I checked a few but the data is not very helpful. Some stations move in different directions within the same plate. Some have moved in one direction for a number of years then moved in the opposite direction (falsifying shock dynamics I suspect). When comparing across plates there is some consistency but not conclusive. In some cases moving certain sites within a plate move toward a neighbouring plate while others move away. I think the sites are only measuring movement relative to other nearby sites so it's not fit for the purpose we are trying to observe although it gives some support to a deforming continental crust as per Expanding Earth theory.
CharlesChandler wrote:
Aardwolf wrote: How exactly are they supposed to measure absolute movement compared to its deep interior?
I don't know — especially as concerns the accuracy necessary.
Hence the problems above. I don't think it's possible therefore GPS data cannot be used to support plate tectonics.
CharlesChandler wrote:
Aardwolf wrote: Also, have you ever considered how its possible there is so many red lines and so few blue lines.
I don't understand what you mean. The red lines are the mid-ocean ridges, and the blue lines are the continental motions, right?
No red is divergent and blue is supposedly "convergent".
CharlesChandler wrote:
Aardwolf wrote: Shock dynamics is falsified with all the other plate tectonic theories. First you need to explain where Antarctica is heading. Second, as a theory based on Pangea, Australia and South America shared no common border yet 25% of all marsupial species are located in South America and 75% in Australia and not a single solitary species in the vast land of Africa separating them. Explanation?
Now I'm wondering if the Expanding Earth Hypothesis and the Shock Dynamics Hypothesis are mutually exclusive. Could the continents have once formed one solid global shell, while on expansion, could the shell have only rifted in one place, leaving a solitary land mass (i.e., Pangea), which was then hit by an asteroid, breaking it up into the pieces we see now?
Why have 2 mechanisms when 1 explains all.
Lloyd
Re: Most Thorough Model
Aardwolf said: Why have 2 mechanisms when 1 explains all.
Expansion explains almost nothing. The mountain chains were formed by horizontal compression, not vertical motion. The lack of sedimentation on the seafloors shows that the continents moved apart very rapidly, not for millions of years. I listed other reasons earlier.
CharlesChandler
Re: Most Thorough Model
Lloyd wrote: Expansion explains almost nothing. The mountain chains were formed by horizontal compression, not vertical motion.
I agree. For mountain-building to be a function of a changing degree of curvature, you have to assume that the degree of curvature is changing (which would create pressure at the top of the crust) in the absence of expansion (which would have relieved all of that pressure, and then some, especially at the weakest parts of the crust, where mountain-building is supposedly occurring). So, all other factors being the same, expansion should create rifts at the weakest parts of the crust, which are the opposites of mountains. To get mountains in an expanding crust, you still need a horizontal force, to prevent the rifts.
The Expanding Earth Hypothesis explains the global fit of the continents, and adjacencies in the fossil records. As such, it needs to be considered. But it doesn't explain everything.
I guess I just don't get the whole winner-take-all thing. Sometimes hypotheses are mutually exclusive, in which case you have to start eliminating the candidates that just aren't going to work. If two or more hypotheses are not mutually exclusive, you have to consider the possibility that two or more sets of principles are at work, and you have a blend of factors. This happens all the time in physics, and you have to add up all of the factors to get the final result.
Lloyd
Re: Most Thorough Model
Lightning Scarred Planet
CharlesChandler wrote:
Lloyd wrote: How do you think Vallis Marineris formed?
I don't know. My first guess would be that the three nearby volcanoes released a bunch of heat, which enabled the crust to cool, and to rift as it shrunk. If what was erupting was liquid water, it would have produced torrential downpours, which would explain the clear evidence of erosion (especially further downstream). IMO, that explains more of the features than the electrical scarring model. But this is all just "look like..." theory — it isn't quantification and prediction, so I wouldn't hang my hat on any of it. []
What's the most that you think electric discharging would do on a planet like Mars? On Earth lightning is known to strike large boulders and throw large pieces a considerable distance, i.e. tens of meters, maybe hundreds. How much larger are arc discharges on the Sun? Should they be able to do proportionally greater feats? Also, Wal considers the Mars volcanoes to be electric discharge anode or cathode spots. Juergens compared them to blisters on lightning rods. Have you seen the TPODs on that?
I agree that the Mars canyons look like a rift in the volcanic shield, since they're fairly straight, rather than meandering like what erosion would produce. Here's a color-coded global elevation map of Mars: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/science/treiman/greatdesert/workshop/marsmaps1/marsmaps1_imgs/mola_color_2.jpg. Here are some observations: A. 30N x 220: Volcano B1. 40S x 290: Large Depression; few craters B2. 50S x 40: Smaller Depression; few craters C.Volcanic shield: --------------- very few craters C1. 0 x 90: Shield center +40deg each way C2. 10S x 90: ValMar canyons west end C3. 15S x 50: ValMar canyons east end C4. 5N x 120: 4 Volcanoes nearby Northern Hemisphere: -2,000 to -6,000m except for A (high) and C (high); very few craters Southern Hemisphere: -2,000 to +4,000m except for B (low) and C (high); many craters
What would account for the low elevation of the northern hemisphere and the lack of craters? Thornhill said electric discharge machining removed material from the northern and deposited it in the southern. But the cratering in the southern suggests that it's older, while the northern and the volcanic shield area, including ValMar canyons, are younger after the cratering died down. Was the northern hemisphere smoothed by water erosion or flooding? Would the southern hemisphere elevation be a supercontinent like on Earth previously? The volcanic shield area seems to be the youngest, with no craters, so the vulcanism must have occurred after the cratering and water erosion occurred during or after that. The ValMar rift may have been due to limited expansion in the eastern shield area.
Earth's Orbit
CC: We might also say that for the Earth to not get perturbed into a more elliptical orbit by the impact, it had to be a glancing blow (i.e., with the Moon toward the outer solar system, or the inner, but not a head-on collision).
Did you see Wal's paper on how adjacent planets can exchange mass electrically and round out the outer planet's orbit?
CharlesChandler
Re: Most Thorough Model
Lloyd wrote: What's the most that you think electric discharging would do on a planet like Mars?
That would depend on how big the discharge was. The size of a discharge is limited only by the capacitance of the charge carrier, and there isn't really a theoretical limit to that. So I'm not saying that mega-lightning never happened. I'm just saying that I don't find Valles Marineris to be conclusive evidence of it.
Lloyd wrote: On Earth lightning is known to strike large boulders and throw large pieces a considerable distance, i.e. tens of meters, maybe hundreds.
Yes.
Lloyd wrote: How much larger are arc discharges on the Sun?
The discharges in solar flares can be many thousands of kilometers long.
Lloyd wrote: Should they be able to do proportionally greater feats?
Yes.
Lloyd wrote: Also, Wal considers the Mars volcanoes to be electric discharge anode or cathode spots. Juergens compared them to blisters on lightning rods. Have you seen the TPODs on that?
I haven't seen that TPOD.
Lloyd wrote: What would account for the low elevation of the northern hemisphere and the lack of craters?
It looks like it got melted, especially considering (as you pointed out) the low number of craters, compared to the southern hemisphere.
Lloyd wrote: Thornhill said electric discharge machining removed material from the northern and deposited it in the southern.
Machining a flat surface takes very tightly controlled discharges. For this to happen in nature would be simply amazing.
Lloyd wrote: Would the southern hemisphere elevation be a supercontinent like on Earth previously?
Interesting question. We would tend to assume, by whatever model of planet formation you choose, that the whole planet was molten at one point. If so, we could expect a perfectly smooth surface, maybe sprinkled with some volcanoes, but we'd have no reason to expect the sort of regional differentiation that we see on Mars from the northern to the southern hemispheres.
Lloyd wrote: The volcanic shield area seems to be the youngest, with no craters, so the vulcanism must have occurred after the cratering and water erosion occurred during or after that. The ValMar rift may have been due to limited expansion in the eastern shield area.
Interestingly, the erosion on the cliffs of ValMar is typical of a fast moving fluid cutting through loosely packed sediments. So how could you get such a thick sediment to build up that high? Perhaps the whole planet was that deep in sediment before the re-melting started.
Lloyd wrote: Did you see Wal's paper on how adjacent planets can exchange mass electrically and round out the outer planet's orbit?
I don't think I saw that one.
Aardwolf
Re: Most Thorough Model
CharlesChandler wrote:
Lloyd wrote: Expansion explains almost nothing. The mountain chains were formed by horizontal compression, not vertical motion.
I agree. For mountain-building to be a function of a changing degree of curvature, you have to assume that the degree of curvature is changing (which would create pressure at the top of the crust) in the absence of expansion (which would have relieved all of that pressure, and then some, especially at the weakest parts of the crust, where mountain-building is supposedly occurring).
Could you explain this point more clearly. Without the parenthesis you state;
"For mountain-building to be a function of a changing degree of curvature, you have to assume that the degree of curvature is changing in the absence of expansion."
This doesn't make any sense. Why do we need to assume the degree of curvature is changing in the absence of expansion? In GET there is no absence of expansion. The curvature is changing while it expands. The rifting is occurring at the weakest points in the crust which are already established.
For example if you take a piece of paper and make a small tear at some point along the edge, then pry it apart from each corner it will tear through the point it was originally weakened. You would not expect it to create multiple tears along the edge to release the pressure. In the same way the Earths crust has already been compromised along rifts so further pressure increases the rifts while the "plates" deform to the flattening curvature.
Also, have you found an explanation yet as to why every rift surrounding the Antarctic plate indicates that it is moving away from every other plate it borders? Where is it going? Off Earth like a blister? I think we would have noticed.
Aardwolf
Re: Most Thorough Model
Lloyd wrote:
Aardwolf said: Why have 2 mechanisms when 1 explains all.
Expansion explains almost nothing.
Do you have a theory that explains where Antarctica is going?
Aardwolf
Re: Most Thorough Model
In case you are struggling to visualise here is an image showing it surrounded by diverging rifts (The dark red areas);
Antarctic Ring.gif (29.85 KiB) Viewed 174 times
This phenomena can only be explained by an expanding Earth. If it's a moving plate, where is it moving?
CharlesChandler
Re: Most Thorough Model
Aardwolf wrote:
CharlesChandler wrote: "For mountain-building to be a function of a changing degree of curvature, you have to assume that the degree of curvature is changing in the absence of expansion."
This doesn't make any sense. Why do we need to assume the degree of curvature is changing in the absence of expansion? In GET there is no absence of expansion. The curvature is changing while it expands. The rifting is occurring at the weakest points in the crust which are already established.
OK, there are two implications to expansion: 1) buckling at the joints, as you're saying, and 2) rifting at the joints, as I'm saying. But I "think" that the rifting will be more dramatic than the buckling. I'd have to plot out the geometry to get real numbers, but I "think" that you'd get a big gaping rift between the continents where they split apart where they were weakest, and which would preclude any lateral stress.
Also, for the upper portion of the crust to get scrunched at the joints, you're assuming that as the Earth expands, the crust maintains its former degree of curvature, while the larger Earth "flattens" underneath it (i.e., as the radius gets bigger). But this assumes no elasticity whatsoever in the crust, such that it cannot flatten out. I don't think that the crust is that rigid.
Aardwolf wrote: Also, have you found an explanation yet as to why every rift surrounding the Antarctic plate indicates that it is moving away from every other plate it borders? Where is it going? Off Earth like a blister? I think we would have noticed.
I didn't really understand the question until you posted the image. It certainly appears that everything is moving away from Antarctica. Then the question is: why?
Like I said earlier, the global continental fit, and the adjacencies in the fossil record as noted in the Expanding Earth Hypothesis, are somewhere between interesting and compelling. Just be careful of that "all-or-nothing" thing, or you could end up being wrong even when you were right. If you had something that is basically right, but which isn't the whole story, the part of it that has been over-extended will fault the whole thing (if such is the case). Before you conclude that Shock Dynamics cannot possibly be part of the answer, you should study it, because Fischer really did a thorough job. I disagree with him, because he thinks that it was all over and done in 26 hours, whereas I think that the impact set things in motion, and they're still in motion. But I'm not going to toss the whole thing just because there's a part that I don't get. Likewise, I'm not going to toss Expansion because I'm not convinced that it's the whole story. Everybody else goes all-or-nothing, but I don't know of anything in the real world that isn't a combination of a wide variety of factors, so I always try to keep an open mind, until/if/when I see a model that can explain everything.
So I might have to toss my "Granite Skid Mark" hypothesis, if the Expanding Earth Hypothesis is correct, because those two hypotheses are mutually exclusive. You can't have a skid mark from a celestial collision that just happens by chance to be in a shape that would completely cover a smaller Earth. But neither of those hypotheses are mutually exclusive with Shock Dynamics. Either the continents formerly covered the entire globe, or they were in one big supercontinent after the collision with Theia (i.e., the Moon). And then there was an impact that broke up the supercontinent. Either way, 2 out of 3 hypotheses survive.
GaryN
Re: Most Thorough Model
This phenomena can only be explained by an expanding Earth.
But GTSM has the planets shrinking as they cool. What is the cause of the expansion?
CharlesChandler
Re: Most Thorough Model
GaryN wrote: But GTSM has the planets shrinking as they cool. What is the cause of the expansion?
In the CFDL model, there are supercritical fluids inside planets and stars, and these have been compressed to densities greater than their solid/liquid densities. As they cool, more and more of the matter drops below the temperatures necessary for a supercritical fluid, and it transitions back into a liquid, and ultimately into a solid, which require more volume. So it's paradoxical, but supercritical fluids can expand as they cool.
Lloyd
Re: Most Thorough Model
Constraints The supercontinent must have formed some ten thousand years or so ago, because the seafloor sediments are too thin for it to be much older than that, assuming rain and wind erosion has remained fairly steady since the supercontinent formed. That sediment is a constraint.
There are constraints on potential expansion. In order to expand matter has to change states or have more matter injected or applied. There is very limited expansion in changing states, surely less than 10%. For CFDLs there must be similar limitation on potential expansion I presume. For matter to be injected there would have to be a means of injection. A large impact might inject quite a bit. What other ways are there for injection? We know meteorites add matter to the Earth every year, but that's on the surface and wouldn't split continents apart.
One of the EE theorists said the Earth was initially half its present size, assuming that the continents all fit together on a smaller sphere. I think the fits on the Pacific rim are fudged. The theorist was a creationist who said Peleg means "divided" and the Earth was divided in the day of Peleg. That seems a poor argument and it also agrees with Shock Dynamics for the time frame of under 5,000 years ago for the splitting.
The mid Atlantic ridge has not been found to be upwelling matter pushing the plates apart, but matter being pulled upward as the plates are already moving apart. By the way, Velikovsky noted that in 1949 volcanic rock on the mid Atlantic ridge was dredged up by a ship and found to have formed in air, not under water, and that supports Shock Dynamics, which says that the supercontinent split apart there by the African impact, and it would have taken some time for the ocean waters to fill in the Atlantic rift as it was forming. If the rift formed slowly over hundred or millions of years, the volcanic rock would have formed under water.
Sequence 1st: homogenous planet Earth with smooth strata 2nd: huge impact forming supercontinent and possible expansion 3rd: rapid evolution of land animals and erosion into the Pacific 4th: secondary impact that split supercontinent apart and very little expansion 5th: extinctions and more rapid evolution and erosion into the new and old oceans
moonkoon
Re: Most Thorough Model
If expansion did happen quickly (and like Lloyd and others I am now inclined to think that it did), with maybe a few separate expansion events, then the MORs are likely some kind of contact artefact, a result of the inflow of mantle material from below, ...any upwelling would start at either side of the fracture (which would extend at least to the base of the crust, say 100km) and work its way up and towards the centre of the ever widening gap until the flows from each side meet somewhere close to the middle.
And I think that one can't discount the possibility that the last expansion phase was relatively recent, within the memory span of mankind. Somewhere around 10,000 yrs ago perhaps. I didn't start out with this view and still find it rather shocking.
moonkoon
Re: Most Thorough Model
Lloyd, ... the Earth was divided in the day of Peleg.
The days of Peleg are traditionally held to be concurrent with the days of Noah of Ark fame (for the technically minded, Peleg is thought to be a contemporary of Nimrod who was an enthusiastic backer, some might say ringleader, of the Babel Tower development project. However Peleg is from Shem's line and Nimrod is from the line of Ham). This interpretation would put the expansion around the time of the flood.
Readers will recall that one of the penalities applied to those who participated in Nimrod's doomed project was their dispersal to the fours corners of the earth. Unfortunately the story does not elaborate on just how the dispersion was implemented, but assuming that expansion did occur at this time, it is easy to hazard a guess as to how the dispersal was accomplished.
The Persian traditional literature also mentions three expansion episodes taking place in the time of Jamshid, King of the Golden Age, which ended with an event reminiscent of the Noah's Ark story.
Lloyd
Re: Most Thorough Model
Moonkoon, if you have much knowledge of ancient myths, we should start a thread on that. Have you read Cardona and viewed the Alien Sky videos?
Plate Movements This http://www.bucknell.edu/Images/Depts/Geology/PTmap.gif shows 9 main plates: NAMER, EURAS, PACIF, NAZCA, SAMER, AFRIC, AUSTR, PHILI, ANTAR Diverging: - Atlantic Ridge: NAMER & EURAS; SAMER & AFRIC - Pacific Rise: PACIF & NAZCA; PACIF & ANTAR - Antarctic Rise: AFRIC & ANTAR; AUSTR & ANTAR Converging: PACIF & W NAMER; EURAS & W NAMER; PHILI & E EURAS NAZCA & E SAMER; ANTAR & E SAMER
So ANTAR is not showing expansion. It's sliding horizontally under E SAMER.
Charles shows in his Geophysics section how tidal forces cause ratcheting motion of the plates, one over another. That pulls the plates apart at the ridges, instead of the ridges pushing the plates apart. The initial breakup of the supercontinent pushed the Americas, NAMER and SAMER, away from EURAS & AFRIC, until NAMER overran the Pacific Rise. If ridges showed expansion, the Pacific Rise would have to be in the middle of the Pacific, instead of under NAMER and close to SAMER.
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