Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Plate Tectonics turns up for the Nobel Prize

 But is turned away at the door
( .. no frock .. )



" ..  Me frock, .. Anyone seen m'rock? .. "


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.

...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 *configuration* of continental rupture that allowed Pacific emplacement, the *ages* of the two (continental rupture and mantle emplacement) are the same (or the oceans are younger).

Which means the dilation of the crust and the emplacement of the Pacific are coincident in time.

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.

Which means from the standpoint of simple geological principles of structural superposition, Plate Tectonics is false.

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".

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? : -

  • 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.
  •  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].
  • The temporal equivalence of the Pacific ocean and its continental marginal ruptures, which tells us that a Panthalasssa and Tethys never existed.
... all three quite apart from many other considerations.

"...There probably  has been an ocean in the present-day position of the Pacific Ocean for nearly a billion years..." (Link
[I don't think so.  Not in my book at any rate.]

What's going on?  Why does Plate Tectonics ignore these lynchpins of global geo-logic?  The answer seems to be (Google it up) that : -

"Plate tectonics is a theory" (about 16,800 results at posting; 56,600 at 20171029)

..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 Nobel prize.

Ouch!   A good theory is tested against the *facts*, not its own hypothesised moving parts.  It is predictive and needs no goalpost shifts.

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).

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: -

"Subduction was a necessary adjunct concept" (Oreskes**, p.247)

Well, indeed it surely was ("if you believed Plate Tectonics was going on"). And indeed they did. And so they invented subduction of oceanic 'plates', and backed it with some highly questionable  seismological interpretations [1] [2]


 Fig.2.  The Asian - Pacific region  showing that earthquake distribution is far more an expression of the continental lithosphere, than it is the oceanic lithosphere.

The ocean floors that are riddled with more fractures than a truckload of slack... ..  How is that supposed to make it, "jostling" and "grinding", from one side of the planet to the other, without making a noise? 

The most perplexing features of the ocean floors (i.m.o.) are transform faults, .. about which Plate Tectonics has *nothing* 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 also 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").

...Plate Tectonicsw receives first prize (the Big Wooden Spoon).
But doesn't seem to notice.
("Hello Everybody!  How you doin'?" )
("Believe in me..Kiddo.")


Menard, H.W., 1986, An Ocean of Truth, a Personal History of Global Tectonics,  353pps, Princeton University Press. 
Oreskes, N., 2001, Plate Tectonics, an Insider's History of the Modern Theory of the Earth, 424pps, Westview Press

[ See also blog for Earth expansion at :-
http://earthexpansion.blogspot.com/] 

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