-67675837701237386382011-12-22T13:31:00.000-08:002017-11-10T03:31:22.981-08:00Mountains arise (!)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">(Through a Head of Cloud)</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><u>Mountain</u>. The word <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain#Definition" target="_blank">defies definition</a>, for the very good reason that it means different things to different people. Professor Cloud's need to describe 'the crumpling that happens' ("when plates collide") places it well and truly in the domain of biblical belief. </span></span></div>
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<b>Fig.1. India collides with Asia</b>. [Preston Cloud, 1988. <i>Oasis in Space</i>, Fig.16.5, p.420 (adapted from <i>Zhang, Liou and Coleman, 1984</i>, Geol.Soc. Amer.Bull., v. 95, p.296, Fig.1).</blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This image from Preston Cloud's book illustrates the consensus view of mountain building in the type area of continental collision: "When continents collide, they pile up into mountains with deep roots, as in the complex multicollisional Himalaya." - p.207.<br />
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<span style="font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">* <span style="font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">(Fly-leaf) - Preston Cloud, professor emeritus of geology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, holds a doctorate from Yale University. He is the editor and co-author of Resources and Man and of Adventures in Earth History as well as the author of Cosmos., Earth and Man. Dr. Cloud is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1976 he was awarded the Penrose Medal of the Geological Society of America. For many years associated with the United States Geological Survey. (died 1991) </span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">
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.. Or compare with these :-
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"When plates and the continents riding on them collide, the accumulated layers of rock crumple and fold like a tablecloth that is pushed across a table." (<a href="http://www.geography.learnontheinternet.co.uk/topics/foldmountain.html" target="_blank">link</a>)</span></span></span></span></span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"The pressure of the colliding plates could only be relieved by thrusting skyward. The folding, bending, and twisting of the collision zone formed the jagged Himalayan peaks. This string of towering peaks is still being thrust up as India, embedded in the Indo-Australian Plate, continues to crunch relentlessly into Tibet, on the southern edge of the Eurasian Plate. (<a href="http://www.platetectonics.com/book/page_11.asp" target="_blank">link</a>). </span></span></span></span></span></span> </blockquote>
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</span></span></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">[Or this one, .. I really like <a href="https://earthexpansion.blogspot.com.au/2017/11/sumo-wrestlers-india-and-china.html">this one</a>.] <br />
</span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The quotes cited are typical of the current consensus as regards so-called '<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fold_mountain">Fold Mountains</a>", .. mountains that are formed by the "buckling, crumpling, and upward thrusting of continental crust as plates collide" (or otherwise variably "move"), and are so named to distinguish them from volcanoes and 'erosional mountains'. The Himalayas are generally regarded as the type area. [20171109 or at least used to be (at the time of writing this page. The wikipedia has changed it to the Zagros mountains to accommodate the change from "mountain <i>building</i>" to "mountain <i>formation</i>" (<a href="https://earthexpansion.blogspot.com.au/2017/08/earth-billiard-balls-and-mountains.html">link</a>)<br />
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What Professor Cloud's figure does (by showing the limits of Indian crumpling restricted to simply the Himalayan sector), is give voice to the consensus view how mountains are formed at the date of publication of his book (1988), by which time Plate Tectonics had become well entrenched. Of course he knows full well that the mountain belt continues sideways out of the figure, ..extending eastwards to encircle the Pacific and westwards to the Carpathians and the Alps (and with the Atlantic closed the Appalachians as well). And so does everyone else. So what we are witnessing in this 'figurative voice' is a kind of struggling for words around a silent question, "How is this uniformity of circumglobal elevation to be explained by "independent plate movement?" - India crumpling Asia, Africa crumpling Europe (but what is crumpling the Americas?) .. and a certain tacit agreement not to try to answer it.
</span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"So arose at different times the Atlas Mountains of northwestern Africa, the Pyrenees, the Alps, and their eastern European extensions and, with them, the distinctive flysch deposits of Alpine deformation. The orogenies responsible for that picture-book scenery then gave way to the vigorous erosion whose distinctive post-tectonic sedimentary product is the Alpine molasse."</span></span></span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">
"And so arose"... There reads to me a certain lyrical, almost creationist tone here, and Professor Cloud is deftly displacing the reader's attention by introducing erosion. But notice he attributes to it, not to the formation of the jagged peaks everybody calls mountains, but the rubbish down the slope we all call 'dirt'. With which I would agree (about dirt), .. but not the bit about arising. It is an expert sleight-of-word from a professorial purveyor of meaning that does two things, 1. it avoids addressing the question how, exactly, this "arising" happened, and 2. with it, Professor Cloud gets to state his own probable view (as a geographer) about the 'arising' of mountains without actually having to state exactly how they do that, .. because (as a pre-Plate Tectonic, old-school geographer) it is almost certainly different from the view he is having to state and is tip-toeing around.<br />
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Really, what he should be doing is not promoting Plate Tectonics at all, but from the vantage of his geographical experience, questioning it. And since he doesn't question it, I'll do it for him : "How in the face of all this convergence, collisional crumpling and the thrusting skyward of so-called "fold-mountains", does the surface from which the mountains are carved (Fig.2) manage to stay flat as a tack?" - (or perhaps I should say, it being a scale thing and all, </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"smooth") - </span></span></span></span>and as well, how does that flatness, in the face of all the professed collision and crumpling, manage to stay as flat as the flatness that was deposited on the sea-floor. How do we get all this flatness from way down there (beneath the sea) to way up there on the Roof of the World, .. <a href="https://earthexpansion.blogspot.com.au/2017/08/the-zen-of-mountain-building.html">mmmh</a>? </span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And no doubt Mr Cloud could answer it to my satisfaction very well (being, as he is, a pre-Plate Tectonic geographer - as could all geographers before the advent of Plate Tectonics). But somehow, with the need to be part of the plate-colliding club, the significance of plateaus has come to be unlearned. Of necessity too, if one is to conform to consensus. Obeisance to consensus is no small thing in the academic world and has its metaphorical equivalent of nose-rings and belly studs in the crafting of language to signify being part of the herd, .. which, in his use of "docking" and "arising" (instead of 'crushing' and 'crumpling'), professor Cloud (him being old-school and all), </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">is decidedly not. </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></span></span>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-fWIg9jjEkBM/TvK8OeCz39I/AAAAAAAAAEs/8UwGUaJzexg/s1600/Kailash4%254070%2525.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="366" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-fWIg9jjEkBM/TvK8OeCz39I/AAAAAAAAAEs/8UwGUaJzexg/s640/Kailash4%254070%2525.jpg" width="640" /></a></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></span></span></span><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HcpY-J45sMk/TvK-iOvdtWI/AAAAAAAAAE4/Jg1_SGLwF1E/s1600/KAILASH5%254070%2525.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="287" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HcpY-J45sMk/TvK-iOvdtWI/AAAAAAAAAE4/Jg1_SGLwF1E/s400/KAILASH5%254070%2525.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Fig.2 Mount Kailash, the Holy Mountain of Tibet</b>. The <a href="http://users.indigo.net.au/don/nonsense/mtbldgpress.html">remnant flatness of the Mesozoic sea floor</a>
preserved in Mount Kailash is mirrored in the flatness (/smoothness)
(it's a scale thing) of the Tibetan Plateau. Flatness extends even to <a href="http://users.indigo.net.au/don/to/codswallop.html">Mount Everest</a>. The white line is the Himalayan front. India to the south. (Right click / new window for bigger figures.)</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> So to properly understand Professor Clouds subterranean dichotomy (how to present his view without actually presenting it), we should have another read of his description of fold mountains (Fig.1) in conjunction with those just below his, but this time compare the careful wording chosen by Mr Cloud with the gung-ho flamboyance of the others.. Does he mention folding? No. Crumpling? No. Why? Because the architectural relationship of the folding that does occur, to that of the erosional surface of the plateau, contradicts outright what Plate Tectonics is saying - as it does everywhere along the circumglobal belt of elevation where folding is exposed. <span style="color: red;"><span style="background-color: yellow;">=></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And Professor Cloud knows this very well because he is old-school, a palaeontologist /geographer, and also knows very well the erosional signifance of the plateau surfaces from which mountains are carved. He's just not telling anybody since the rise and rise of Plate Tectonics, and the need (then) to fit in with it if he wanted to sell his book. ("Preston Ercelle Cloud, Jr. (September 26, 1912 – January 16, 1991) was an American paleontologist, geographer, and professor - wikipedia.). </span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And first-year geologists know this too. But Plate Tectonics is a new song to be sung (and there are exams to pass). </span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
It couldn't have been easy, trying to find words that would convey to the reader what the reader wanted to read, and the same time satisfy what Mr Cloud wanted to write.
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"Wherever the current cycle of continental motion has caused plates to converge and collide, mountains have arisen." Preston Cloud <i>Oasis in Space, (p.417)</i>. </span></span></span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> Does Mr Cloud use the word crumpling? No. Folding? No. Contorting, crushing, crashing etc etc etc.? No, .. just (obligingly) (if a word must be used) "arisen" - like Jesus on the third day. No need for the histrionics of 'plates'. No need for anything other than citing the litany according to Saint Tectonics or to clarify anything for the reader who is being given the message that he should put his trust in experts.<br />
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So mountains do not crumple by collision, they just "arise" and "pile up" (?) What he does say is that India first "docked" then (according to seismic evidence) proceeded to "tuck its leading edge" beneath the Asian Plate, thickening the crust and uplifting the Himalayas.
</span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"When the leading (oceanic) edge of India itself first docked along the present northern margin of the Himalaya, it generated a 2,400-kilometre-long suture, or zone of joining (refs fig. above) tracked now by the sacred Indus and Brahmaputra rivers. Seismic reflections from the crust-mantle boundary in this region indicate that India thereafter tucked its leading edge beneath that boundary and was over-ridden from the north in the main Himalayan mountain-building event terminating perhaps 10myBP"</span></span></span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">
"Docked"? "Tucked"? What sort of language is that to describe the spectacular consequences plate collision, crustal crumpling, buckling, and the 'mountain-building' upheaval to form the roof of the world that so pervades the literature so? No sort of language at all, really. By his use of the much more moderate language of "arising" we might expect some qualification along lines that emphasise the retention of essential flatness. We don't get it, but at least we don't get the popular litany of "tossing high of mountains by crumpling and folding, twisting and collision". Instead we merely get sedate "docking", and "tucking under".<br />
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Publication may have been jeopardised had he cast doubt on Plate Tectonics from the vantage of his lifetime credits. Yet this is in fact what a close reading of his book suggests, cloaked as it appears to be in academic diplomacy and written more as an impartial onlooker, than as participant, ... which is interesting given that he (Cloud) lived the transition from continental drift to Plate Tectonics and knew full well the arguments for Earth Expansion, as well as its global expression in geomorphology. He was also critical enough of the arguments for subduction, referring to Panthalassa (one of the lynchpins of Plate Tectonics) as "<b>The phantom global sea</b>" (p.166). (Still, .. he was old-time, and knew the significance of plateaus.) Geologists and geophysicists today apparently don't. He impartially puts the two emerging hypotheses of the day in the same "outrageous" and "preposterous" bag (an interesting word-choice, given the nearly 20-year (supposed) acceptance of Plate Tectonics by the time of publication of his book in 1988): -
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> "Two seemingly outrageous hypotheses have been proposed. One calls on plate tectonics and subduction since the Archean to recycle the ocean floor so completely that no trace of it is left outside the residual greenstone minioceans. The other hypothesis is even more outlandish. It proposes that an Earth of a once much smaller volume has literally expanded like baking bread, extending its diameter to the present size. Preposterous as these ideas may seem they meet the essential criteria of scientific hypotheses. They explain what we know and they have verifiable consequences. They are testable."</span></span></span></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <br />
Testable? They certainly are, and the test is the simple one of flatness and smoothness in Figure 2 that Professor Cloud fails to draw attention to, yet as a geographer he is equally certainly cognisant of it!<br />
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The writing seems to be of one who is personally bemused by the conundrums of both hypotheses yet who, possibly on account of keeping a certain 'professorial distance', is at pains to represent the status quo impartially and let the voice of others speak. "Will crustal compression continue?" he asks. "Assuming it does, will the Himalaya grow still higher, or will they at some point flow to lower levels under their own weight?" (p.421.) <br />
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The question is an interesting one (considering it already has; eastwards to Indonesia) (and Mr Cloud probably knew that too), .. and carries a barb that goes right to the core of Plate Tectonics and supports the argument for Earth Expansion - that the Himalyas are intrinsically gravitationally unstable and are, as professor Cloud says (but the Plate Tectonics' consensus of his time didn't), collapsing over India. That is, .. India is not pushing from the south, Tibet is pushing from the north under its own gravitational weight due to the collapse of the now unstable, remnant curvature of the Pangaean Earth <span style="color: red;"><span style="background-color: yellow;">=></span></span>. India never <i>was</i> anywhere else relative to the collapsing Himalayas, .. but was attached to Africa (according to a smaller Earth) <a href="http://www.mad.html/" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;"><span style="background-color: yellow;">=></span></span></a><br />
<br />One thing we can admire about Professor Cloud's carefully chosen wording is an angelic hesitation to tread where others have no qualms rushing. Plate collision by "docking" and "tucking" is excellent circumspection. Others have been far more extravagant in their advertisement of an event that in fact never happened. So we should thank Professor Cloud for his choice of language, if perhaps not for the disingenuousness that underpins it, .. and also give some consideration to the benefits of 'going-with-the-flow' when the price is merely one of lip-service and suspension of belief - and maybe excuse him some dog-whistling (</span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"outrageous"), by way of retaining some self-respect. </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> [See also blog for Earth expansion at :- <br />
<span style="color: black;"><a href="http://earthexpansion.blogspot.com/"><span style="color: #0067fc;">http://earthexpansion.blogspot.com/</span></a> </span>]</span></span></span></span>don findlayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12458072902579491159noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430456476367817075.post-6774720792258209762011-09-11T15:21:00.001-07:002019-11-02T06:26:10.573-07:00Euler poles and plate movement : Plate Tectonics' supporting pillars( Blog for website at http://users.indigo.net.au/don )<br />
(from the archives) <br />
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<b>Fig.1. Manual construction. </b>Carey's caption reads, "Hemispherical table with the same radius as the globe behind, and spherically molded tracing foil for accurate comparison of continental shapes. The foil sheet on the upper left of the globe fits so accurately that it does not need sticking down, and North America shows through. On the table, two foil sheets have been joined to cover the whole arctic region." (Carey, 1989, <i>Theories of the Earth and Universe</i>, p.103).</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The development of Plate Tectonics from sea-floor spreading was (and still is) all about the time (post-war funding generated by the politics of fear), place (the very few institutions who received it - and the correspondingly few 'key players' who had access to the data), - and spreading in the Atlantic (the cradle of it all :-: continental drift, sea-floor spreading, Plate Tectonics, and Earth expansion).</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">And so we begin this note with Sam Carey, the real father of Plate Tectonics, and his comment on Atlantic opening - though one could be pretty sure that is an attribution he would rather let pass to another. But <a href="http://platetectonicsbiglie.blogspot.com/2011/01/plate-tectonic-cowboys-go-to-hollywood.html">history has it</a>, (click the link and scroll down to comments by Moores, .. and Armstrong just below), so he doesn't have a choice.) Carey writes :-</span> </div>
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" ..In 1929 appeared Sir Harold Jeffrey's prestigious book, The Earth - quite the most authoritative treatise ever on the physics of the earth, following the tradition of Osmund Fisher and Lord Kelvin. However, Jeffreys (1906 --) was completely opposed to Wegener's hypothesis, and in regard to the alleged fit of South America into the angle of Africa, he wrote: "On a moment's examination of the globe, this is seen to be really a misfit by almost 15 degrees. The coasts along the arms could not be brought within hundreds of kilometres of each other without distortion. The widths of the shallow margins of the oceans lend no support to the idea that the forms have been greatly altered by denudation and deposition.</blockquote>
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From my many "moments" of accurate examination of this question that I had done, I knew this statement to be incorrect. I considered that the matter was rather trivial, that the true position would be generally realised, and that this criticism would fade away. But Jeffrey's prestige was so great that most workers accepted his pronouncement as final. Jeffreys repeated the statement in the second edition of his book in 1952, and to rub salt on the wound, Dr George Martin Lees (my former chief in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company), in his 1953 presidential address to the Geological Society of London, listed this as one of his three crucial reasons for rejecting the Wegener hypothesis. So I sent Lees my stereographic projections of two decades earlier [1933 - thirty years before 'Plate Tectonics' in 1960-1967 - d.f.] (Fig.11), proving that Jeffrey's statement was false. I added that "whether the continental drift hypothesis be true or false, this argument should never be used against it again." I asked Lees to arrange publication of this rebuttal, which he did.</blockquote>
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When I went to England in the summer of 1960 as Tasmanian delegate to the third centenary of the Royal Society, Sir Edward Bullard invited me to lunch to discuss the Atlantic fit, which he then repeated with the aid of a computer. The Atlantic match has since been known as the "Bullard fit" and adopted generally. " (Carey, 1989, Theories, P.103.)</blockquote>
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The "Bullard fit" of the Atlantic, usually figured so, </div>
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<b>Fig.2. The Bullard fit</b>. (Courtesy of On-line Encyclopedia Britannica.)</div>
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Many would say that anything better (finessing the dark blue /overlap parts) might be overkill, but Carey was prepared to address the point since many protested his derivative assertions. Why I don'[t know. The figure is constructed of flat map cut-outs joined together, as you can tell from the skewed ("least squares") squares mirroring the projection. It's not a snap-shot of a globe.</div>
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[Addendum. Scouring the web for an image from the original publication encounters a barage of paywalls. Carey's first book (1976) shows the 'Bullard fit' to be the same as above but in black and white, from which it may be presumed that this is indeed the original. But to me this raises severe doubts about the efficacy of Bullard's 'least-squares' method of fit on a same-sized Earth, compared to Carey's on a half-sized Earth, which worked too (probably better - d.f. 2011-09-13)] </blockquote>
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Well, .. if geology was a romance, to be seen as either "philosophically satisfying or unsatisfying" when compared to the quantitative grit of the 'American Way' according to Oreskes, then the Atlantic was the elusively beguiling Queen, no matter from which perspective she was viewed. <br />
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Following Carey in 1933 and 1953, and Bullard in 1965, the next to have a go now that the computer had demonstrated its formidable intellectual power was Jason Morgan, .. but just while we're talking about the Atlantic, the following figure, also of the "Bullard fit "from Dan McKenzie's account of his own role in the evolution of Plate Tectonics in relation to that of Jason Morgan, deserves a mention in view of the Bullard "fit" above. Accent on theoretical (inductive /armwaving) coastline-fitting was shifting to take into account the Great Cross-Faults of the ocean floors which were becoming available, and which looked for all the world like tramlines of continental displacement.) Crikey! This was something! Obviously what was needed was some theory to show that they were indeed 'tramlines' of movement ('rails' of convectional flow). So, think of one, measure them up, stick it in the box and see what comes out. The one that Jason Morgan came up with - rotation on Euler poles - is figured in Dan McKenzie's account : -</div>
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<b>Fig.3 The Bullard fit again</b>. This time three-dimensional, showing the latitudinal lines of displacement about a pole of rotation (an Euler pole), which is not the same thing as the North Pole - although in the case of the Atlantic and within the latitude of the 'fair go', it is close. McKenzie's caption reads : -</div>
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"..The fit between Africa and South America obtained by Teddy Bullard and his colleagues using Euler's Theorem (Bullard et al., 1965). The theorem states that any motion of a rigid plate on the surface of a rigid sphere corresponds to a rotation of the plate about some axis that passes through the center of the sphere. The problem on the Earth is that every point on its surface is on a moving plate, and no rigid sphere exists. So one plate must be chosen and taken to be fixed. Then the motion of any other plate with respect to this fixed plate corresponds to a rotation about an axis. In this figure Africa has been taken to be fixed, so South America moves. <b>(a)</b> shows the location of this axis, marked with an arrow, that Teddy and his colleagues found for the motion between Africa and South America. The circles are lines of latitude about this axis, just like the usual lines of latitude about the Earth's rotational axis. <b>(b)</b> shows the original position of the two continents before the South Atlantic opened., obtained by fitting the edges of the continents together. These edges are under the sea and are not the present coast lines. As the continents move, every point on the South American plate moves in a direction that is parallel to the latitude lines. This behavior is easily seen by comparing the positions of the latitude lines in the two pictures before and after opening. Their position on South America does not change. [Note that by 'plate', McKenzie means not just the continent of South America, but the ocean floor west of the spreading ridge as well, which is half way between the two continents." [in Oreskes (2001), <i>Plate Tectonics, an Insider's history of the Modern Theory of the Earth</i>, P.174)</blockquote>
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Considering the anathema that Earth expansion presents to Plate Tectonics it should not go unnoticed that North America and Europe are missing in the figure, and therefore that the sphere is effectively half the size it should be. The fit therefore is shown on a half-sized Earth, which is a construction supporting Earth expansion, not Plate Tectonics! Just a nicety that should not go unremarked, .. particularly in view of McKenzie's comment that, "I remembered I had disliked the method he (Bullard) used to fit the continents together." (Oreskes, p.180.)<br />
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Well, .. they were all young then, . didn't have the mantle of gravitas that age and career usually bestows, so the figure could be excused for being a bit 'iffy' as regards support for Plate Tectonics (but very good for Earth expansion!), but it does show the point of small circle rotations. Whether or not those are real is another matter we might look at later - particularly in the case of equatorial dilations (rather than longitudinal ones like the Atlantic.)<br />
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After seeing a two-page note by Bill Menard (published in <i>Science</i> in January 1967), on the linear configuration of the Great Cross-Faults in the Central Pacific, Jason Morgan wrote a computer program that showed their configuration as small circles too. <br />
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Menard writes : -</div>
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Jason had already submitted his abstract for the April 1967 meeting, of the American Geophysical Union when he saw my paper. He was due to talk on "Convection in a Viscous Mantle and Trenches," but he immediately stopped his project and spent two months generating a computer program. I had learned about the properties of great circle charts as a naval officer, and so had he. What struck him about my illustrations, however, was not that the fracture zones were almost straight, but that they were not completely straight. It appeared that they followed the arcs of enormous small circles and that the radii of the arc increased from north to south. Like Teddy Bullard, he recalled Euler's theorem, and what he was programming was a means of determining an Euler pole from the geography of fracture zones. ( ... ) So, as the geological world tried to accommodate to the shock of Vine's paper in December, Jason Morgan was already developing the quantitive theory of plate tectonics that would subsume the qualitative miracle of sea-floor spreading. ( .... ) Jason Morgan's paper provided the foundation for all subsequent work on ancient plate tectonics and may have been the most important paper ever written in geology, and certainly in tectonics." (Menard, 1986, <i>The Ocean of Truth</i>, P.284.)</blockquote>
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<b>Fig.4 Menard's caption</b> reads : "Morgan 's evidence that the old fracture zones that I had plotted (heavy lines) followed small circles (dashed lines) around a single Euler pole. (Menard, 1986, <i>The Ocean of Truth</i>', Fig.24c)<br />
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"Ultimtely it was not geology or physics, but a theorem proposed by the Swiss mathematician, Leonard Euler two centuries earlier, that provided the linchpin of plate tectonics." (Menard, Ibid., p.2)</blockquote>
"The most important paper ever written in geology"? Well, .. high praise indeed, to be sure! But it doesn't sound to me that a paper talking about a computer program and 'small circle fault traces' is saying very much at all about geology, other than that there is a sea floor with lines on it. Global geology involves rather more than a computer program to describe small circles, -- particularly when possibly they may 1. not be very small at all, and 2. separation by rotation is not the same thing as separation by convection. Black boxes = "Garbage in, garbage out," if you don't consider the facts, particularly geological ones. And the main geological fact that was not being considered was that (according to Earth expansion here) those 'small circles' were formed very close to the Pangaean equatorial zone (<a href="http://earthexpansion.blogspot.com/2011/02/earth-expansion-synoptic-simplicity.html">Synoptic simplicity, Fig.1</a>) where small circles do very closely approximate great circles, and half of their extent is concealed in American override of the Pacific anyway. In such a situation it would be almost impossible to tell the difference, and a smaller Earth getting bigger would exacerbate the problem. <br />
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But it did at the time serve to describe plate *movement*. That is, .. if you ignored the <a href="http://earthexpansion.blogspot.com/2011/04/plate-tectonics-and-along-ridge.html">along-ridge spreading, manifested in the difference in lengths between the spreading ridges and their original breakout from continental margins</a>, which implied it was not movement at all in the rightful meaning of the word, but *growth* in the opposite direction, which in turn (when both sides of the ridge were considered simultaneously) implied UP, .. and Earth expansion.<br />
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Next was Dan McKenzie, who showed from earthquake first motions around the Aleutian Trench that this Pacific plate with the Great Cross-Faults (transform faults) could also move bodily in a direction other than that indicated by those faults (/cross-faults /transform faults). (Fig.5).<br />
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<b>Fig.5. Pacific plate motion according to Dan McKenzie's analysis of earthquake first motions</b>. The caption reads : -<br />
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".. This figure shows the motion of the Pacific plate, obtained from the motion on faults during earthquakes,. when the North American plate is fixed. The solid dots show the locations of a number of large earthquakes produced by the motion between these two plates. The arrows show the direction of motion between the two sides of the faults on which these earthquakes occur when the side of the fault that is part of the North American plate is taken to be fixed and the Pacific side is moving. The map is in a special projection, chosen so that the motion of the Pacific plate is everywhere parallel to the big arrow if the plate moved rigidly. (b) Contours of the depth of the ocean around Hawaii, using the same projection as (a). If the volcano that forms the Hawaiian Ridge is fixed to North America, the ridge should be parallel to the large arrow, which is approximately true. (Courtesy of Oreskes, 2001, P.179)</blockquote>
So, .. Morgan says the Pacific plate moves west according to the tramrails of transform faults, and McKenzie says the same plate moves north according to the first motions of earthquakes. Different spatial moves for both of them, but both in the same time frame. This difference is rationalised in Plate Tectonics, not by trying to understand the information in terms of a single data-set and finding a single solution (the scale problem again), but by considering the data sets as independent and trying to find a solution that will suit each independently. Puzzling at first, this apparent contradiction is rationalised by hypothesising that the reference frames for the two movements are different : the Pacific plate (moving west in respect of original continental separation) is also moving north with respect to the fixed American plate. So relatively speaking, one movement is a subset of the other (a solution reminiscent of the olden days of astronomy when inventing epicycles to the planets was what the demonstration of intellectual endeavour was all about, and which earned the pleasure of the Pope as a demo. of God's work.)<br />
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But <a href="http://sideshow.jpl.nasa.gov/mbh/series.html">NASA's time series satellite data shows America is not fixed</a> but is moving in accord with overriding (as Earth expansion maintains). So if we reverse the movement frame and consider the Pacific plate to be fixed and the American plate that's moving, then it also reverses the hotspot story : a fixed Pacific plate means the hot-spot must move. But this would disturb the convection story necessary for the whole concept of plates - so we can't go there.<br />
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<b>Fig.6 Synopsis of the data.</b> (You need to right-click this one to see a bigger figure.) Red arrow (visible on the larger figure) shows plate movement according to Morgan, pink arrow shows movement according to McKenzie, big white arrow shows direction of *growth* (projected on to the present-sized Earth) according to Earth expansion, small white arrows (pointing south) shows overriding according to NASA's time-series data and also according to expansion, and the smallest arrows with the red flag (pointing north) shows movement according to the USGS plate movement (presumably after McKenzie). <br />
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So, .. complications. ... Jason Morgan writes the paper that "provided the foundation for all subsequent work on ancient plate tectonics and may have been the most important paper ever written in geology, and certainly in tectonics", .. and Dan McKenzie's paper is the one generally cited as "the first paper on Plate Tectonics", yet both are citing exactly opposite conclusions regarding plate movements - for the very same plate, .. for the very same time. For the hypothesised reconcilliation of this, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Jason_Morgan">Jason gets a gong from my fishing buddy</a>, .. and Dan gets the credit for laying the foundation of plate movement over hotspots. This is the doublethink Orwell warns us about, otherwise known as the PMWS syndrome - the Principle of Multiple Working Stories - much beloved of 4-year-old children as a way of rationalising 'the terror' - of the adult occupation of their world.<br />
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Earth expansion dispenses with all of these stories, beginning by recognising that ocean floors cannot move the way Plate Tectonics says, in a direction of either Morgan or McKenzie, but must <i>grow</i> towards the ridges. And therefore move up, ..as Menard was reaching for with his "moving ridge" as a way of rationalising the difference in length between the magnetic anomalies at the ridges and those further away. Expansion explains overriding as gravitational correction attributed to the brittle outer crustal shell, not gravitational correction due to a sinking slab, and overriding (not subduction) is supported by the satellite time series data (which is more recent than the USGS arrows. (I can't paste a quick-fig convenient copy of that since it is 'interactive', but if you <a href="http://sideshow.jpl.nasa.gov/mbh/series.html">go to the site</a> you'll see what I mean..)<br />
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So which is to be believed? .. and on what grounds? The PMWS-supporting-pillars of Plate Tectonics? ... Or the ("neither of us believed for a moment ") unbelievable, .. the unthinkable, .. the un-<i>IMAGINABLE</i> Earth expansion, that solves all of these multiple (and contradictory) movements at a stroke?<br />
<br />
........................... <br />
<br />
Plate Tectonics is slowly having to admit the support for expansion in the OVERRIDING shown in NASA's own time-series data (Fig.6) (and in the Flat Subduction of the circum-Pacific. But it's taking its TIME. You know why? Because it's not a geological issue, .. and never was. The issue is the corner Plate Tectonics has painted itself into.<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
"Least noticed, but most important of all, a generation of conservative geologists had passed on. As Max Planck wrote in his autobiography, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." (Carey, op.cit., p.121)</blockquote>
<br />
Now that Carey himself has passed on we are left with the tribal 'volunteers' from the compost of the mentis, convinced by the fatherly gravitas of those who firstly couldn't get their minds properly around what Earth expansion was saying, secondly were afraid of the implications for funding if they did understand it aright, .. and thirdly were denied the powerful three dimensional manipulation of the data that is now casually available to schoolchildren, thanks to Google Earth.<br />
<br />
<br />
Well, we began this post with Carey, .. meandered through the young-lad supporting pillars of Jason Morgan and Dan McKenzie (and my fishing buddy George). In view of where all this is heading we might let Menard have the last word in regard to attempts to rationalise the along-ridge spreading, in a meeting discussion : -<br />
<blockquote>
"The discussion was brief, but it offered Vine the occasion to refer to convection cells as "presumed" and "mythical." Certainly , the many problems related to convection that had been troubling the conference members would have been solved by eliminating convection entirely. " (Menard, The Ocean of Truth, p.276.) </blockquote>
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"Along ridge spreading", ..not from the continental side of any initial split, but from the oceanic side of differences in length of magnetic anomalies between those at the ridges (bigger) and those away from the ridge (smaller). Menards' remark that "It certainly helps to think about these things (ridge-length difference) at leisure.." has now had its leisure lengthened to half a century with still no takers on the Plate Tectonics side. Nobody has done it, because to do so challenges both the fundament and the firmament of Plate Tectonics. Menard did suggest that it might be explained by the ridges themselves moving (sideways), but moving sideways only works for one side of the ridge at a time (and provided the implications for the other side are ignored). If it is considered for both sides at once, .. well, .. that means (again) .. the only way it can do that is if the ridge moves UP (which means expansion).</div>
<br />
<div>
You can see the problem that would have posed for Menard, given the hatchet job they already did on Bruce Heezen, which was also (I think) why as he says, "There is no record in the published account of any discussion after this talk." No wonder. Lurking under the surface here is probably the reason why Carey never took up the offers either, of a position in the States despite being quite pally with Hess, ..</div>
<div>
<blockquote>
"Harry Hess, chairman of the Princeton geology school, and I cemented a warm friendship that deepened until his premature death." (Carey, 1988, Theories of the Earth and Universe, 1988, P.119.</blockquote>
.</div>
..and why he thought Tasmania on the other side of the world was just fine to pursue the geo-*logical* questions, instead of those arising from geophysical PMWS syndrome. Those guys and the institutions that housed them would not have thought twice about doing a hatchet job on him too, given half a chance, had he threatened the Big Story. They would have found a way, as Armstrong did in time in response to Carey's book, <i>Theories of the Earth and Universe</i>; (Hollywood Cowboys post and scroll down to 'Armstrong' again). And as many others have done too, labelling Carey (politely) as 'misguided'). But it would have had to have been more forceful than just removing handles from office doors (Ewing on Heezen), or forbidding him to use certain data at conferences (Ewing on Heezen again ).<br />
<br />
Between the lines (of "Truth"), .. the story is actually quite murky.<br />
<br />
("From the ashes, ..a phoenix rises.")<br />
<br />
<br />
[See also blog for Earth expansion at :- <br />
<span style="color: black;"><a href="http://earthexpansion.blogspot.com/"><span style="color: #0067fc;">http://earthexpansion.blogspot.com/</span></a> </span>]don findlayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12458072902579491159noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430456476367817075.post-38049087365575238792011-07-05T19:21:00.000-07:002017-10-29T13:25:45.591-07:00Plate Tectonics turns up for the Nobel Prize<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4WmtHFwGieQ2Z1Dd2E7HcVRFdZNoubAMxOBHMGV6NuQ7bGZcCIN8TCXi7EhQeN44F_g6KR7n2Owx3Qinu0C9qicL9mZT2hWTPH07zykF0t8AXH9lSWT7EVWuuC1xGz5mFOQ-SoN7mUo4/s1600/red2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="33" data-original-width="30" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4WmtHFwGieQ2Z1Dd2E7HcVRFdZNoubAMxOBHMGV6NuQ7bGZcCIN8TCXi7EhQeN44F_g6KR7n2Owx3Qinu0C9qicL9mZT2hWTPH07zykF0t8AXH9lSWT7EVWuuC1xGz5mFOQ-SoN7mUo4/s1600/red2.JPG" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">But is turned away at the door</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: normal;">( .. no frock .. )</span></span></span><br />
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" .. Me frock, .. Anyone seen m'rock? .. "</div>
<br />
<br />
You know the old adage: "If it looks like a duck, flies like a duck, walks like a duck (and f-@#$ like a duck, etc. etc", .. then we must seriously consider that what we are looking at is, for all intents and purposes, . a duck, .. particularly when the offspring exhibit the same appearance and behavioural proclivities. Otherwise we must seriously reconsider the type - or deny the logic of reason.<br />
<br />
...As Plate Tectonics does with its determined invention of a Panthalassa to deny the 1/3rd - 2/3rds proportional logic of continents to ocean floors that we see, and that the oldest part of the Pacific (northwestern margin) is the same age as that of the continental ruptures that allowed its emplacement. That is, regardless of whatever was the *<a href="http://www.synoptic.blogspot.com.au/html" target="_blank">configuration* of continental rupture that allowed Pacific emplacement</a>, the *ages* of the two (continental rupture and mantle emplacement) are the same (or the oceans are younger).<br />
<br />
Which means the dilation of the crust and the emplacement of the Pacific are coincident in time.<br />
<br />
Which means that there is no spatial or temporal room for the emplacement or destruction of *any* Panthalassa (Or Tethys) let alone one equivalent in size to the sum of the current oceans to meet Plate Tectonics' needs of a historical same-sized Earth.<br />
<br />
Which means from the standpoint of simple geological principles of structural superposition, Plate Tectonics is false.<br />
<br />
Even children in their bath know what a duck looks like. Which is more than can be said for Plate Tectonicists who consider instead that mountains form by crumplecrust "plate collision".<br />
<br />
Such is the nonsense geo-logic is up against when rationality and logic are negated by obtuse ignore-ance. Can geologists *really* deny that these three lynchpins of Earth dynamics do not exist? : -<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Length difference of spreading ridges between the present and the past, which shows ocean-floor spreading is *towards* the ridge (not away, as Plate Tectonics would have it) .. and therefore the ridges keep moving up.</li>
<li> Folding and mountains do *not* have causal equivalence across the punctuation of peneplanation, i.e., the folds of mountains are not formed by crumplecrust tectonics (as advocated by Plate Tectonics), but are gravitational collapse structures due to the reduction of Earth's curvature (as it gets bigger), .. and that mountains are simply the remnants of erosion [not "tossed high by the collision of plates].</li>
<li>The temporal equivalence of the Pacific ocean and its continental marginal ruptures, which tells us that a Panthalasssa and Tethys never existed.</li>
</ul>
... all three quite apart from many other considerations.<br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"...There probably has been an ocean in the present-day position of the Pacific Ocean for nearly a billion years..." (<a href="http://www.scotese.com/pacifanim.htm" target="_blank">Link</a>) </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">[I don't think so. </span></span><a href="http://users.indigo.net.au/don/nonsense/platetrouble.html">Not in my book</a> at any rate.] </div>
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What's going on? Why does Plate Tectonics ignore these lynchpins of global geo-logic? The answer seems to be (Google it up) that : -<br />
<br />
"Plate tectonics is a theory" (about 16,800 results at posting; 56,600 at 20171029)<br />
<br />
..And as a theory it is touted as flexible, dynamic, etc etc.; "The mark of a good theory is that it is flexible enough to incorporate new facts as they come to light". And "being a theory" (centred in the oceans) Plate Tectonics is allowed to excuse itself from considering the facts of the continental crust, and have its 'theory' evolve as parallel, mutually contradictory threads, to be tested (by ever more research) against each other more than the geological facts, leading to the claim that it deserves a <a href="https://earthexpansion.blogspot.com.au/2017/04/but-we-used-juice.html#prize">Nobel prize</a>.<br />
<br />
Ouch! A good theory is tested against the *facts*, not its own hypothesised moving parts. It is predictive and needs no goalpost shifts.<br />
<br />
The main proponents of this Nobel-claim are of course, geophysicists. I find it hard to believe that geologists are the same, for this much is noticeable: geologists of field orientation are much more open to considering the possibility that Plate Tectonics is false compared to their desk-driving academic cousins. I put this down to two things, 1. They got where they did in academia because they excelled at telling the required story, and 2. if you *don't* tell the story in academic circles then you're in dangerous territory. No tell the story? - no job. Geologists in industry don't have that damoclean sword hanging over them, but by another token are mostly too busy to worry about the niceties of global geology, so most don't much bother with it; it is not of a scale relevant to day-to-day requirements of mining. (However, with the world being dependent economically and politically on ore deposits and the reasons for their location, perhaps they should be more involved in this question than they are).<br />
<br />
We have to take all this Plate Tectonics stuff with a big pinch of salt, for how can a theory of the Earth be claimed without taking the continents into account? .. Which is what Plate Tectonics essentially does. In two of the most authoritative histories of Plate Tectonics I've come across (Menard* and Oreskes** - see footnote) there is not even an index entry for "mountains", which by the failure of Plate Tectonics to recognise peneplanation as the precursor to so-called "building", are still the most perplexing feature of the continental crust. Consideration of global geology stopped at the continental margins, where, as Tanya Atwater succinctly puts it: -<br />
<br />
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"Subduction was a necessary adjunct concept" (Oreskes**, p.247)</div>
<br />
Well, indeed it surely was ("<a href="http://platetectonicsbiglie.blogspot.com/2011/01/jack-oliver-and-passing-parade.html">if you believed Plate Tectonics was going on</a>"). And indeed they did. And so they invented subduction of oceanic 'plates', and backed it with some highly questionable seismological interpretations <span style="color: red;"><span style="background-color: yellow;">[1] [2]</span></span> <br />
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<b> Fig.2. <a href="http://earthexpansion.blogspot.com/2011/03/japan-earthquake-march-2011.html">The Asian - Pacific region</a></b> showing that earthquake distribution is far more an expression of the continental lithosphere, than it is the oceanic lithosphere. </div>
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The ocean floors that are <a href="http://users.indigo.net.au/don/nonsense/rubble.html">riddled with more fractures than a truckload of slack</a>... .. How is that supposed to make it, "<a href="http://users.indigo.net.au/don/nonsense/platesmove.html">jostling" and "grinding</a>", from one side of the planet to the other, without making a noise? </div>
<br />
The most perplexing features of the ocean floors (i.m.o.) are <a href="http://earthexpansion.blogspot.com/2011/06/atlantic-transform-faults-as-growth.html">transform faults</a>, .. about which Plate Tectonics has *<i>nothing</i>* to say other than that they are "the third boundary of plates, and the means whereby Plates "move /grind/ slide /glide etc." past each other". [1] (see <a href="http://tinyurl.com/yb8kxao6" target="_blank">also</a> 32,100 /20171029). If that is the case then there are as many plates as there are transform faults (+ duplicated across the ridge), not just the "seven or twelve ("depending"). <br />
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...Plate Tectonicsw receives first prize (the Big Wooden Spoon).</div>
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But doesn't seem to notice.</div>
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("Hello Everybody! How you doin'?" )</div>
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("Believe in me..Kiddo.")</div>
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<u>Menard, H.W., 1986</u>, <i>An Ocean of Truth, a Personal History of Global Tectonics</i>, 353pps, Princeton University Press. </div>
<u>Oreskes, N., 2001</u>, <i>Plate Tectonics, an Insider's History of the Modern Theory of the Earth</i>, 424pps, Westview Press<br />
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[ See also blog for Earth expansion at :- </div>
<span style="color: black;"><a href="http://earthexpansion.blogspot.com/"><span style="color: #0067fc;">http://earthexpansion.blogspot.com/</span></a></span>] <br />
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don findlayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12458072902579491159noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430456476367817075.post-92186560037569422622011-06-17T19:44:00.000-07:002017-10-31T02:13:55.424-07:00Origin of Plate Tectonic Theory<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">The party's over, Rover. </span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> ( ... Lifting the wool from the eyes .. )</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">If you search the web for the origins or history of Plate Tectonic theory you get the wool pulled over your eyes. Contrary to the proferred geological story, the development of Plate Tectonic theory was virtually wholly sociological in its origins, little to do with geological evidence. Had it to do with *geo-logic*, it would unequivocally have gone in the direction of Earth expansion. But it was the social and political contexts back in the days of the Cold War, that pulled it in the wrong direction. The much vaunted "no mechanism" aimed first at continental drift and later against Earth expansion was just a cop out, .. an excuse to avoid what was obvious even then - that the Earth's crust (in respect of continental drift) had been displaced in relation to the ocean floors, and that (in respect of Earth expansion) it had been dilated, the support for the latter being primarily the continental retrofits on the smaller Earth as proposed by Carey and others. It was a cop-out because if the path of geo-logic had been followed, research would have included considerations of continental geology instead of just mapping guyots (which Hess was good at) and the topography of the ocean floors generally. This would have meant putting a big question mark over the funding, which was available, not for abstruse geological research, but for getting on with mapping the ocean floors and dodging guyots, which had military reasons (sailing submarines), not geological ones.</span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In Europe, the concept of mantle convection with continents riding on top, colliding in some places and pulling apart in others was well known and well accepted well before the Plate Tectonics 'revolution'. Arthur Holmes textbook '<i>Principles of Physical Geology',</i> had been a standard student textbook in Britatin at least for fifteen years by the time Plate Tectonics was developing in America. The last chapter of the book was devoted entirely to convection as a hypothesis for mobile crust developing the ocean basins and mountain belts. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">However, if we are to read the preface to Naomi Oreskes' book (1999), '<i>The rejection of continental drift, theory and method in American science',</i>
we would get the impression that American geologists who were wholly
responsible for Plate Tectonic theory, might have been oblivious to
this.</span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<blockquote>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">".. (By 1978) I had completed two years as a geology major at a leading US university and counted myself lucky to have chosen a field of science heady in the wake of revolutionary upheaval: geologists around the globe were reinterpreting old data and long-standing problems in the new light of plate tectonics. It seemed a good time to be an aspiring young Earth scientist. Imagine my surprise - and dismay - to discover in England that the radically new idea of plate tectonics had been proposed more than half a century before by a German geophysicist, Alfred Wegener, and widely promoted in the United Kingdom by the leading British geologist of his era, Arthur Holmes. The revolution that had been described by my professors in the United States as the radical revelation of a dramatically new vision of the Earth was viewed by many of my professors in England as the pleasing confirmation of a long-suspected notion."</span></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">How did it happen that Naomi's professors gave her such an impression? From today's perspective it seems hardly credible that Wegener's 'continental drift' was not common knowledge in America by the time of 'The Great Plate Tectonics Revolution' in the 60s. And of course, it isn't (credible). Nor was it then. Even in the antipodes, the last stop before the polar wastelands of Antarctica, Sam Carey had been teaching mantle recycling as a model for crustal tectonics for almost two decades before that revolution, before giving it up as unworkable and moving on to the next contextual framework for geological advance - Earth expansion. It is simply inconceivable that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Hammond_Hess">Harry Hess</a>, as one of those "senior geologists", though much earlier than Naomi's day and who would later claim the mantle of Plate Tectonics for himself, or his contemporaries, or those following, would have been unaware of the works of either Arthur Holmes or of Sam Carey; the latter in fact spending some sabbatical time in America at the invitation of Hess.</span></span><br />
<blockquote>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">(Sam Carey [on continental mobility]) : "Through the 30s and 40s and 50s if you dared to propose this sort of thing in America you'd be laughed at, you're a ratbag flat-earther. And there was no chance of getting a job if you had that kind of idea. But by about 1956 I could see the glimmerings of the recognition that something was wrong, and then of course I was invited several times to Princeton. Harry Hess was the Chairman there and he and I became warmest of friends. I always stayed in his home, and in the many lectures I gave in Princeton, Harry realised it had to be, and later he became the leader in selling plate tectonics." <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2002/526793.htm">http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2002/526793.htm</a> and click 'show <span style="background-color: white;">transcript' </span></span></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #8e7cc3;">[ Interestingly, H.W. Menard, 1986, writing from personal recollection on the development of Plate Tectonics and commenting on how Tuzo Wilson arrived at the idea of transform faults says, "Writing textbooks is not doing what counts, <span style="color: black;">which is one reason why the older scientists in the United States never thought to read Holmes's text of 1944</span>. Revising textbooks is an even drearier patching of new data on old ideas." (<i>The Ocean of Truth', p.243.)</i> ] </span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: white;">A strange observation surely, considering that the structuring of significant data and events is what one does from the perspective of more advanced years, and which by his book is precisely what Menard is himself doing. I guess he means that everybody was creaming themselves over the interpretations of new data to such an extent that everything previous was just indiscriminately swept away. Maybe too that after coming back to Earth from the stratospheric heights of speculation and realising that the conceptual framework was already common knowledge in sophomoric textbooks, life *was* a bit "dreary". Best to steer clear of textbooks if you're in America? (But what about the young guys that w<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">e</span></span>re developing this? )</span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Oreskes attributes this apparent oblivion of American scientists to the different ways that American and British /European geologists actually do science, telescoping those ways into the words 'inductive' and 'deductive'.</span></span><br />
<blockquote>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"My English training and Australian experience had inculcated in me an inductive methodology, in which scientific problems originated in the observation of geological phenomena in the field, but many of my American professors disdained inductive science and what they pejoratively dismissed as "outcrop" geology. They encouraged me to pursue a deductive strategy, and to rely primarily on the tools of laboraytory analysis. This was particularly true of younger professors and those who had achieved a high level of professional recognition."</span></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">... but I don't think she has it quite right. I think the reasons are far more personal /political than can be explained by dedication to 'method'. It would appear from historical considerations that those "younger professors" she mentions would have been those riding on the back of the triumphal deductive methodological American way of doing science , .. so to address the question "why the difference?" it would seem that we have to return to the sociology of an earlier day. But first some clarification of the methodological difference might be in order.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In the inductive method you gather the data and make a judgement how they fit together. It's like doing a jigsaw, but in a kind of 'top-down' way, where previous experience, knowledge and understanding is brought to bear on how the pieces are likely to fit. In other words you build on what you already know. This cognitive faculty is analogous in a way to being armed with the picture on the front of the box. You've seen it before (or something like it), you know what it is (or something like it), .. so where's the problem? Well, one problem is that it is seen as highly subjective; one's experience is unique and non-repeatable, and non-repeatability is eschewed in science. Or to put it another way, science (of the mainstream sort) denies the individual. 'Big Science' is a Team effort, underpinned by institutional kudos. Repeatability is an aspect of the deductive method consequent on the tools and apparatus of the laboratory. But in the field of geology, and observation and the intellect of the individual, .. if you *do* know what it is, and you *have* seen it before (or some aspect of the picture on the front of the box), the inductive method works very well. (Ask <a href="http://users.indigo.net.au/don/ee/eureka.html">Louis Pasteur</a>.) (Or Albert Einstein.) Or indeed the main players devising Plate Tectonics (!) [Note to develop Jack Oliver, Peter Molnar, John Dewey + ?others.]</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">One order of magnitude down from this is where, absent of Experience Understanding and Knowledge, an explanation of the data is simply formulated, .. fished from the air as a best guess as it were, and tested against the data. The potential for circularity and junk (<a href="http://users.indigo.net.au/don/nonsense/subass.html">formulating conclusions around original assumptions</a>) is obvious, but neverthless this method enjoys respectable currency as 'the scientific method'. The obvious problem lies again in the guesswork, in the quality of hypothesis used to explain the facts. Anybody can have an idea, after all, .. indeed usually more than one, .. and more than one typically does fit the facts. So which idea is better than another? .. the one that might appear to fit the facts better? .. or the one proferred by greater experience, authority and knowledge? And who amonst those lacking such cognitive 'preparation' as advocated by Mr Pasteur, will be the arbiter? And if all ideas /hypotheses are partly right (according to the method of multiple working hypotheses) what is the underlying synthesis, the explanation, ..the paradigm, incorporating all? And how is this to be distinguished from 'just another idea'?</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And then there is the 'deductive' approach where any allusion to the 'picture on the front of the box' is purposely eschewed. Attention is given wholly to fitting the 'contours and matching patterns' of the pieces themselves: the jigsaw is built from the bottom up as it were. The key thing here, is that it is not the *perceived* matching that is important, but the *<i>actual</i>* matching - in other words the degree of certainty involved, not one's perception of it.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This approach is admirably suited to the technological aspect of laboratory science - we stand back and let the tools do the job of unequivocally matching the contours and patterns of the pieces, e.g., the use of computers to do large calculations on large amounts of data. The 'hands-off' objective approach thus offered is lauded. However this deductive method suffers similarly from two things, firstly the 'being driven by the machinery' syndrome, i.e., the indiscriminate use of, and inappropriate reliance on, tools. In geophysics this is the 'black box' syndrome; .. because a tool was used, the interpreted result must, because it was objectively derived, be valid. Secondly (which is really much a restatement of the same problem) the hubris of their drivers, exemplified in the garbage-in garbage-out factor and wacky interpretations that purport to be significant by those explaining their data.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Technology that can infallibly match contours and patterns of 'jigsaw pieces' is of course a boon to science By all means we should stand back and let the algorithms of search-and-match do their stuff. But we have to know that the designers are competent, and in particular that they are not failing to take account of alternative patterns of matching. There is more than a little irony in Plate Tectonics claiming validity on account of the technologies that defined "sea-floor spreading when that 'spreading', <a href="http://earthexpansion.blogspot.com/2011/04/plate-tectonics-and-along-ridge.html">inclusive of what is happening along the ridge as well as across it</a>, also axiomatically defines the growth of an expanding Earth. It is also disturbing that Plate Tectonics hides behind the gratuitous shibboleth of "no mechanism" and retreats from discovery, when evidential reality points in the direction that a mechanism should be sought. As an explanation of natural phenomena "no mechanism" has no place in science, but going where no man has gone before is a (highly) risky business in science. The mantra offers security by closing off no-go areas of research.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">No greatly sophisticated aparatus or deductive methodology is needed to confirm the upwards growth of the ocean floors. It is as obvious at a glance as continental fits support separation in the Atlantic. Are we to believe that this simple observation of along-ridge spreading there and elsewhere was overlooked by those developing Plate Tectonic theory? I think not. I think this is the unspoken lie (of omission) of Plate Tectonics that will torpedo the Big Ship, because it goes to the heart of the difference between sea-floor *spreading* and sea-floor *growth*, and chooses growth as the logical option, <a href="http://users.indigo.net.au/don/nonsense/transoffsets.html">thus negating convection as the driver for Plate Tectonics</a> .</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We wait to see therefore what geophysicists will invent to deny this (for they haven't done thus far; they seem oblivoious to this implication) just as they denied Wegener his continental drift, and Carey his expanding Earth. Having twice before snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by self-serving denial, what aspect of deductive 'rationalism' will it take for geophysicists to overcome their denial this time, to once again claim (eventually) as theirs Earth expansion as the forward position of deductive Earth science?</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What will it take? Again we get some idea from Naomi Oreskes' assessment of the sociology of the day:-</span></span><br />
<blockquote>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"The choices these scientists made, moreover, were self-ratifying. American earth scientists chose not to pursue the field-based observational evidence relevant to the question of continental drift; instead they solicited the partronage of private institutions and miliary bureaucracies in support of instrument-driven science. Not surprisingly, then, little new observational evidence in support of the theory was gathered, while reams of instrumental data were. And when these instrumental data were made public and their support of moving continents became evident, earth scientists were satisfied that they had made the right choice. Yet had the Navy not been interested in supporting marine geophysics - had submarine warfare not existed - earth scientists would necessarily have taken a different route, and perhaps been well satisfied with that too."</span></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #8e7cc3;">[ H.W.Menard, 1986 " ..Moreover, success had become a trap. An astonishing fleet of research ships had been created, and it had hungry crews. Research laboratories were proliferating, and into them flocked eager graduate students who needed support. In Washington agencies were created to grant funding. The accepted way to finance a few kilobucks of thought by a senior scientist was to spend a megabuck at sea, and that took lots of time. ('The Ocean of Truth', p.297) ] (.. and money : me)</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">... from which it would seem to take some fortuitous coupling of technological apparatus and the security of funding to support its development to tell us what, from a much simpler and inductive commonsense coupling, is clearly apparent - that the Earth's crust has indeed been distended by the extents of the ocean floors. Hopefully the background of war will not be an additional sociological ingredient, as previously was the case. For it was *exactly* in this wartime coupling (and funding) that lay the evolution of Plate Tectonics; and whence better for that security of funding (in the days of the cold war) than from military sources through the tools that had proved their wartime use?</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Moving on from this particular circumspection to questions of more geological import the question then arises, what difference would it have made had Hess (as captain /admiral of the Big Ship) accepted Carey's inductive *geo-logical* conclusion of Earth expansion, instead of as he did, reverting to the well known convective model of Holmes? Hess did after all recognise the value of inductive empirical geology of Earth expansion in solving his <a href="http://platetectonicsbiglie.blogspot.com/2011/02/big-lie-8-oblivion-heros-journey.html">three most pressing problems regarding the evolution of the ocean floors</a>. .. So why did he not go with it? </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Personally I think again the answer comes back to the security of funding. Hess as a senior naval man knew full well that who pays the piper calls the tune, and that in the political milieu of the day the military were solely interested in securing and maintaining dominance, not answers to questions whether the Earth was expanding or not, nor even if ocean floors were spreading. The new tools that had been developed during the war for detecting ocean depths and the presence of submarines were obviously ones to develop in a new era of Cold War tension, where submarines were now armed with nuclear warheads and the threat of massive annihilation at the press of a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods">psychopathic military button</a>, was very real. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #8e7cc3;"><u>Menard (Ibid. p.38) writes</u> : -</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #8e7cc3;">"Before the war there were three oceanographic laboratories in the Unites States: Scripps, Woods Hole, and the University of Washington. They had a total budget of less than $250,000. and with it supported three ships. In 1948 the Navy poured about $600,000 into oceanographic laboratories, which was a sizeable expansion even after allowing for inflation. Up to 1958 it spent a total of $46 million on academic research in oceanography. The number of laboratories multiplied, and the Navy spent about $300 million for ships, facilities and equipment. The Navy disbursements for three laboratories of the most interest here are shown in Table 1.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #8e7cc3;"><br />
</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #8e7cc3;"><u>Lab</u> <u>1948</u> <u>1950</u> <u>1952</u> <u>1954</u> <u>1956</u> <u>1958</u> <u>Total</u></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #8e7cc3;"><br />
</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #8e7cc3;">WHOI 300 550 1,100 1,020 1,420 1,300 10,600</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #8e7cc3;">LGO 35 410 420 360 1,040 520 4,600</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #8e7cc3;">SIO 200 305 1,010 450 2,040 1,040 9,900</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #8e7cc3;"><br />
</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #8e7cc3;">"By the end of the decade, NSF money was becoming abundant, and Scripps also received significant funding from the State of California. The first decade of postwar expansion, to 1958, was only the beginning. In the next seven years the Federal support for SIO and WHOI would triple to more than $10 million per year. The total for all academic oceanography from ONR and NSF would reach $25 million per year = just 100 times what it ad been in 1941. In 1948 no one knew that this would happen. Even then, when funding had only doubled, Columbus Iselin, Director of Woods Hole, wrote, "The effects of this great outpouring of money on oceanography are by no means all healthy. In the first place nobody knows how long it will last." (SIO= Scripps Institute of Oceanography; WHOI=Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; LGO=Lamont Geological Observatory. NSF=National Science foundation?) "</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">How long it would last would depend on the reason for it. The degree of funding, both directly by the Navy and by specially created Federal grants committees, suggests that it would last as long as Cold War exigencies deemed it necessary. Military imperatives one way and another would have been central to funding. Any geological understanding that may emerge was entirely spin-off, and had to be regarded as such by those dependent on it (if not the public paying for it). There was a need to keep the focus on the ocean floors, and the methodologies that defined them. Reds were under beds everywhere, and the navy was equipped to nuke 'em, provided they didn't bump into seamounts, the ocean floor, or other submarines of opposing sort. In terms of providing the funding for exploration of the ocean floors, Harry Hess, captain of the the Big ship, was (to the community of geophysicists) unquestionably an *admirable* hero. No question. If Hess's wartime experience had not happened, and Hess's military rank (as captain and later admiral) not been considerable, it is highly probable that Plate Tectonics would never, .. *could* never, have arisen in the face of the emerging geological paradigm of Earth expansion. As Oreskes (above) rightly observes, "Earth scientists would necessarily have taken a different route, and perhaps been well satisfied with that too."</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"Different route"? There was only one alternative - the one that Plate Tectonics has resolutely refused to countenance (Earth expansion), because to do so would be to admit that the Big Ship of physics didn't have a clue about mechanism, .. and *that* (in terms of funding) was a no-go area back then. The same is still true today.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It is easy to make a case for Plate Tectonics being a classic example of "being used by your machinery", and Earth science being turned from its 'natural philosophy' inductive roots towards a tool-driven methodology of enquiry. But as much as anything the course of Earth science exploration was determined by the political / sociological climate of those earlier days when bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and when later Russia would threaten America in the space race. Military spending from the Cold War to Star Wars has ensconced physics in the driving seat of Earth science, and ensured the survival of deductive methods that have given us the rag-bag apology of Plate Tectonics as a geological model for crustal tectonics and even, as a sop to a barking public seeking 'value for money', the hyped imperative to look for it on other planets. But even though it has provided for many "the gift that keeps on giving", the geological return from it has been poor despite claims to the contrary. Worse than poor in fact, since it has spawned a false consensus that will require unlearning.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Plate Tectonics has given us <a href="http://users.indigo.net.au/don/nonsense/subcrux.html">starkly contradictory multiple working hypotheses</a> that have served the Earth sciences very poorly, .. that have simply led us up the garden path. Most of all it has been derelict in its scientific duty of falsification, in failing to give any billing whatsoever to alternative views, especially (amongst other things) the incontrovertible fact (apparent to anyone) that the spreading ridges through geological time have got longer along their length as well as across them, .. and that transform faults are the brittle expression of this adjustment to growth, and are *NOT* the so-called "new class of faults" expressing tramrails of convectional mantle flow as continents have separated, as advocated by Mr Wilson. (<i>Googlesearch : - Tuzo Wilson, "a new class of faults"</i>). If ever there was a case of the expedient scientific finagle, a magic rabbit from the geophysical hat to maintain a false assumption, this is one - second only to the choice of subduction over its natural alternative, overriding.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It is time to recognise that Plate Tectonics is long past its use-by, that its roots in military funding imposed a myopia that much hampered exploration of important geological questions by keeping the focus on the ocean floors rather than on their relationship to the continents, and that there is a need therefore for Earth science to return to its traditional (inductive) geo-*logical* roots. In many ways the larger-scale geological questions *can* only be approached by guesswork, and until such time as computers can truly simulate the higher functions of the human brain, logic steered by rational assessment remains the best tool for the job - a tool that from the many contradictions of Plate Tectonics has been woefully absent in the development of that model. Despite the obvious advantages that technology offers to science, the limitations of deductive methods of tool-driven exploration in Earth science should be recognised, not in regard to the tools themselves which are exemplary, but for the expediencies underlying their use that for decades have maintained a demonstrably false consensus, whose 'success' is unremarkable for anything other than it pays mortgages along the road that leads up the garden path.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Which is laudable enough as regards those who live in the garden, .. but the barking public dog might have something to growl about.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">(And piss on the lamp post!)</span></span><br />
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See also blog for Earth expansion at :- <br />
<span style="color: black;"><a href="http://earthexpansion.blogspot.com/"><span style="color: #0067fc;">http://earthexpansion.blogspot.com/</span></a></span>]don findlayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12458072902579491159noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430456476367817075.post-43094308879914675052011-05-06T22:39:00.000-07:002020-04-20T05:51:32.672-07:00Plate Tectonics is a Theory<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Earth expansion is a fact</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: normal;"> ( .. an animated description of "what you see is what you get" .. )</span>
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<span style="font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Earth expansion is an observation of how things actually are, contextualised through crustal evolution over geological time since the Mesozoic. Plate Tectonics is a hypothesised denial of this on grounds of "No known mechanism". It is nothing less than a celebration of ignorance.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><u><b>1. Destruction of the ocean floors.</b></u> We might (with Earth expansion) say that Plate Tectonics should begin with the creation /extrusion /emplacement of the ocean floors, because after all something must be created before it can be destroyed. <br />
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But creation is not where Plate Tectonics begins. Nor does it really begin with the destruction of the ocean floors. It begins with the *<a href="http://tinyurl.com/y8qdp2hc" target="_blank"><i>perceived need</i></a>* for their destruction <span style="color: red;">(<a href="https://earthexpansion.blogspot.com.au/2017/09/slabs-jack-olivers-eureka-moment.html">J.O.</a>)</span> It's a subtle difference that shifts the emphasis from the fact to the perception of the fact. The destruction itself is arguable, but for Plate Tectonics the *<i>perceived necessity</i>* for destruction is very real.<br />
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So the case for Plate Tectonics does not rest in the facts themselves, nor exactly in the way they are interpreted (though this is somewhat closer), .. but in <i>the way they could be perceived to be structured in the first place - *IF...*</i> (<a href="https://earthexpansion.blogspot.com.au/2017/09/slabmen-and-new-global-tectonics.html">and it's a very big 'IF'</a> ) in order that they *can* be interpreted as desired.<br />
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The way I read it (as outlined in earlier posts), it begins exactly where the website of the USGS says it begins, .. with Harry Hess's *<i>surmise</i>*, .. as follows:- <br />
</span></span><br />
</span><br />
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"..The size of the Earth has not changed significantly during the past 600 million years, and very likely not since shortly after its formation 4.6 billion years ago. The Earth's unchanging size implies that the crust must be destroyed at about the same rate as it is being created, <b>as Harry Hess surmised</b>." [emphasis - df. ] ( <a href="http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/understanding.html">http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/understanding.html</a> and scroll down to "Convergent boundaries".)</span></span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">
Thus are facts nuanced (by presenting 'surmise' as a stated 'fact' of unchanging size. The foundation is not in the body of the paragraph, but in the last four words - "as Harry Hess surmised" (that the crust must be destroyed at about the same rate as it is being created) - and they are hoping nobody notices the segue. It's quite possible the author him/herself didn't notice, though I doubt it. Syntax like that is a quite slippery thing to construct. The Wikipedia succeeds in being more factual and says it this way :- <br />
</span></span></span><br />
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"Plate tectonics < ....... > is a scientific theory which describes the large scale motions of Earth's lithosphere. The theory builds on the older concepts of continental drift, developed during the first decades of the 20th century (one of the most famous advocates was Alfred Wegener), and was accepted by the majority of the geoscientific community when the concepts of seafloor spreading were developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s."</span></span></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">
..which acknowledges that Plate Tectonics was based on earlier ideas of Holmes and numerous others (and not on a surmise of Hess) - that convection was the driver of continental separation. It followed Hess's rejection of the implication of the geological evidence [presented by Carey] that the earth had expanded, which would "solve three of my [Hess's] greatest difficulties regarding the evolution of the ocean basins."<br />
<br />
Note that Hess didn't reject the <i>evidence</i>, .. he rejected the <i>implication</i> that followed from it re. enlargement as "philosophically unsatisfying", and therefore substituted the *need* for destruction of the ocean floors to match their creation (creation being all about expansion). No-one has contradicted Carey's case for expansion on geological grounds, only on the claim of "no mechanism".<br />
<br />
The underpinning of Plate Tectonics was therefore not based on <i>empirical fact</i> but on Holmes' (and others') <i>theory of convection</i>,. The comment that "crust being destroyed (at subduction zones) at the same rate as it is created means that the Earth is not increasing in size", is entirely hypothesis, and the circular argument is obvious, which incidentally renders Plate Tectonics equivalent to Junk Science. (Junk science is when the initial assumption (not the data) is used as the supporting pillar to reach the conclusion inherent in the assumption.)<br />
<br />
Many people were working in the new field of geophysics, and framed their results according to Hess's surmise (cited above), thus skewing the emphasis of the findings away from geology. This is the reason why Plate Tectonics (as a theory of convection) supplanted continental drift as something new when it wasn't. The way <a href="http://platetectonicsbiglie.blogspot.com/2011/01/plate-tectonic-cowboys-go-to-hollywood.html">Hess in his 1962 paper dismissed Holmes's work on convection</a> reads as a classic example of appropriation. The problems he was trying to address in relation to the ocean floors were by no means new :- <br />
</span></span></span><br />
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"In reality, this question had been solved already by numerous scientists during the forties and the fifties, like Arthur Holmes, Vening-Meinesz, Coates and many others: The crust in excess disappeared along what were called the oceanic trenches where so-called "subduction" occurred." ... (<a href="http://self.gutenberg.org/articles/Tectonic_plates" target="_blank">link</a>)</span></span></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">
What he was doing in adopting this was avoiding having to face the implications of the data of continental retrofits and much else, which supported a smaller Earth as illustrated by Carey. And he was not alone. The complicity of the entire geophysics community in Hess's appropriation is apparent from the reference in the Wikipedia, that Hess's paper was "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Hammond_Hess">for a time the single most referenced work in solid-Earth geophysics</a>".<br />
(Continuing the above quote..) :-<br />
</span></span></span><br />
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">" ... Therefore, when various scientists during the early sixties started to reason on the data at their disposal regarding the ocean floor, the pieces of the theory fell quickly into place. Wikipedia ref." <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics</a></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> "Mid-ocean ridge spreading and convection"</span></span></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">
I don't believe the "various scientists" did accept it on the data, because the essential facts on which those pieces of the theory "fell quickly into place" described creation of the ocean floors, which were all about the Earth getting bigger (expansion). Geophysicists were effectively taking the fall-back position of adopting the theory-of-the-day of convection that for nearly two decades had been first-year text-book geology - and (riding on the back of sea-floor spreading) calling it new. I believe *this* was the reason why geologists "adopted it" - because they <i>already accepted it as a norm.</i> T</span></span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">hey didn't "adopt" it at all (on new data); they already owned it. </span></span></span>They must have, because as a theory it had been standard text-book geology for nearly two decades.<br />
<br />
The phrase "quickly falling into place" seems to be designed to gloss over this point, with the purpose of talking up new data of the ocean floors. Media likes to be part of 'new developments' - especially ones related to new fields emerging from prestigious institutions. In today's terms the "falling quickly into place" was a 'media beat-up'.<br />
<br />
Thus was laid the track down which the brand new gravy train was about to roll. What was being proposed in principle, in terms of theory at least (convection) was no more than people already knew from the work of Wegener and Holmes. Certainly the facts emerging from the ocean floors were substantial, but that substance, first and foremost, supported expansion. Destruction was a device, an avoidance, a ploy ( /cop-out), to avoid having to face what could not be talked about, i.e., everything that the criticism of "no mechanism" could be aimed at. As a result and with a consensus assured, the emphasis was towards shoring up and confirming the meme that people already knew, rather than (as science demands) its falsification.<br />
<br />It was a classic example of the 'meme machine', .. an appeal to people's intuitive understanding of the way tectonics worked using crumpling tablecloths to describe mountain building, and soup-in-a-pot to describe convection :- "Everybody already knows what we mean, so we don't have to explain ourselves very well. In fact we don't even have to explain ourselves at all; all we have to say is, "everybody knows" ". And from then on, slogans will do. </span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
In fact those subduction zones need very close scrutiny, which, in their reference to <a href="https://earthexpansion.blogspot.com.au/2017/10/flat-slab-subduction.html">'flat subduction'</a> and "<a href="http://users.indigo.net.au/don/tck/lingo1.html">overriding</a>" Plate Tectonics is only now beginning to do. "Flat subduction" does not return oceanic lithosphere to the deep mantle. And with no return to the deep mantle there is no convection, only spreading (/"growth") and decoupling of the crust from the mantle, . which is expansion. Sea-floor spreading is the fact. The theory to explain how so much has occurred is still not known, but the geological reality is a powerful incentive to get to know.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
Hence the *necessity* of subduction, with all its contradictions, for without it, Plate Tectonics is in the same ("no mechanism") position as Earth expansion. But the 'soup-in-a-pot' convection model has no currency in the exchange with Earth expansion, <a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_2039165934">based on </a><span style="color: black;"><a href="http://earthexpansion.blogspot.com/2011/05/earth-expansion-is-fact.html">factual evidence in the alternative blog</a> (which Plate Tectonics ignores)</span>. <br />
<br />
In short, Earth expansion includes facts that Plate Tectonics omits, and explains facts for which Plate Tectonics provides only <a href="http://users.indigo.net.au/don/nonsense/subcrux.html">self-contradictory conundrums</a>. By the very nature of scale and time of parameters in Earth science, predictions are specious. The only valuable prediction is that Plate Tectonics will naturally evolve to Earth expansion as 'observation + logic' trumps theory founded on "philosophical un-satisfaction", denial of evidence, ignore-ance of what can be directly observed, and skewed perceptions of how things could be otherwise - *IF*.<br />
</span></span>
<br />
<br />
[ See also blog for Earth expansion at :- <br />
<span style="color: black;"><a href="http://earthexpansion.blogspot.com/">http://earthexpansion.blogspot.com/</a></span>]</span>don findlayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12458072902579491159noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430456476367817075.post-2307189298429480492011-03-11T13:14:00.000-08:002020-07-17T01:03:26.880-07:00Big Lie #11 - Mountain building by plate collision<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;">..In which we continue the dismantling of Plate Tectonics by the rejection of so-called 'fold mountains'</span><br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: medium;">Current consensus recognises <a href="http://tinyurl.com/63nnqde">five types of mountains</a>. Not being at school any more I can't tell if this is so or if it is just a joke. Here they are:- 1. volcanoes (which are self-evident examples of a 'built' mountain), 2, 'dome' mountains apparently pushed up by igneous intrusion, 3. horst mountain formed by an uplifted block of crust (or a crustal block bounded by downfaults), 4. fold mountains formed by elevation by crustal crumpling, and 5. plateau mountains, formed by erosion of plateaus. This last is frequently referred to as <a href="http://tinyurl.com/4l33uxf">'pseudo-mountains'</a> because they are a topographic curiosity formed by weather, and not orogenic aspects of crustal formation. Not real mountains at all, in other words (in the consensus view).<br />
<br />
Now, this classification strikes me as odd to say the least - so it could be a joke, though if it is then with 25,800 google-entries on the net at the time of posting, it's a bit stale by now. I certainly don't remember there being any such division when I was at school (though it's been a while) - a mountain was just a mountain. What's the deal ? It's a land form, not a geological one any more than a hill, a valley, ..a plain, ..a cliff etc etc., (..a waterfall?). We wouldn't dream of classifying hills or cliffs as 'geological' features. Besides, ever since school, I've always thought hills and mountains were formed by erosion - by rivers cutting down the land, forming ravines, gorges, valleys, and finally, with what was left as attrition continued, mountains, hills, and finally a peneplained surface, where no more erosion was possible.<br />
<br />
Well, ..weren't they? .. ?? Apparently no. It seemed that was only half the story. The other half lay in the reason for the elevation of the land in the first place, which was deemed to be due to crustal crumpling by continental collision. ..hence 'fold mountains', while the other lot, 'plateau mountains', those formed by the erosion of a peneplained surface, were designated not really mountains at all (since they were formed by erosion).<br />
<br />
Now, .. it used to be wrongful practice in geology to name elements according to one's perception of how those elements came to be formed; 'genetically' so to speak (rather than morphologically, i.e., how they physically are). I guess, however the first classification, 'volcano', seems to be ok. It's in that middle ground, being formed by a build-up of volcanic detritus, which is 'geological stuff', rather than being formed by weather - like the other mountains. Nevertheless, the word refers to the physical description of the edifice, not the fact that it can spew lava. It may seem a bit like splitting hairs, but it is an important distinction within the broader perspective that differentiates taxonomic aspects from genetic ones. Dinosaurs for example are classified by their descriptive characteristics of size and bone structure, not because they could run fast or ate meat or vegetables. The second is an inference dependent of the former.<br />
<br />
Similarly in tectonics. So we shall set aside 'dome' and 'block' mountains, in order to consider the two main categories, which are 'fold' mountains and 'plateau' mountains. However the caution just mentioned regarding taxonomy v. genesis has come to be overlooked by Plate Tectonicists to the extent that <a href="http://tinyurl.com/68grey4">'fold mountains'</a> (23,600entries) are considered today, not to describe mountains that look like folds, but mountains that are formed by folding. And 'plateau mountains' are thought to be formed by a continuation of the erosion that formed that land surface. The second is true, the first is not; with cursory examination it can easily be seen that both are really the same thing, namely 'plateau mountains'.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://earthexpansion.blogspot.com/2011/03/erosion-and-building-of-mountains.html">As we have seen</a> it is simply wrong to link folding with mountain 'building', and it requires no more than a casual Google Earth traverse of the Earth's surface to show it to be wrong. All regions of the Earth from whence 'fold mountains' are described, are in fact eroded plateaus ('plateau mountains'). Once upon a time it took adventurous people to climb mountains and look to the horizon to verify this, ..and then write about the implications of what they were seeing using the concepts of orogensis, taphrogenesis, and epeirogenesis, developed over decades of study of regional geology. These days children can do it with the passing ease of Google Earth before playtime, and even though they may not easily understand the meaning of those terms, they can at least easily see the common heights of the mountain tops, and with a little help from the teacher and a sketch on the blackboard, know that the mountains have been carved from a planed surface, and not formed by the folding.</span><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW4VhOT1-g9JohjdhGn0_1gTVX0_JbTr_oVTiDiVYxqgxwCwlWR2y5Wth85dkeSgClQHVXtZbqb8E7Pz73yG5yjR8j8z2jITk-f8mHWENGaklPUBgpZHqzUYUD6C6IbJ5AtbGUBGIBE-Xh/s1600/pt3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" q6="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW4VhOT1-g9JohjdhGn0_1gTVX0_JbTr_oVTiDiVYxqgxwCwlWR2y5Wth85dkeSgClQHVXtZbqb8E7Pz73yG5yjR8j8z2jITk-f8mHWENGaklPUBgpZHqzUYUD6C6IbJ5AtbGUBGIBE-Xh/s1600/pt3.jpg" /></a></span></div>
<blockquote>
<span style="font-size: normal;"><b>Fig.1. Blackboard sketch</b>. Mountains formed by erosion; folding predates the erosional surface. The jagged surface of mountains is unrelated to the folding in the rock.</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: medium;">So, if children can do it (before playtime), .. (see that mountains wherever we look are erosional features carved from an earlier peneplained surface), then what are Plate Tectonicists up to, maintaining <a href="http://users.indigo.net.au/don/nonsense/sumo.html">the myth of colliding plates heaving and shoving and pushing up mountains</a>? Which is it? Are mountains formed by pushing up? Or eroding down? And which authority would *you* rely on to tell you? - those putting it around that mountains are formed by the collision of colliding plates? Schoolchildren before playtime? Me? Or your own eyes, as you too load Google Earth, and see for yourself - that the surfaces from which the mountain belts are carved were once flat?<br />
<br />
What they up to? What they are doing is a combination of building on sand (taking the simplisitic picture of rumpling tablecloths as an analogy of folding that they learned as children), telling lies by omission (ignoring the peneplanation that typifies the high tracts of the planet in order to support their contrived model of Plate Tectonics), and drawing the long bow. They are relying on institutional kudos to pull Joe Public's leg to get grant money to research faeries up the garden path with smushy chicks. Are we to believe that they do not know that a conformity of rocky peaks derives from a once-flat surface? ... either peneplained or directly exhumed from the sea? Look, ..these are guys at the most prestigious institutions in the world, and they are ignoring the fundamentals of erosion that are taught virtually in primary school, and using that ignore-ance to obstruct investigation into the most profound question of the Earth sciences that's been around for the last more than sixty years, "What is it, that is causing a massive blowout of the planet to create the oceans of the world?" And at the same time, at the cost of billions of dollars of taxpayer's money, they are giving oxygen to the supposed rationale for investigating 'Plate Tectonics' on other planets, .. when through the imaginary lens of so-called 'fold mountains' it doesn't even exist on this one.<br />
</span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
( "We are a community of scientists." .. ?? )</div>
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: medium;">That's big bikkies if you ask me (the lies, and the wasted expenditure in the name of so-called 'science'). And you thought it was just the financial sector that could work out ways how to rip you off? How do you feel about that, .. spending your money just to shore up their ignore-ance.<br />
<br />
'Fold mountains' ? ... The term epitomises the nonsense of Plate Tectonics that was an adaptation of a convenient and naive sketch of the analogy between folding and crumpling tablecloths learned when they were children before school. They are hoping the same meme will help it work on you too - like pot-of-soup convection, ..both of them contrived to by-pass a problem that was (and still is) profound, which was (/is), "What is the process that has caused the outward movement of the Earth's surface from an equilibrium condition on the ocean floors or of zero erosion near sea-level, to the highest elevation on the planet, ..and that accounts for the extrusion of the mantle that is everywhere young?"<br />
<br />
An Earth that is expanding provides the answer, and, in the context of the <a href="http://users.indigo.net.au/don/nonsense/subass.html">choice that faced Plate Tectonicists in the beginning</a> - the only answer. But no, geophysicists back then chose to look at the problem from the oceanic side, from aboard the Big Ship trolling the oceans with a black box which they believed would tell them what to think, .. and *<b>philosophised</b>* in a 'whilst-this-and-whilst-that' way, about tablecloths, mountains and the continental crust, rather than looking at the problem from the continental (field /geological) side (of geology and geomorphology - of mountains, plateaus, and peneplains, ..of orogensis, taphrogenesis, and epeirogenesis). And (dammit!), they just plain got it wrong. What doozies!! (?) Well, not for the bad guess, ..anybody can get the flip of a heads-or-tails wrong, ..but for their determination to maintain that wrong in the face of the obvious right.</span><br />
<br />
<blockquote>
<span style="font-size: medium;">"...We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield." ~ George Orwell.</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: medium;">
<br />
Bang, bloody bang.<br />
<br />
"Are they nuts?"<br />
"Have to be."<br />
"Why?"<br />
"Sitting in the dark."<br />
"<a href="http://platetectonicsbiglie.blogspot.com.au/2011/03/draculas-blood-cuts-mustard.html">Sucking blood</a>?"<br />
"Yeah.."<br />
"Weird people."<br />
<br />
No, .. not nuts, ..not weird, ..just cognisant of the <a href="http://users.indigo.net.au/don/nonsense/fraud.html">need to build and maintain a consensus</a> in order to ease publication /grants /careers. Is that science? For the bereft many, sadly it is. <br />
<br />
So take a trip on Google Earth and check out the high surfaces of the planet from which mountains are carved (not 'built'), and find them to be incised peneplains. These days children can do it in class (before playtime). But to understand why Plate Tectonicists cannot, we have to recognise the decades of baggage that have to be off-loaded, but which they cannot do without copping a whole lot of egg-on-face, because their mistake was apparent from the beginning. For "<a href="http://platetectonicsbiglie.blogspot.com/2011/02/big-lie-8-oblivion-heros-journey.html">philosophical reasons</a>" they deliberately chose the option that contradicted the geological facts, rather than further investigate those facts.</span><br />
<br />
<blockquote>
<span style="font-size: medium;">(" When thoughts, logic and facts have the potential to humiliate and frighten, they will always be ignored. " ~ <a href="http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/?comments=all&csort=desc">Mister Supernatural</a> )</span>
</blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuMuAqVFNo5uMkXy-815RqsSZiJhXb6SnGQRPaSORzJDFWvu9TGPm2XkNiQY4ribDox_5PFYXZCsYSvN4IyALHnrOiS3EGpKCh0roQ80Jbk7FBrtvLdzYIel9xA-9v7POokfdEbSGpcvAr/s1600/pt2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" q6="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuMuAqVFNo5uMkXy-815RqsSZiJhXb6SnGQRPaSORzJDFWvu9TGPm2XkNiQY4ribDox_5PFYXZCsYSvN4IyALHnrOiS3EGpKCh0roQ80Jbk7FBrtvLdzYIel9xA-9v7POokfdEbSGpcvAr/s1600/pt2.jpg" /></a></span></div>
<br />
<blockquote>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Fig.2 The uplifted floor of the Upper Triassic sea, known now as the Italian Alps ('Dolomites').</b> The floor was already essentially flat, so, ..minimal erosion on emergence. You can see it, can't you (thanks to Google), .. tide out, the water washing over it. It almost still looks like a rocky coral shore, (It's been eroded a bit since of course.) :))</span>
</blockquote>
<span style="font-size: medium;">
However it is not the *mistake* that will be the future focus of attention, but the reasons why so many could get it so wrong and for so long (and still persist in doing so). In short, Plate Tectonics will go down as the biggest con-job in the history of Earth science, if not science as a whole.</span><br />
<br />
<br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: large;"><img border="0" q6="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd0kjm3tCb2Nx2O_X4KIqTHQbLtmUwOaGkfDK-dd1aF6QKMuYTQHcOTHECPlH36P5REVZhlmHkLySUcIJ1H3F9ayNh47Lwn6w5wNZu17ixeHO5LIEPtM7T1eeqVZnnPBGViFZBxasxk56A/s1600/PT1_50%2525.jpg" /></span></span></div>
<br />
<blockquote>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Fig.3. Close up of the rocky shore above.</b> Makes the sea-shore a bit more difficult to see because the sea-shore is a point in time, whereas the build-up is over many millions of years. ("Build-up?" Do we mean this is how mountains are built? No, .. but by the logic of Plate Tectonics it might as well be,) (image courtesy of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dolomites_cablecar_view_2009.JPG">wikipedia</a> )</span>
</blockquote>
<br />
[ See also Expanding Earth blog at <br />
<a href="http://www.earthexpansion.blogspot.com/">http://www.earthexpansion.blogspot.com/</a> ]
don findlayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12458072902579491159noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430456476367817075.post-56083482630590997842011-03-04T06:39:00.000-08:002020-08-24T03:05:51.183-07:00Dracula's Blood cuts the mustard?<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4WmtHFwGieQ2Z1Dd2E7HcVRFdZNoubAMxOBHMGV6NuQ7bGZcCIN8TCXi7EhQeN44F_g6KR7n2Owx3Qinu0C9qicL9mZT2hWTPH07zykF0t8AXH9lSWT7EVWuuC1xGz5mFOQ-SoN7mUo4/s1600/red2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="33" data-original-width="30" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4WmtHFwGieQ2Z1Dd2E7HcVRFdZNoubAMxOBHMGV6NuQ7bGZcCIN8TCXi7EhQeN44F_g6KR7n2Owx3Qinu0C9qicL9mZT2hWTPH07zykF0t8AXH9lSWT7EVWuuC1xGz5mFOQ-SoN7mUo4/s1600/red2.JPG" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">This is not about the science</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: normal;">( .. It's about the facts not cutting it)</span></span></span><br />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="400" />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">If I were to write a nice little smiley note to all believers in Plate Tectonics in a bid for hearts and minds, .. you know, to win friends and influence people, this is what I would say:-</span></span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"There is light at the end of the tunnel of your philosophical dissatisfaction. There is a simpler paradigm. Your trials, ..your tribulations, are over. Your calls for "more research needed", are now thankfully redundant. Ocam's razor, <a href="https://earthexpansion.blogspot.com.au/2017/04/slingshots-death-by-thousand-stones.html">sharp as it ever was</a>, is telling you all conundrums besetting Plate Tectonics are explained in a single cut. The mustard has been sliced and you are saved the bother. The jigsaw is done. There *is* no more research needed. You can all go home."</span></span></blockquote>
<br />
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">
"So far so good?"<br />
"Nah, mate, ..failed the first hurdle."<br />
"What? what's the first hurdle?"<br />
"The heart - you just drove a big wooden stake right through it."<br />
"How? Isn't it good to have a problem solved? <br />
"Did you come down in the last shower of rain or what?"<br />
"How?"<br />
"Coz there's a whole lot of people whose whole existence is all about solving problems, doing jigsaws, and they just love doing them in the dark. Don't you know? It's their job to keep telling everybody just how dark the place is. Shine a light on them with a solution and it's worse than cock-crow to Dracula."<br />
"You mean they're not interested in solutions?"<br />
" 'Course not. You tell them the jigsaw's done an', .. well, .. what are they going to do for an encore?"<br />
"Well, couldn't they do something with Earth expansion instead? .. in the daylight so to speak?"<br />
"You mean after telling everybody how fascinating the dark is when doing jigsaws?"<br />
<br />
---------------------------- <br />
<br />
(I guess that's it, isn't it - people expressing their <a href="http://platetectonicsbiglie.blogspot.com/2011/02/big-lie-8-oblivion-heros-journey.html">philosophical dissatisfaction with daylight</a> are hardly likely to change hats at the drop of one and advertise it just because somebody switches a light on, ..are they? )<br />
<br />
"Does that mean I'm wasting my time, .. trying to wheedle Plate Tectonics into seeing it's trolling around a dead Dracula?"<br />
" 'Fraid so."<br />
"Is that why they're not speaking to me?"<br />
" 'Fraid so."<br />
"Blood?"<br />
"Yeah.."<br />
"Jeez, ..if that was me, ..I'd ditch it like a shot."<br />
"Yeah, ..but not everybody's an empirical rationalist enchanted with daylight. There's a lot of currency in dead Draculas, provided you can keep them dark and the blood warm. There's a whole industry peddling them."<br />
"EeeEEyukK. What's the going rate?"<br />
"A sinecure, ..a lifetime's career, mate."<br />
"Wot? ..Sucking blood in the dark?<br />
"Yeah, ..in the dark.."<br />
<br />
(Plate Tectonicists - pushing shit uphill maybe a better way of putting it, .. or rather, up a mountain. Condemned forever to have the shit (and the mountain) roll back down on them. The ancient Greeks tell a good story about that, but didn't quite have that <a href="http://earthexpansion.blogspot.com/2011/03/erosion-and-building-of-mountains.html">additional bit about the mountain falling down</a>. Guess they didn't know then about the Earth expanding and the propensity for mountains to do exactly that or they would have added it to the plot, ..given the uphill strugglers being such a mendacious mob deserving of burial.)<br />
<br />
"Gee, that's no way to win friends and influence people."<br />
"Wot?"<br />
"Telling them they're a mob of mendacious bloodsuckers."<br />
"So what do you suggest I do call them,"<br />
"Well, be nice. Tell them their labours are appreciated."<br />
"But they're not."<br />
"Tell them anyway."<br />
"They'd see right through me."<br />
"No they wouldn't. They'd just love people to tell them what a great job they're doing."<br />
"Sucking blood?"<br />
"*Withdrawing* blood. It's to prevent illness and disease and promote the healthy balance of humors."<br />
"*<b><i>I</i></b>* don't think it's very funny."<br />
"They've been doing it for at least two thousand years."<br />
"Yeah? Don't people die?"<br />
"Well, .. that's exactly the point:- Really spectacular prevention wouldn't you say?"<br />
"Sure, .. I'll say. Ok, I suppose we can build around that, ..about death being a spectacular prevention of illness and disease."<br />
"Good. You're getting the picture."<br />
"What about lobotomy, can we throw that in as well?"<br />" < &%&^#$$@ </span></span></span><br />
<br />
<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">
<img alt="The facts, not cutting it" border="0" height="200" l6="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8h35FdPpt0j0rvzkPHgRRp8xKbdbHxpXNRlmDTEKb1VQyYE7YxrDPAsYUL2WyaxDyWcGtus4BCyi2GzW5ydOP6t1omvihGvoYfZivXrTu5S-_7KH9cegeHu9xBdQg9irAUALbLmo3aMob/s200/dracula1.jpg" width="196" />
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: medium;">Plate Tectonics bleeds Joseph Blogs</span><br />
<span style="font-size: medium;">(The 'facts' - <a href="https://earthexpansion.blogspot.com.au/2017/04/slingshots-death-by-thousand-stones.html">not cutting it</a>) </span>
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: normal;">[ See also Expanding Earth blog at </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.earthexpansion.blogspot.com.au/">http://www.earthexpansion.blogspot.com.au/</a> ]</span>
<br />
<br />don findlayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12458072902579491159noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430456476367817075.post-9658480854840662182011-02-24T05:41:00.000-08:002018-11-03T04:15:57.076-07:00Hill Buildies, the Footsoldiers of Plate Tectonics<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">If I were a student doing geology, coming at it cold so to speak (well, not exactly cold because I would have seen stuff about it on the telly, .. I would have been primed as it were, already 'set up'), ..I would find Plate Tectonics highly appealing because I would know a bit about it already (.. having been set up). I would be positively disposed. I would have already internalised it, appropriated it as 'mine'. I would own it, ..and would view anybody who tried to disabuse me of my internalised belief as a crank. (..Must be, going against what everybody already knows to be true) (I saw a program on it on telly after all.)<br />
<br />
Well, it's how it works isn't it? Get the kids. Get them young. Set them up. Bob's your uncle. It's how it's done. From the <a href="http://tinyurl.com/4nefktr">military</a> to suicide bombers [<a href="http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0606/suicide_bomber_recruitment_rally.php3">1</a>] . [<a href="http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/terrorism/jan-june07/suicidebombers_04-13.html">2</a>], ..where's the difference? (which is most organised?) (Which is most committed?) It's the whole point of school, isn't it, .. to prepare children for the world in which we live.<br />
<br />
Just reading <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-newton/evolution-creationism-and_1_b_825432.html">an article here</a> where it says about 13% of teachers advocating creationism in the classroom. and (which is more disturbing) the cautious 60% afraid to let their advocacy show. How, among that lot, do we encourage the child to develop to independent rational adult assessment, when we drag the baggage of childhood impressionability and belief along?<br />
<br />
Now I don't know anything much about biology, nor quantum mechanics, but if I were in a classroom as a child with a teacher telling me, I'd be inclined to believe what he was saying, because, .. well, he's a teacher, and particularly when there's an exam at the end of it all which says, "This is stuff you need to know." And implied would be, not just for the exam, but for it's own sake. It's school after all. You know nuthin'. They're teachers. They do. You learn stuff because it's right. I mean, ..they wouldn't be telling you rubbish would they? But it's not really presented as an opportunity for discovery of the mind and what you might think about for yourself. It might masquerade as that to begin with, but the class had better all end up at the same place, .. or else.<br />
<br />
There's a box to tick, ..and you'd better get it right.<br />
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="moment"></a>
<a href="http://platetectonicsbiglie.blogspot.com.au/2011/02/hill-buildies-footsoldiers-of-plate.html#oldguy" name="oldguy"> </a>
I'm an old guy now, but I remember when I was at school a defining moment when I just about jumped out of my skin (maths class) because the teacher (I still remember his name - rest his soul) (good teacher too, and well liked) had thrown a duster at me, .. one of those hard-backed wooden things that if it hit you would have been bloody sore, but he was a good shot and it just rattled off the desk, as was no doubt his intention. He came up and stuck his red old face right in my young and lovely one, and said (and I still remember it - <i>verbatim</i>) (one way to impress kids, eh?), ..he said, "You, Findlay, ..the trouble with you, ..you're a why-man, ..and you'll find out this world doesn't *<i>LIKE</i>* why-men."<br />
<br />
I could not for the LIFE of me work out what he was on about, or why he suddenly had reason to say that. I was absolutely shaken. But he's been dead right (all these years). It upsets people when you ask why. And often upsets you when *they* tell *<i>you</i>* why. Especially when you don't ask in the first place and they just tell you anyway, because they think it would be somehow good for you to know - whether you like it or not. Like here.<br />
<br />
But it's been asking why that's led me down this road of Earth Expansion, as answers to why-after-why-have kept clicking like tumblers on one of those fruit machines, and when Plate Tectonics keeps throwing up combinations that just drive you up the wall. Coming at it from knowing a bit about geological perspective (and not as a child having been instructed in the finer arts of <a href="http://users.indigo.net.au/don/nonsense/plate.html">plates</a>) I find it mindboggling that Plate Tectonics can be taught in the classroom any more, to the point where I have to recognise that the veracity of the science is not the issue here - it's about the politics of educational hierarchy, the 'curriculum' and "maintaining standards", .. whether (scientifically) right or wrong.<br />
<br />
And, in turn, societal cohesion. <br />
<br />
Which reminds me of another article I came across recently (I don't remember how recent it actually was), ..the gist of it was that a law had been passed (New Mexico, I think) that gave teachers the right to tell the class (if they wanted - because it seemed like they didn't have it before) that alternative views existed to whatever it was that was being taught, but I think they still drew the line at discussing what those views actually were. I more remember one of the comments, which said "It is more important for teachers to teach the curriculum, than to have any personal views on the subject." (and presumably say what they were), which it must be conceded is difficult to argue with.<br />
<br />
All of which leads us to arrive at the question, when it comes to the Earth sciences, who sets the standards for the core curriculum in schools (and universities)? ..because it seems that Plate Tectonics gets more than a casual mention. And the further question, in whose interest is it - the students', ..the school's, ..whose, exactly? Because from a geological perspective it might just as well be creationism being taught, as Plate Tectonics. Plate Tectonicists just don't have a leg to stand on, when it comes to occupying the high ground of scientific respectability. Nothing wrong with the core geology of course, just the theory, but these days it's quite a challenge to unravel fact from fiction in whatever field you care to mention.<br />
<br />
"Get them young, learn 'em up, and Bob's your uncle..." <br />
<br /><Boom> Canon fodder. Just having a gander round cyberspace, there are a lot of suicide bombers lighting themselves up in defence of Plate Tectonics. For whose benefit? Certainly not theirs, (..trolling that baggage around.) Whose then? Teachers? I don't think so. I'm sure many emphasise the theoretical aspects, but I'm also pretty sure they must find the fact/fiction thing a bit difficult going by the many articles that describe that model. So whose then? In whose interest is it, that this nonsense gets taught in schools? Students? Not them either, getting sent out into the world only to discover later that their teachers were not served well by their thoughtmasters. <br />
<br />
Whose then?<br />
<br />
It's fairly easy to identify the multifarious interests of the Christian Right in the case of the 13% creationism, but what cabal is it that occupies the remaining 87%, given the importance of '<a href="http://tinyurl.com/639k2sx">institutional kudos</a>' to university <a href="http://users.indigo.net.au/don/nonsense/fraud.html">administration boards</a>?</span><br />
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<br />
[ See also Expanding Earth blog at <br />
<a href="http://www.earthexpansion.blogspot.com/">http://www.earthexpansion.blogspot.com/</a> ]don findlayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12458072902579491159noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430456476367817075.post-90782279236191176862011-02-12T23:10:00.000-08:002018-03-05T14:28:25.880-08:00Big Lie #9 Subduction 1<br />
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"We need to return to the geological path signalled by Wegener, and jettison *ALL* of Plate Tectonic theory, which is framed essentially around failure to understand a mechanism for the sudden and rapid breakout of the mantle bubble that caused the global enlargement we see today, manifest in the creation of the ocean floors." That's me, quoting me, from the last me-post. (Well, if you can have i-this and i-that, and Ya-tube, i don't see why WE can't have the odd bit of *me* too, out there in hyperspace. Going by the blogs on Plate Tectonics there aren't too many of me around. So in the interest of evening up the narcissism score, here we go (I think it's true anyway - about jettisoning.) <br />
<br />
Convectioneers, ..sailing the Big Ship, ..thinking that if they all line up under the flag and chant the "Wot abaht subduction" mantra it will keep them walking on water for the rest of the year. Or six inches above it more like, if your read their litany. Maybe they just want to insist on looking at it from the ocean side because that guy they've nailed to their cross, .. their sacrifical lamb, .. their *<a href="http://platetectonicsbiglie.blogspot.com/2011/02/big-lie-8-oblivion-heros-journey.html">Hero</a>* (along with some flanking others) Harry Hess, worked in the navy. (Don't know what that's got to do with anything about Plate Tectonics. There's a *B*' of a difference between admiral and admirable. I worked as a milkman once, ..and people put glasses of milk next to plates, ..but I guess that's another issue.) (Ennyhow, ... )<br />
<br />
So he did (navy) *but* this is a CONTINENTAL argument, not an OCEANIC one. Big difference.<br />
<br />
The jigsaw of Plate Tectonics might be about OCEANS. But the jigsaw of Earth expansion isn't. It's about CONTINENTS. Oceans are all young and make the Earth bigger when they make their way through the crust. (So I don't know what sort of a jigsaw Plate Tectonicists think they're doing anyway). It's the continents that Earth expansion is talking about. You have to take the oceans out of the picture and do the jigsaw thing with the continents out of the way. Then if all the pieces fit, you have to accept it. Or at least you have to accept that it is a jigsaw worth doing, ..a picture worth looking at, ..something about not-knowing and trying to *get to know*, a thing about SCIENCE, that is. <br />
<br />
You can't pull a disingenuous fast one as PT-ers want to do and say, "Ok then, ..we'll take the oceans out of the way," and then with some hat-magic sleight of hand substitute another imaginary one for which there is no evidence and say, "Hey, ..look everybody, see? ...it still doesn't fit. No finding out needed." 'Coz that's exactly what they do.<br />
<br />
Plate Tectonicists want to keep the argument sloshing about in the water, where people can't get a grip of it, rather than beach it so people can. ...Bunch of bloody mermaids, bamboozling folk with their tales, trying to subduct MEN OF HARD ROCK to their nether regions with all that talk about sucking and pulling. ... Wish somebody wou... <br />
<br />
'Course the bloody jigsaw fits - from the *CONTINENTAL* side. <a href="http://earthexpansion.blogspot.com/2011/02/earth-expansion-synoptic-simplicity.html">Easy too</a>. What else would it do? If PT-ers have a problem trying to make it fit from the OCEAN side that's their problem (trying to shove a whole Panthalassa into a non-existent hole..). But they *don't* have a problem because they don't *WANT* to make it fit. Confucius he say, "No fit, no problem", and if there's one thing about PTterologists, it's that they think they're pretty wise guys. But in fact if it fits, then they're out of a job. That's why they're so vocal about subduction, ..and trying to keep whole schemmozle WET, bamboozling everybody, ..keeping them at sea. Those Pteros, they can't avoid the fits in the Atlantic, Indian and Southern Oceans, they even need them, ..but push their Pacific button and tell them that fits too and whoh-hoh, ..hear them squeak! <br />
<br />
This guy on this wikipedia says, "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subduction">Without subduction, plate tectonics could not exist</a>". Well he's dead right, of course. Neither it would. But subduction is not the issue, and it's a bit myopic and silly to think it is, really. The mantle can swirl and birl and twirl as much as it likes underneath the continental crust, ..can convect like a witches cauldron, ..subduct nineteen to the dozen, ... twenty seven-and-a half-even, if it likes, .. it doesn't make one whit of a difference to what's happening upstairs. So what if the mantle's *is* subducting? It proves / disproves absolutely nothing about crustal tectonics, plate tectonics, blobtonics or any other kind of tonics. So why should it make any difference if it's happening underneath the continent, or at a crack in the continent, or on the edge of one, when that edge is just as legitimately the edge of continental lithosphere, as it is the edge of the oceanic one? There's *two* sides to that there edge. Pteros find it convenient to disregard that, .. it's not the oceanic crust returning to the deep mantle that's going on, but the continents sliding out over the mantle that's happening. They even say so themselves when they use the word '<a href="http://users.indigo.net.au/don/tck/lingo1.html">overriding</a>'. <br />
<br />
Anyway, ..more and more the word is not "subduction", but "FLAT SUBDUCTION" or "flat slab subduction". Google 'em up and see. Subduction, meaning the return to the deep mantle, is a furphy. All around the Pacific (the only place there is any going on), the buzz is now "flat slab subduction". Under the Himalayas as well, lifting the Tibetan Plateau up. .....the flat bit going down and along the asthenosphere, i.e. the continental crust leaning over the oceanic crust as the curvature of the Pangaean hemispheres (du Toit's 'Laurasia' and 'Gondwanaland') flattens off. No return to the deep mantle. And so long as the crust and mantle are detaching, .the crust collapsing and skating on the mantle, ..you know, with the Earth rotating and all that, and lagging west into the bargain, you can forget all about satellite measurement meaning anything as regards convection / plate movement. Anyhow, what's twenty years of satellites against two hudred million and more of the real crustal thing? Do they think just because they're angels they have some sort of passport to higher authority than common sense? Like belief? (That's for Ray, if he's reading this.) Hi Ray! :-) <br />
<br />
These Ptero-guys, ..they really just don't have a geological clue, ..or a leg to stand on when it comes to subduction. Showing 'slabs' in their articles, ..indeed. Doesn't it occur to them it's just the mantle turning down against the continental lithosphere? .. which is wot dense stuff *does* when less dense stuff floats on top of it - ..it turns ... (everybody, ..all-together-now) ..."DowWWn" ... (YaAAyyyy !!!)<br />
<br />
Subduction? My Aunt Fanny.<br />
<br />
(Wonder what it would look like, if you floated a lump of rock in an even denser rock...) (or even metal, say...)<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIdce7djBcK6_KOfG9UzFs-ZBAqlBS5GWgN8abAUOdA4v8uA_dzyQ-7PIcaDoHagRYOJ9Zb94ziKMTu30-fAiUScvbe5E8zMUnGTn_MTu73skYz6ZKhBsECGCq3n7AgY48xJQybR7vahrL/s1600/expansion8.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" h5="true" height="185" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIdce7djBcK6_KOfG9UzFs-ZBAqlBS5GWgN8abAUOdA4v8uA_dzyQ-7PIcaDoHagRYOJ9Zb94ziKMTu30-fAiUScvbe5E8zMUnGTn_MTu73skYz6ZKhBsECGCq3n7AgY48xJQybR7vahrL/s400/expansion8.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<blockquote>
<b>Fig.1 Oceanic deeps mark the subduction zone</b> as cold heavy metallic mercury subducts beneath the ancient continent of Reginia, . Or if we prefer to stretch a point and turn it around, Continent HMS (the unsinkable) Gold Pound Coin adrift on a sea of mercury, proves once again (beyond a sea of doubt), that material properties are critical in the search for substances that can support <a href="http://users.indigo.net.au/don/nonsense/rubber.html#substances">Plate Tectonics assertion</a> that mantle convection is the modus operandum for global tectonics. ("The owl and the pussycat went to sea, in a beautiful gold pound coin.." ; Mermaids, ..the souls of owls and pussycats, drowned at sea.. ) Image courtesy of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(element)">wikipedia</a>, reproduced here in the interest of informing all schoolchildren (and others who may be interested), in order to focus on the critical point of oceanic deeps that develop subduction zones when oceanic crust (blue-grey) subducts beneath the UK (gold)... "Mantle, which is also blue-grey.. has the property of mild steel.." </blockquote>
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[ See also Expanding Earth blog at <br />
<a href="http://www.earthexpansion.blogspot.com/">http://www.earthexpansion.blogspot.com/</a> ]don findlayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12458072902579491159noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430456476367817075.post-37235670104979817662011-02-03T05:18:00.000-08:002017-11-02T04:33:01.295-07:00Big Lie #8 Oblivion - The Hero's Journey<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">"The most powerful lie is the lie by omission"</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="550" />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Let's be very, very clear about this. The reason why Plate Tectonics was developed as a theory did not come from any astute evaluation of the geology. It developed precisely *<i><b>in spite of</b></i>* astute geological evaluation. It developed because <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Hammond_Hess">Hess </a>could not accept expansion despite it removing his three most serious dificulties in dealing with the evolution of the ocean basins, claiming it to be (according to him) "philosophically unsatisfying" (on account of a lack of a mechanism).</span></span><br />
<blockquote>
Hess, (1962):-<br />
"..While this [expansion] would remove three of my most serious difficulties in dealing with the evolution of ocean basins, I hesitate to accept this easy way out. First of all, it is philosophically rather unsatisfying in much the same way as were the older hypotheses of continental drift, in that there is no apparent mechanism within the Earth to cause a sudden (and exponential according to Carey) increase in the radius of the Earth. .."<br />
[The second reason was about the extra water needed - see <a href="http://platetectonicsbiglie.blogspot.com/2011/01/plate-tectonic-cowboys-go-to-hollywood.html">Hollywood Cowboys</a> post]</blockquote>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">...and so he tarred it with the same 'no mechanism' brush as had previously been done with Wegener's observations of palaeogeological reconstructions for continental displacement ( 'drift' by the way was the term others attached to Wegener's work). Hess's reason was "philosophical dissatisfaction", ..nothing to do with the geological facts that Hess (according to his admission that it would explain his three most serious difficulties) nevertheless clearly found intrinsically appealing.</span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">
A point for today's Plate Tectonicists to consider, ensconced as they are in the certainty of Plate Tectonics, is what would have happened had Hess overcome his "hesitation" and accepted those points. Not only would his view have aligned with that of others who favoured expansion, notably Carey, but also with that of Heezen, Tharp, reportedly Jack Oliver; Tuzo Wilson (before his capitulation to the Plate Tectonics camp), and no doubt others who would then have seen which way the wind was blowing. The Earth Sciences would almost certainly be fifty years further advanced in the direction of expansion. There would be no Plate Tectonics theory, and no derived, abortive geological explanations - no mountains built of colliding plates, no plates even, possibly not even any convection. It would also have forced the physics community to address their destitute lack of understanding of the physical processes that caused the Earth to rapidly extrude a mantle bubble the like of which there was no precedent in Earth history. And possibly by now there would indeed be understanding of a 'mechanism'.</span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">
Or would it? Was Hess so big, that he could have had such an influence as coercing the physics establishment to put their house in order and find one? As it was, Hess's "hesitation" (/"philosophical dissatisfaction") led him to choose the 'lose-lose' option : "We (/I) can't think of a reason; you can't have your geology".</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It is difficult to assess the full legacy of this. On the theoretical side certainly, there is half a century of misadventure in the Earth sciences (and a commensurate waste of resources) that will need to be revised. Economically could be included the dearth of supply to the labour market following the drop in enrollments leading to the closure of geology departments, because students see little point in studying a subject that has little more than kindergarten 'soup-in-a-pot, rumplecloth' appeal underpinning it, ..that has arrived at its destination and has nowhere else to go. As well there is the stymying of research in physics that might explain a rapid massive mantle blow-out of the planet.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Who knows?... Given the <a href="http://platetectonicsbiglie.blogspot.com/2011/01/plate-tectonic-cowboys-go-to-hollywood.html">drama described by Moores at Carey's lecture</a>, Hess's 'hesitation' may simply have been due to the 'not invented here' syndrome. Hess was a geologist concerned with the geophysics of the ocean floors. Carey was a geologist of global orientation who had not only been teaching Plate Tectonics for twenty years but had, with good reason, discarded it as unworkable, and moved on to convincingly demonstrate that from a geological perspective expansion was the only viable option.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So what was going on? What *is* going on still? Hess with his 'convection' in 1962 after all was essentially just making a pitch for the standard status quo of continental drift that had been in Arthur Holmes book Principles of Physical Geology since 1944, and which was a standard student text (and <a href="http://users.indigo.net.au/don/nonsense/carey.html">Carey by 1956</a> had been teaching for twenty years). What subtexts were at work that made Hess turn away from Carey's forward position that would overcome his (Hess's) three main problems, and choose the lose-lose option?</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Here's what I think is the reason. Almost certainly Hess would have placed himself in an extremely precarious position had he accepted Carey's conclusion. And would have known it. Right or wrong was not the issue. Carey was a free-thinking flamboyant maverick of a geologist with a big idea and even bigger geological data to support it, and was visiting from the other side of the world. Hess, a geophysicist, was by all accounts much more reserved and conservative, and was reportedly struggling to understand his ocean-floor data, which only clicked when the penny dropped with the publication in 1960 of Bruce Heezen's (who favoured expansion) work in the Atlantic. (For the resistance Heezen's work generated, and the pivotal role played by Marie Tharp, <a href="http://barista.media2.org/?p=2884">read this</a>.) It was all very well for Carey to propose expansion (and even soundly support it with empirical geological data). It was quite another for a resident (geo-) physicist "to catch that particular infection" (Armstrong quote in <a href="http://platetectonicsbiglie.blogspot.com/2011/01/plate-tectonic-cowboys-go-to-hollywood.html">'cowboys</a>' post), and have to cite it to a funding body on his home turf as a basis for research. Such would almost certainly have been committing what some saw Carey (albeit from the other side of the world) as already having done - "professional suicide".</span></span><br />
<blockquote>
"..From 1930 to 1960 a scientist who supported it knowingly committed academic hara-kiri. S. W. Carey of Tasmania, a major figure in igniting the revolution, could not get his papers published in reputable scientific journals in the 1950s. "He had to run them off on a mimeograph machine and distribute them himself," Wilson says. (By <a href="http://www.mssu.edu/seg-vm/bio_j__tuzo_wilson.html">Robert Dean Clark, Society of exploration geophysicists</a>).</blockquote>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Why should Carey have been perceived as "committing professional suicide"? After all, according to Moores, Carey had blown their minds with his exposition of palaeomagnetism and polar wander paths to the extent of obviating all further discussion on the point, and Moores and Armstrong both conceded Carey's pivotal role in formulating Plate Tectonics. What Carey had done, surely, was the stuff of the cutting edge (what's more, he followed it up by writing three books on the subject). Why should that have been regarded as professional suicide? Far from it, Carey's place in the history of Earth science is assured.</span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And why was Tuzo Wilson himself warned that he "was headed for the wrong side of the scientific tracks" by choosing geology over physics? "at [a] time [when] students were told what they could bloody-well do"? [And, by inference, what they couldn't]. Whatever it was, it would certainly seem to shed light on the scientific establishment's <a href="http://users.indigo.net.au/don/nonsense/fraud.html">intolerance of innovation</a>, and the importance of 'institutional kudos'. Funding is perhaps not uppermost in the public's mind when they think of science and scientists, but it most assuredly is for those who have chosen it as a career.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And here we must reflect briefly on this much: Science is a thing unto itself and chooses the people who do it, by setting a high bar of commitment. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It is very important here to recognise the schism between the 'geo' and the 'physics' on which this argument for expansion turns. The positive arguments for expansion lie in the empricial geology; refutation lies, not in any positive achievement of physics (or geophysics), but in the FAILURE of physics to understand how it can happen. 'Geo' - 'physics'. (+ - ) = 0 (Neutered.)</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">
Surely we can (and must!) commend Carey for his geological acumen and commitment to his conviction of global expansion, ..for speaking up forcefully for geology, ..but we must also spare a thought for Hess and see the difficulty he would have been in had he adopted Carey's position. [Edit revision here in relation to "Hess as geo-physicist":- Basically the reason seems to have been simply the 'not-invented-here' syndrome, as well as giving legitimacy to the "No Mechanism" bugbear of expansion in the face of the emerging importance of geophysics.] It was all very well for Carey, a geologist from the other side of the world, to talk, but for Hess, a senior figure in an enterprise heavily involved in geophysics to give it legitimacy could have been fatal to his career. In my view it was this realisation that focussed Hess's mind keenly on the need to reject expansion. He had little choice. Even today it is an area that invites professional suicide for those 'career artists' who might venture into it.<br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">
Thus we can understand the "hesitation" (denial even), from a physics point of view. But not from a geological one. It is not cloth-headedness that makes geologists go along with Plate Tectonics, but pure expediency. Few would take the route Carey did for the sake of geological principle, and Carey might not either had his position in far-off Tasmania been apparently secure. Expediency begets necessity; Carey did after all withdraw elements from his thesis, that as a graduate student he knew if included would have cost him his degree. Carey well knew the heat in the potato he was holding, and the challenge it posed to the establishment in general, and to Hess in particular, and would therefore have also well undertstood Hess's dilema. Whether he was sympathetic or not is another matter. My guess is he probably was, though with some natural misgivings regarding what we might call the 'workings of the system'.</span></span></span></span> <br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">
I do wonder therefore, ..was Hess doing the heroic thing under the circumstances and talking in code, when he conceded that expansion would remove his three most serious problems? After all, he needn't have said that. Was he in fact throwing out a message-in-a-bottle so to speak, to the geological community when facing his moment of truth and the realisation that in having to choose the lose-lose option he was going to have to scuttle his Big Ship, or, which amounted to much the same thing, have it fated to sail the geological seas like the Marie Celeste, a ghost whose geophysical achievements would be forever consigned to oblivion in the face of the geological storm that appeared to be looming on the horizon? That concession from Hess of a 'three-problems solution' was no small thing. It is one too that subsequent comment has gone to considerable trouble to eradicate. To the best of my knowledge all retrospectives focus on Hess's "rejection by no mechanism", and ignore his coded(?) "acceptance of expansion" that would solve his problems in understanding the evolution of the ocean basins.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"The most powerful lie is the lie by omission"</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> ~ George Orwell</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> Lie? Certainly one that Hess could not explicitly state. It is also one that the current crop of Plate Tectonicists would do well to consider when contemplating the foundation of their 'no-mechanism' position. "No mechanism" has no place in science, concerned as it is with the collection and collation of observable empirical facts, and no geologist should be conned by that mantra. To cite "no mechanism" over the geological evidence is to support the wall-eyed ignorance of physics and to advertise ignore-ance of the geological facts - and the principles on which it is founded.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">
Hess, by putting the + and the - together like that was laying bare his dilema, and by both = 0 thereby stating that he had virtually no option but to stay with the status quo and reject expansion, for otherwise was to commit the hara-kiri Carey was perceived to be doing. From a <i>geological</i> perspective of course Hess would have been doing no such thing, but from a physics perspective he was. Was this why he jumped from his seat in agitation? Bruce Heezen (geologist / oceanographer) working in the Atlantic had already published on the huge dilation there and, Hess knew, supported expansion. Indeed it was that very work on which Hess built his own. But then it wasn't Heezen providing the grand synthesis and bludgeoning the audience with it. Hess would probably also have known the trouble that Heezen's work was landing him in ("read this" link above).</span></span><br />
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What was Hess to do? What he in fact did (in terms of mechanism) was to simplistically restate convection in terms already well known, and attempt to taint others' views in terms identical to those levelled against Wegener forty years earlier - of "continents ploughing through the oceans etc etc."<br />
<blockquote>
Hess:-<br />
"..The continents do not plow through oceanic crust impelled by unknown forces; rather they ride passively on mantle material as it comes to the surface at the crest of the ridge and then moves laterally away from it."</blockquote>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">
...exactly as Holmes had stated it in 1944 (and earlier in 1928). Hess was saying nothing new here. In my view it was wrong of him, in 1962, to represent by then current views of convection the way he did, but in context we can see why he might have done so - and why others in review might have allowed him to; indeed might have tacitly encouraged him to. For all the ostentatious trumpeting, invention of a new vernacular, and prize-givings etc., that have gone on since, convection as represented by Hess - indeed even as it is understood today, is little different from Holmes' day. The way I see it, it was an attempt to tart up the 'geo' element of geophysics in order to deflect attention away from the destitute-in-knowledge 'physics' part, by people who didn't seem to have much of a clue as to the <a href="http://users.indigo.net.au/don/nonsense/subcrux.html">Pandora's Box of geological conundrums</a> they were opening by doing so.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">
Or perhaps they exactly did, .. and were far more willing to face the geological conundrums than consequences of the physics ones. </span></span> <br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">
And that is the reason why I think Plate Tectonics exists today, a blousy old lush of an empress, tarted up in incongruous geological rags for anyone who fancies having their geophysical way with her - a mute lush for all seasons, stood over by an ignorant pimp. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Seen against this background the prizes for Plate Tectonics and calls for prizes are little more than a cop-out, .. sustenance for scientists afraid to face the unknown when facing it spells oblivion for whoever does. The receiver is the fall-guy, the sacrifical lamb. It is the audience that applauds, who benefits.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">
Basically, geophysicists are in a bind. They cannot use geological evidence to support expansion even if they believed it, for basically the same reason Hess couldn't. It's actually in a double bind because of the way that physics operates. Physicists proceed from hypothesised mechanism (as many as are needed) to explain the facts (and Plate Tectonics embodies many that are contradictory). Geologists proceed from the facts, and using the Principle of Uniformitarianism, conclude mechanism (if mechanism must be known). But the lack of known mechanism in no way subverts the arrangement of the facts, if that arrangement is made according to sound logical principles.</span></span> <br />
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So long as geologists allow the tail of physics to wag this dog, there will be no advance. Everyone will be the loser. </span></span> <br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">
Plate Tectonics as an achievement? (I think I'll go fishing...) (..with me mate George.)</span></span> <br />
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:-)<br />
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[ See also Expanding Earth blog at <br />
<a href="http://www.earthexpansion.blogspot.com/">http://www.earthexpansion.blogspot.com/</a> ]don findlayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12458072902579491159noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430456476367817075.post-48467515335699183282011-01-24T04:54:00.000-08:002018-03-10T14:59:16.355-08:00The Plate Tectonics Cowboys go to Hollywood<div class="separator" style="border: currentColor; clear: both; text-align: left;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHJDCFDEM3Dk5Jyc6C7knzhictyme8kl1OQrxR2pTbei180Fu4jxl96qX7XOtq95ZlkRCqSaI3q01oAdM2h_PBKDWeEJBgOWY7uQqM58vcF1ncEhdNrJJaaJ9W2yxdJr8oO975DrPXwAb1/s1600/consensus1.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; cssfloat: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" s5="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHJDCFDEM3Dk5Jyc6C7knzhictyme8kl1OQrxR2pTbei180Fu4jxl96qX7XOtq95ZlkRCqSaI3q01oAdM2h_PBKDWeEJBgOWY7uQqM58vcF1ncEhdNrJJaaJ9W2yxdJr8oO975DrPXwAb1/s1600/consensus1.JPG" /></a><span style="font-size: large;">I'm just wild about Harry..</span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivcn7cMg8xIwyi5JVxtmQB_7QNtp7FLeAHyQyKbIcU7KYqFzC0butjUel8dhrVrIXSyW5QUQwTml-pY1tg61znAZNzZ4E8Qm2KKfCrItkB0lMp-9qkFM73earb5eKGriGn5vOWYRrmMlGL/s1600/consensus1.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" s5="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivcn7cMg8xIwyi5JVxtmQB_7QNtp7FLeAHyQyKbIcU7KYqFzC0butjUel8dhrVrIXSyW5QUQwTml-pY1tg61znAZNzZ4E8Qm2KKfCrItkB0lMp-9qkFM73earb5eKGriGn5vOWYRrmMlGL/s1600/consensus1.JPG" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-XjZQ3i8gzY5JvATsVvHvoC4CqpJ9kG1Zo_jdBHTiiHIM-Yfio78vo5wxUM70Yxo09UKf_9l26Y4MTMeBT9smvIViverRRzunjbTCv3jIeSvQg1s7NXU7E5o9YjiB3Mo9KhY8d0uyQCfp/s1600/dream2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><img border="0" height="241" s5="true" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/_y1_2Bh_TlBg/TT1sY6a7F1I/AAAAAAAAACc/zu2ihbLPgFM/s320/DREAM1.JPG" width="320" /><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/Hess.gif"><img border="0" s5="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-XjZQ3i8gzY5JvATsVvHvoC4CqpJ9kG1Zo_jdBHTiiHIM-Yfio78vo5wxUM70Yxo09UKf_9l26Y4MTMeBT9smvIViverRRzunjbTCv3jIeSvQg1s7NXU7E5o9YjiB3Mo9KhY8d0uyQCfp/s1600/dream2.JPG" /></a> </div>
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<b>Fig.1. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Hammond_Hess" target="_blank">Harry Hess</a> in the role of Clarke Gable doing the derring thing in the Pacific</b>. This was the war years. There would be another fifteen at least before Hess would write his "Essay in Geopoetry" officially underpinning convection as the modus operandum for Plate Tectonics, which he would term instead "sea-floor spreading", by which time Arthur Holmes' book, <i>Principles of Physical Geology</i> 332pps, published in 1944 and advocating convection for continental drift, would run to fifteen reprints. (<a href="http://www.princeton.edu/geosciences/about/welcome/HHH.pdf">More on H^3</a>.) [D.F. - For image modification, see end of post]</div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Those words from <a href="http://platetectonicsbiglie.blogspot.com.au/2011/01/jack-oliver-and-passing-parade.html">Jack Oliver's obituary</a> have really got me : "All of the pieces suddenly made sense if you believed plate tectonics was going on", ..because I mean, ..why wouldn't you (believe)? Given the certitude in which Plate Tectonics is held today, what was different way back then that was holding them up? Those guys constructed the model after all. What were they alluding to then by that qualification, that today's crop of hangers-on don't know, or have forgotten, or find more convenient to forget, or have just never properly understood?</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What they were alluding to was the young age of the ocean floors, and the implication that held for Earth expansion, but to properly understand how that would have appeared to those at the time we have to read between the lines of what they wrote, realising that one cannot talk about what one *doesn't* know, ..you can only talk about what you *do* know. What *was* (becoming) known was that the ocean floors were everywhere young and dilating the crust, which carried the implication that the Earth had got bigger - doubled in size. What was *not* known (and therefore couldn't be talked about) was how this could happen.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Since you can't talk about what you don't know, this is precisely the reason why the question of expansion has been - and still is - summarily dismissed, as was Wegener's continental displacement decades before, with the mantra, "no mechanism". It was (and is) a con job pure and simple, put around by geophysicists in America to deflect attention from the 'geological how' of expansion to the 'physics why' of it, ..in other words to deflect attention away from the geological documentation that would support the fact of Earth enlargement, towards the ambit of theoretical physics where there was nothing to talk about. It was an exercise in power, prestige, institutional kudos, and who controls the debate. And one in which geologists for some reason I frankly can't understand given the glaringly obvious geological inconsistences that have lined the road of half a century of geology like so many crucifixes, have been inexcusably compliant. On the one (geological) hand the facts of enlargement were there to be talked about, but on the other (physics) hand, nothing to say. It was a masterly dialectical stroke that supplanted an honest attempt at empirical geological reason with ignorance bred of overweening hubristic conceit and arrogance of the "what we don't know isn't knowledge" sort.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">How's that for a triumph of 'science'? Everybody knew expansion was there to be talked about - but there was nothing to say. Some elephant indeed, occupying the room!</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But what *was* already known, that *could* be talked about and linked to the newly emergent realisation of the young age of the ocean floors, was laid out in the last chapter of Arthur Holmes' book, <i>Principles of Physical Geology</i>, published in 1944 and summarising twenty years of teaching before that, which was entirely about mantle convection and continental drift. In 2000, Cherry Lewis, Holmes' biographer writes:-</span></span><br />
<blockquote>
"..Holmes, however, was one of a small group convinced from the start of the theory [continental drift]'s validity. His work on radioactivity, geological time, and petrogenesis had led him to a profound understanding of processes in the Earth's interior. Consequently, he was the first to propose that incredibly slow-moving convection currents in the mantle caused continental breakup, seafloor formation, crustal assimilation, and continental drifting. Despite his theories being ignored, he still taught them to his students for the next 30 years.</blockquote>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Hess would of course have known that Arthur Holmes was a staunch supporter of continental drift. In fact, by the time Hess published his seminal paper in 1962 , Holmes book, a standard student textbook of the day and by then running to fifteen reprints, clearly set out the means by which the continents were carried passively on convecting mantle, providing the mechanism for continental drift, exactly as it is understood today as Plate Tectonics. Exactly in principle, that is, ..but in reality it doesn't work, for continents are deeply rooted, and no continents exist on oceanic mantle crust that could be said to be carried by convection. </span></span><br />
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Holmes, (1944):-<br />
<blockquote>
<u>p.306</u>:- "..Currents flowing horizontally beneath the crust would inevitably carry the continents along with them.."<br />
<u>Preface</u>:- "..While I have not hesitated to introduce current views, since these reveal the active growth of the subject, it should be clearly realised that topics such as the cause of mountain building, the source of volcanic activity and the possibility of continental drift remain controversial just because the guiding facts are still too few to provide a formation to more than tentative hypotheses. It is my hope that recognition of some of the outstanding problems may stimulate at least a few of my readers to cooperate in the attempt to solve them."</blockquote>
Hess (1962, p.607)<br />
<blockquote>
"..Long ago Holmes suggested convection currents in the mantle to account for deformation of the Earth's crust (Vening Meinesz, 1952; Griggs, 1939; 1954; Verhoogen, 1954; and many others). Nevertheless, mantle convection is considered a radical hypothesis not widely accepted by geologists and geophysicists. If it were accepted, a rather reasonable story could be constructed to describe the evolution of ocean basins and the waters within them. Whole realms of previously unrelated facts fall into a regular pattern, which suggests that close approach to satisfactory theory is being attained."</blockquote>
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Carey (1988), in a retrospective is more inclusive of earlier workers exploring convection:-<br />
<blockquote>
"..Convection currents in the Earth were propsed in 1881 by Osmond Fisher, in 1906 by Otto Ampferer, in 1928 by Rudolph Staub in Switzerland, and in 1935 by C.L. Pekeris, later of the Weizmann Institute in Israel, and particularly by Arthur Holmes in Durham and Edinburgh, by Felix A. Vening Meinesz in the Netherlands, and David T. Griggs in Harvard as the main driving force in Geotectonics generally, and latterly in respect of Continental drift. Keith Runcorn of Newcastle adopted convection as the main cause of continental displaement, so did Harry Hess more recently.</blockquote>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">By skirting Holmes' exposition, by referring to it as "long ago", by not including Holmes in his references, and by delegating authority on the matter of convection to the community of geologists in general, Hess appears to taint earlier views of convection with a certain irrelevance, which is reinforced by his use of the words 'nevertheless', radical', ' not widely accepted' as if, were those views to include the right ingredient which he was about to propose, convection would be respectably instated in its proper place. Convection causing the crust to ride passively on the mantle was certainly current by the time Holmes wrote his book, and if it was also radical then it would be a topic of some discussion, and widely promulgated. Or should have been. If it were not, then that, surely, was the fault of the grey polloi of geologists whom Hess would appear to vest with authority on the matter. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So was Hess, as Holmes hoped, "cooperating in attempting to solve outstanding problems"? In my view, .. possibly. Unfortunately he seems to be somewhat ungenerous in not recognising others as the foundation on which he was building. Well aware that the current views of Holmes (and others later) did refer to the crust being carried passively on the mantle, here's how, in 1962, Hess represents those earlier views of convection:-</span></span><br />
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Hess, 1962<br />
<blockquote>
"..The mid-ocean ridges could represent the traces of the rising limbs of convection cells, while the circum-Pacific belt of deformation and volcanism represents descending limbs. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge is median because the continental areas on each side of it have rnoved away from it at the same rate-1 cm/yr. This is not exactly the same as continental drift [read Holmes' convection]. The continents do not plow through oceanic crust impelled by unknown forces; rather they ride passively on mantle material as it comes to the surface at the crest of the ridge and then moves laterally away from it.</blockquote>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"Ploughing through oceanic crust" was hardly a fair representation of what either Holmes was saying, or what was by then current views, which Hess was effectively restating, but would represent by the term "sea-floor spreading", ..a well worn technique of appropriation; change the language, and hope it will be seen by the less aware (who are usually the more vocal) as changing the facts. Carey (1988, p.104) comments somewhat acidly, "Although any loose statement denigrating continental drift got easy passage to publication during that period, anyone unwise enough to speak for it was rejected by referees and editors with snide comments." </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So what was unsatisfactory about convection before Hess, that was satisfactory by the time Hess came to write about it? Seems to me it was mostly because it was Hess doing the writing. And his pals doing the reviewing.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But all of this talk of 'convection' was emerging because of what, largely, could *not* be talked about, namely expansion.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Hess, 1962, <i>History of Ocean Basins</i> , p.610 :-<br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"..Egyed (1957) introduced the concept of a great expansion in size of the Earth to account for apparent facts of continental drift. More recently Heezen (1960) tentatively advanced the same idea to explain paleomagnetic results coupled with an extension hypothesis for mid-ocean ridges. S. W. Carey (1958) developed an expansion hypothesis to account for many of the observed relationships of the Earth's topography and coupled this with an overall theory of the tectonics of the Earth's crust. Both Heezen and Carey require an expansion of the Earth since late Paleozoic time (ca. 2 x 10^8 years) such that the surface area has doubled. Both postulate that this expansion is largely confined to the ocean floor rather than to the continents. This means that the ocean basins have increased in area by more than 6 times and that the continents until the late Paleozoic occupied almost 80 per cent of the Earth's surface. With this greatly expanded ocean floor one could account for the present apparent deficiency of sediments,volcanoes, and old mid-ocean ridges upon it. While this would remove three of my most serious difficulties in dealing with the evolution of ocean basins, I hesitate to accept this easy way out. First of all, it is philosophically rather unsatisfying,in much the same way as were the older hypotheses of continental drift, in that there is no apparent mechanism within the Earth to cause a sudden (and exponential according to Carey) increase in the radius of the Earth. Second, it requires the addition of an enormous amount of water to the sea in just the right amount to maintain the axiomatic relationship between sea level-land surface and depth to the M discontinuity under continents, which is discussed later." (PETROLOGIC STUDIES: A VOLUME TO HONOR A. F. BUDDINGTON, PP.599-820 NOVEMBER1962 History of Ocean Basins, H. H. HESS, Princeton University, Princeton, N. J.)</span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Hesitating to accept expansion in the face of it overcoming his three most serious difficulties, does not sound like honest rational appraisal. In citing "No Mechanism" Hess was merely reiterating the objection against continental drift, and with respect to the elephant in the room (expansion) was dismissing it on grounds no more substantial than that he could not think of a reason why it should be there. His other objection, the question of water, does not seem to me to be an issue; if water is seen as part of the mantle and manufactured commensurate with mantle extrusion, then the 'plimsol line' *must* be globally invariant, except for local crustal disturbances (advance /retreat /isostatic adjustment) due to curvature correction.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Eldridge Moores casts an interesting light on Hess's 1962 paper (2003, <i>A personal history of the ophiolite concept</i>. Geological Soc. Amer., special paper 373, page 22.)</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"Late in 1959, the Australian geologist S.W. Carrey came through to deliver a lecture on continental drift and earth expansion. His ideas on expansion have been widely discounted and detract from his contributions to continental drift, however*. Carey's contribution to the contiental drift debate was to construct a spherical table, ~2m in diameter, on which he plotted the 500 fathom contour, rather than the coastlines, as had Wegener. Carey gave a three-hour spell-binding lecture, ending completely spent, covered with sweat and chalk dust. At the end we all filed numbly out of the room. Halfway througth the talk, however, Hess bolted out of his seat and started pacing up and down the aisle. Thereafter in Advanced General Geology, there was no more talk of problems of palaleomagnetism and polar wander paths. Within two months Hess was circulating a manuscript entitled "Evolution Ocean Basins [sic], which was eventually published as "History of Ocean Basins" (Hess 1962). This was the key insightful paper that gave rise to the new unifying model of ocean floor spreading, just as Kuhn (1970)* suggested would happen in a scientific revolution. I believe that S.W. Carey must be given the credit for "pushing Hess over the edge." In his article, Hess suggested that the oceanic crust was chiefly serpentinized mantle peridotite, that the mid-ocean ridges were the loci of upwelling and divergent motion and that the continents were passive riders on mantle material." </span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">[*D.F. - "However" - I know of no-one who has in fact discounted Carey's analysis other than in terms of Hess's "No Mechanism". Carey does in fact provide a mechanism in the penultimate chapter of his book Theories of the Earth and Universe, (p.325) but states, "I must of course attempt to explain the accelerating expansion I have described. However, if the explanation I offer should turn out to be invalid, that explanation should be rejected, not the reality of expansion."]</span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">[*DF. - Moores is not representing Kuhn correctly. Kuhn suggests that insights that create the paradigm shift are made by people who are either very young or new to the field and know very little of it (often both). This hardly applies to Hess, departmental head at Princeton, who by 1962 would have been fifty six years old.]</span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Eldridge Moores' above comment in regard to Carey is supported by that of Richard Lee Armstrong, [ Book review, <i>Theories of the Earth and Universe: a History of Dogma in the Earth Sciences</i>. Warren Carey. 414 pp. Stanford University Press, 1988. $45. Geological Sciences, University of British Columbia, Cananda. It was published on the American Scientist, Volume 77, 382-384, 1989.] [See also <a href="http://www.geochina.org/forum/ShowAnnounce.asp?boardID=1&RootID=6&ID=6&skin=0">http://www.geochina.org/forum/ShowAnnounce.asp?boardID=1&RootID=6&ID=6&skin=0</a> ]</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">" ..Carey and I met 30 years ago at Yale, where he taught the graduate structural geology course in a way that has never been done before or since. He was there at a critical moment in the development of tectonic ideas in North America and clearly has to be credited with planting the seeds of the plate tectonics revolution in many places as he promulgated the gospel of continental mobility and ocean expansion. He was newly arrived at the inspiration to explain everything by accelerating earth expansion, but most of his audience did not catch that particular infection. Many, including Hess and Wilson, were persuaded to give a serious look at mobility, and, as they say, the rest is history. Being a skilled orator and able to manipulate his audience like a magician did not hurt his cause.</span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"The ensuing three decades have flooded us with information and new interpretations of geologic processes. The plate tectonics model has undergone considerable detailed testing, modification, and embellishment. Meanwhile, Carey has gone on to champion earth expansion from ever-more philosophical and universal perspectives. But his views on earth expansion have changed little since 1959. The new dogma he espouses is largely a static one-the same arguments, the same fallacies, and the same points of debate are repeated here with little accommodation to new discoveries. Of course Carey was nearly 100% right in 1958 about what was going on in the oceans. His detailed view of sea-floor expansion in 1958 preceded and was not much improved upon by the views of Hess or Deitz in the 1966s. Carey has a right to feel slighted here. And he correctly analyzed marginal basins and arcuate orogenic belts decades before others discovered the truth and accepted credit for it. His feelings sometimes show: "The precocious visionary bears a sinister taint, and the accolades for the great advance are worn by the nouveau-wise."</span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">" But the essential flaw in Carey’s view of the world is his firm belief that compression in mountain belts and subduction of the ocean floor are "myth" "illegitimate faith" and "spurious concept" He minces no words in his dismissal of these essential components of the plate tectonics hypothesis. His arguments are exemplary of the failures he sees in others, but not in himself-the blind eye to contradictory data, the resort to fallacious arguments, and the mustering of nonunique "explanations" of data. Students of tectonics can only stare in disbelief and amazement as he assaults the "myths." His discussion denies volumes of modern and ancient literature on mountain belt structure, decades of study by seismologists, deep seismic profiles, deep-sea drilling results, and endless lists of quantitative models of stress and strength distribution, lithosphere bending, earthquake source mechanisms, gravity field measurements, and virtually all of geochemistry and petrology.</span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The last paragraph of Armstrong's critique is broadbrush denigration that in my view is without foundation. Anyone who takes the trouble to read what Carey has to say cannot doubt the compass and depth of his analysis, particularly when compared to the superficial responses of his detractors. We give the last word to Carey in respect of his assessment of the catch-up Johnnies-come-lately, and reflect that surely Carey would far rather be known as the father of Earth expansion, than as the (real) father of Plate Tectonics.</span></span><br />
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"By this time (mid-1970's) the global tectonic revolution in North America had routed all opposition to the gross dispersion of continents and had reached what I had been teaching my students in the early 1950's, but I was disgusted that the "new global tectonics" had gone only halfway. It still assumed axiomatically, notwithstanding the patent rapid growth of new oceanic crust, that the size of the earth had remained essentially constant. Hence it had to go back to the mechanism I had adopted in the 1930's and 1940's of swallowing great areas of crust down the ocean trenches, but which, after 20 years of working with it, I had found by 1956 to be unworkable on a global scale. Hence my Elsevier book [1976] set out to quash this subduction myth" (S.W.C., 1989, Theories of the Earth and Universe, extract, preface, p.x; the book in question reviewed by Armstrong.)</blockquote>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Make of it what you like. To me, Hess's appropriation of Holmes' and Carey's work represents a changing of the guard in the Earth sciences from geology to geophysics, in which over the last five decades, far from Armstrong's representation of the plate tectonics model as having undergone "considerable detailed testing, modification, and embellishment", we have witnessed instead ad hoc goalpost shifts designed to obscure an incredible, breathtaking, inexcusable failure to address the inconsistencies that ("..if you believe that Plate Tectonics is going on") have arisen.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There's a certain unfortunate irony in Hess being left holding this baby of what will surely turn out to be the biggest con job in the history of modern science (Plate Tectonics), because to a certain extent he was probably the fall guy for a good number of others, but it would seem he did rush in where angels feared to tread. Holmes on the other hand, in the last paragraph of his book, was extremely circumspect regarding convection, despite probably having more authority than anyone to promote it.</span></span><br />
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"..It must be clearly realised, however, that purely speculative ideas of this kind, specially invented to match the requirements can have no scientific value until they acquire support from independent evidence. The detailed complexity of convection systems, and the endless variety of their interactions and kalaeidoscopic transformations, are so incalculable that many generations of work, geological, experimental and mathematical, may well be necessary before the hypothesis can be adequately tested. Meanwhile it would be futile to indulge in the early expectation of an all-embracing theory which would satisfactorily correlate all the varied phenomena for which the earth's internal behaviour is responsible. The words of John Woodward, written in 1695 about ore deposits, are equally applicable to-day in relation to continental drift and convection currents: "Here," he declared, "is such a vast variety of phenomena and these many of them so delusive, that 'tis very hard to escape imposition and mistake." .. " [End of Book]</blockquote>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">...against which background the following reads somewhat poignantly, which is presumably also from Cherry Lewis although appearing on an anonymous website:-</span></span><br />
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("..Holmes made another significant contribution to geology. Years before the scientific community accepted Alfred Wegener's theory of continental drift, Holmes hypothesized (correctly) how it could have happened, through convection currents in earth's mantle.) Yet plate tectonics would not be widely accepted by geologists until after Holmes's death, and Holmes himself confessed in 1953, "I have never succeeded in freeing myself from a nagging prejudice against continental drift." <a href="http://www.strangescience.net/holmes.htm">http://www.strangescience.net/holmes.htm</a></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> "I have never succeeded in freeing myself from a nagging prejudice against continental drift." ... Such an illuminating statement indeed from someone who had taught it all his life! For why should Holmes, by 1953, in the best position of anyone to assess the veracity of a convective mechanism for continental drift, appear to be distancing himself from it? Seems to me the reason is in the pages of Holmes' own book - <i>Principles of Physical Geology</i>, for those principles if applied correctly to the evolution of the surface of the land, particularly with reference to scale and in relation to the incision of elevated erosional surfaces from which mountains are carved, practically spell out Earth expansion. Almost certainly Holmes did not entertain that exact intention to begin with, but writing focusses the mind powerfully well, .. and Holmes almost certainly could not ignore what would occur to any casual observer reading his book if they came at it already cognisant of the reality of expansion, ..that the many illustrations in his book are testimomy to the point of expansion. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Was Holmes by then moving away from mantle convection towards the same path as Carey? Given the paralllel life-times, the impingement of Carey's ideas on his own, and the very documentation of expansion that Holmes himself had set out in his book, and the inevitable realisation of what the flat tracts of eroded plateau surfaces must represent, I think it highly probable. From a <i>geological </i>perspective there is no alternative. </span></span><br />
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"... And Harry's wild about me..."</div>
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[D.F. <u>Image modification</u> - 2011/01/26. The above image of H. Hess was from the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hess.gif">wikipedia commons</a> and may have been removed by Google. I am not reposting it in case there may have been an inadvertent infringement of copyright since I did merge it with that of Clark Gable (remaining), with the intention of space-saving. The juxtaposition of the two was by way of acknowledging the apparent importance of Hollywood in the American psyche and the part that might play in the public perception in tying Hess's naval career (as captain and later admiral) with his academic career as one of the founders of Plate tectonics - since he's easily as good-looking as Clark Gable (in <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutiny_on_the_Bounty">Mutiny on the Bounty</a></i>), which in itself is surely worth a plate or two. (Vivian Leigh by the way didn't understand swashbuckling at all, if all she complained about was bad breath.) .. .. (Those cheroots from the Caribbean, ... some weed...) ]<br />
P.S. 2011/08/19 The black warning sign has just appeared (within the last couple of weeks or so), suggesting it could have been a Google take-down. The original was up for about three days before it was taken down, since when it it has been an empty frame until replaced by the above.<br />
P.P.S. The swashbuckling picture of Clarke Gable was also removed from the Wikipedia about the same time. Here we see him in a suit, just oozing swash.<br />
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Karaoke with Carmen<br />
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[ See also Expanding Earth blog at <br />
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</span></span>don findlayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12458072902579491159noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430456476367817075.post-83944657513161969682011-01-20T18:27:00.000-08:002017-10-21T06:02:27.043-07:00Jack Oliver and the Passing Parade<br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"All of the pieces suddenly made sense - *<span style="font-size: large;"><b><i>if</i></b></span> * you believed plate tectonics was going on"</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The above <a href="http://tinyurl.com/6zb76a6">quote from the obituaries</a> noting the recent passing of Jack Oliver, one of the few remaining fathers of Plate Tectonics, is a rather illuminating one for the uncertainty couched in the iffy qualification in the tail of the statement, which makes it perfectly clear which way round the status and logic of the present consensus of Plate Tectonics should be read, and for which the current generation of Plate Tectonicists will probably not thank him. But then the Grim Reaper has a way of extracting honesty when he makes his rounds.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">[D.F. - The posting says, "All of the pieces suddenly made sense if you believed plate tectonics was going on," said Larry D Brown, a professor of geological sciences at Cornell who was a former student of Oliver. <and this from <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/weekinreview/16chang.html">Lynn R. Sykes</a>> " I had been told as an undergraduate at M.I.T. that good scientists did not work on foolish ideas like continental drift,” recalled Lynn Sykes, an emeritus professor of earth and environmental sciences at Columbia. <...> Dr. Sykes said he thought that his adviser, Jack Oliver, was also not a believer in continental drift. ."]</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Well, ..of course "all the pieces make sense if you believe Plate Tectonics is going on". So do all the gifts that appear under the Christmas tree make perfect sense too, if you believe in Santa Clause. And the shiny coin under the pillow if you believe in the tooth fairy. And crop rings if you are into UFOs. There is no end to the power of belief in making things make sense. And rightly so, since it underpins the religious institutions of the world.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Belief however is not a credible foundation for science You begin with the facts, and for all that the facts are notoriously difficult to divorce from one's perception of them, you try your hardest to do exactly that. Belief, if ever that condition should be allowed to colour the scientific mindset, develops only by the most critical (and honest) analysis of what you think you know, and why you think it, and should always be held at arms length in any case; rational thought, not belief, is the hallmark of science. Belief is for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. It has no place in science.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">He puts it very well, does he not? ...and no doubt very intentionally so too. To my way of reading it highlights the uncertainty that the fathers of Plate Tectonics must have felt when trying to grapple with a problem that most nowadays don't give a second thought to, since we already have an answer packaged and supplied, which was the implication that followed from the realisation that the ocean floors were everywhere young, that the Earth must have enlarged by the extents of the ocean floors since Mesozoic times. The force of this must also have been emphasised by exactly this position being vigourously asserted by <a href="http://users.indigo.net.au/don/nonsense/carey.html">Sam Carey</a> <also Google-up>. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">However, rather than confront the detailed geological evidence that supported this (as described by Carey), the grapplers took the shortcut as they had done before with Wegener, and took refuge in their own ignorance claiming "No Mechanism", and in a classic case of narcissistic reversal, heaped the substance of their ignorance on the victim, saying in effect, "We can't think of a mechanism and you can't either, .. and what's more, ..we are masters of the college", a claim given some weight at the time by the <a href="http://users.indigo.net.au/don/cpr/mac.html">awe in which physics was held</a> following the recent advances in understanding the atom.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And in essence that is the state of affairs of Plate Tectonics today, a triumph of ignorance in geophysical understanding of the interior workings of the planet (that we can't see) over the empirical surface geological facts that result from it (that we can see), which are telling us in no uncertain terms the Earth has indeed got bigger. Very suddently. Very recently.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Or maybe not, if you are a paid-up member of the aforesaid Congregation, and "believe Plate Tectonics is going on..."</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">For even then not everyone involved in the "New Global Tectonics" did, notably <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_C._Heezen">Bruce Heezen and Marie Tharp</a> who put together the maps of the ocean floors. It is a brave voice however, that is prepared to make a stand for certitude bred of ignorance, ..that for which we have no explanation today, but for which we may have an explanation tomorrow. It smacks too much of religious faith. Evidently that was not a course the Big Ship of physics was prepared to chart, .. to admit ignorance in the face of the facts and leave clarification to the future, and so it invented a solution and adjusted the facts to suit. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Facts lacking explanation do not easily find their way into scientific debate, but by the same token, whatever their beguiling colour, shape or form, explanations should not be held paramount over the facts. Facts rule, ..particularly when they are geological ones that embrace all scales, compared to the raw facts of geophysics, which when boiled down amount to little more than the trace of the shake of a shaky pen at the end of a seismograph when an earthquake happens - fertile ground indeed for all sorts of imaginings and hypothesising, ... "if you believed plate tectonics was going on."</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">..The trace of the shake of a shaky pen... A fact? Or a representation of a fact. And what value then the pyramid of assumptions and assertions balanced on its inverted tip?</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">(Belief, ..the opus moderandum powering the Big Ship, ..The Noah's Ark for the Congregation of Plate Tectonics. One has to wonder where it's 'Mount Ararat' will be, ..when the waters run off from underneath it, and leave it high and dry, and it finally has to face the reality - of run-off from a once Big Flat Land. Was Mount Ararat really a mountain? Or the sea floor.... ??</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">[ See also Expanding Earth blog at </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://www.earthexpansion.blogspot.com/">http://www.earthexpansion.blogspot.com/</a> ]</span></span>don findlayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12458072902579491159noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430456476367817075.post-49908726197419496582007-09-30T17:05:00.000-07:002017-09-18T14:29:32.589-07:00Rubber numbers rule OK<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5UxrsMG0Nia_sF2kDZh7NC3HUkoVfnhughGpuWcwFpbF3YUoWt0TJ4VDSaLo4dglINmS3KGaufldJUXCaUdNait5UF-Ph1k7NYIG_PojtP9VsK-l-42A_OjgDCTc4ROTDsIWQ4O1qpZE1/s1600/red2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="33" data-original-width="30" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5UxrsMG0Nia_sF2kDZh7NC3HUkoVfnhughGpuWcwFpbF3YUoWt0TJ4VDSaLo4dglINmS3KGaufldJUXCaUdNait5UF-Ph1k7NYIG_PojtP9VsK-l-42A_OjgDCTc4ROTDsIWQ4O1qpZE1/s1600/red2.JPG" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">( ... you bet ...)</span></span></span><br />
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In which Team Leader Rubbery Trolley-Dosser argues the case for Plate Tectonics via thermal modelling.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkknrvrAlq8aHixdy5Bh2EI_McPNXG_2w3qfvZzUbxPLz7Zi4n4bRL8-n4q88O0qZrWY1jGf7nSO5PSsmRfNNZuxUBO30S0URGb3FJNR0fQ39r23dQP6ffJarH_lzV_pZo122choKRWhdr/s1600/rubber1b.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="217" data-original-width="217" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkknrvrAlq8aHixdy5Bh2EI_McPNXG_2w3qfvZzUbxPLz7Zi4n4bRL8-n4q88O0qZrWY1jGf7nSO5PSsmRfNNZuxUBO30S0URGb3FJNR0fQ39r23dQP6ffJarH_lzV_pZo122choKRWhdr/s1600/rubber1b.JPG" /></a></div>
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<b>Fig.1</b> Now all fitted up and kitted out with lanyard, whistles, measuring tape and the requisite Swiss Army Knife, .. and having answered to his satisfaction the question, "What keeps fragments of the Earth's crust bouncing backwards and forwards off each other from one end of the planet to the other like railcars in a shunting yard" (and feeling hugged by a Size 0 rubber number), our bold convectioneer sets out to explore the contradictions and conundrums of subduction in a bid to answer what gets it all going in the first place, .. fully aware (but hoping nobody notices) he has explicitly chosen colours which, if everything goes belly-up will identify him as a fifth-column expansionist. </blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgebMnwg1NSGWCTLOpbY-U8HxapoeHbExuCI6dm4DUSTqNUucjQOtLVQyK5MsUcTFj7ViBQGWu25uww4ugdcddy8cSBILqLLq9pcxQt9v6ywrqzdRCZQRWIeO3gdXMsIoSRR8ua8HiKlgIV/s1600/red2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="33" data-original-width="30" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgebMnwg1NSGWCTLOpbY-U8HxapoeHbExuCI6dm4DUSTqNUucjQOtLVQyK5MsUcTFj7ViBQGWu25uww4ugdcddy8cSBILqLLq9pcxQt9v6ywrqzdRCZQRWIeO3gdXMsIoSRR8ua8HiKlgIV/s1600/red2.JPG" /></a><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b> Maybe (not)</b>:- <span style="font-family: inherit;">Always game for a throw of the rubbery dice when it comes to numbers, our bold convectioneer is less confident when it comes to matters of the sophomoric mind: "Maybe, .. maybe not. I agree that how subduction gets going is an interesting problem. What keeps it going is a less interesting one." | link1 | | link2 |</span></span></span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgebMnwg1NSGWCTLOpbY-U8HxapoeHbExuCI6dm4DUSTqNUucjQOtLVQyK5MsUcTFj7ViBQGWu25uww4ugdcddy8cSBILqLLq9pcxQt9v6ywrqzdRCZQRWIeO3gdXMsIoSRR8ua8HiKlgIV/s1600/red2.JPG" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="33" data-original-width="30" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgebMnwg1NSGWCTLOpbY-U8HxapoeHbExuCI6dm4DUSTqNUucjQOtLVQyK5MsUcTFj7ViBQGWu25uww4ugdcddy8cSBILqLLq9pcxQt9v6ywrqzdRCZQRWIeO3gdXMsIoSRR8ua8HiKlgIV/s1600/red2.JPG" /></a>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Convecting substances</b>:- The predicament for Plate Tectonics is that despite the many geological conundrums it faces, support centres purely in the dynamics of convection. Rather than confront those conundrums ever more substances are examined in a drive to find the one which, through the kalaiedoscope of rubbernumber manipulation, may most closely match that of solid rock:-<br />------------------------------------------<br /><b>Ketchup</b>:- "Really? Diffusion works different in ketchup? Simple fact is one can find regimes where the properties of ketchup remain more or less uniform i.e, the phases don't separate. I was able to find them for corn syrup, silicon oil, all sorts of stuff." | link |<br />------------------------------------------- is </span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></span></span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgebMnwg1NSGWCTLOpbY-U8HxapoeHbExuCI6dm4DUSTqNUucjQOtLVQyK5MsUcTFj7ViBQGWu25uww4ugdcddy8cSBILqLLq9pcxQt9v6ywrqzdRCZQRWIeO3gdXMsIoSRR8ua8HiKlgIV/s1600/red2.JPG" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="33" data-original-width="30" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgebMnwg1NSGWCTLOpbY-U8HxapoeHbExuCI6dm4DUSTqNUucjQOtLVQyK5MsUcTFj7ViBQGWu25uww4ugdcddy8cSBILqLLq9pcxQt9v6ywrqzdRCZQRWIeO3gdXMsIoSRR8ua8HiKlgIV/s1600/red2.JPG" /></a><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Smart</b>:- In a bold and ostentatious move to outsmart the argument for a Nobel Prize, our brave fifth columnist volunteers a moniker for Plate Tectonics as "massive academic fraud", thus sticking his paddle through the gunnels of his canoe and seriously compromising his chances of making it over the next wave.</span></span></span></span><br />
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="rubber"></a>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <b>The next wave - a rubber number</b>:- Casting grammar, syntax, spelling, and the fact that the ocean floors are riddled with more fractures than a truckload of slack to the wind in a bid to redeem himself over his gaffe of academic fraud, our bold convectioneer proceeds to demonstrate the <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/sci.geo.geology/Q_6Hdq7rkYE/sptUzJRgbCEJ" target="_blank">parameterisations by which Plate Tectonics has attained celebrity</a>, ..how seismic wave speed anomalies may be converted to temperature/ pressure "using equations of state determined from actual rocks", and thus converted to density, enabling a further calculation be made to extract stiffness of the lithosphere from which may then be calculated subduction rates and thus rates of mantle overturn, so proving that convection driven by subducting slabs is truly the dynamic agent for global tectonics.</span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>No subducting slab</b>:- Exhilarated by the thrill of discovery that no subducting slab underlies the extinct northern Kamchatka volcanic arc and paddling himself with excitement, our bold convectioneer cites this absence as direct proof for catastrophic slab loss, proposing avalanches of subducting slabs into the mantle for good measure. Commenting on findings in Nature by an international team of researchers, team leader Rubbery Trolley-Dosser said, "Now you see 'em, now you don't. It's like fairies at the bottom of the garden, everyone knows they are invisible so the fact that you don't see them is overwhelming direct proof for their presence. With future research we hope to be able to document more areas where slabs are not present, thus confirming our present findings of catastrophic slab loss into the mantle. We are excited by the prospect that this could put a whole new perspective on the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, and open up an entirely new avenue for research." ?link></span></span></span></span><br />
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don findlayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12458072902579491159noreply@blogger.com0