http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20091122x2.html
On a plate: A map of the world showing the boundaries of the 15 largest
tectonic plates on the surface of the planet as delineated by Plate Tectonics
Theory. The theory assumes the planet has always been about its present size,
and that many of its landforms have been created as a result of enormous
pressures caused by movements of these plates. U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY
Dogmas may blinker mainstream scientific thinking
By JEFF OGRISSEG
Special to The Japan Times
The competing claims of Growing Earth Theory and Plate Tectonics Theory as
presented in the accompanying article may appear to be a recent rivalry, but
they are in fact following in a long tradition.
Soon after accurate maps of the world were first drawn courtesy of the great
European navigations of the 15th to 18th centuries, scholars studying them were
struck especially by the facing coastlines of Africa and North and South
America that appeared to fit into each other if pushed together.
Consequently, they theorized that those continents - and by extension other
land masses - were long ago much closer together. Just how long ago, however,
was not determined until well into the 20th century.
Back in 1912, a German scientist named Alfred Wegener (1880-1930) published his
theory of continental drift, which he believed held the key to answering those
questions.
According to this, the land masses were once one giant continent Wegener named
Pangaea that was surrounded by water, and they arrived at their present
positions by drifting around somewhat like melting ice cubes do on a sheet of
glass.
Most of Wegener's evidence was circumstantial and his theory failed to explain
the geological mechanism driving continental drift - how, for example, the
Indian shield, ancient rock that is essentially welded to the mantle, could
break loose and ram northward into Asia and keep on going with such force as to
cause the giant ripples now known as the Himalayas.
Wegener's hypothesis was largely forgotten until the 1950s, when it was dusted
off and revised to become Plate Tectonics Theory a decade or so later. And that
- despite being so complex in its supposed workings and requiring such radical
geomorphic change over a very short period of geological time as to render the
Earth unique in the whole of our solar system as we know it - became the
received wisdom now generally treated as fact. Interestingly, though, it's not
so long since science was leaning in favor of a far simpler explanation that
followed in the footsteps of those who had centuries before set their eyes on
the first world maps.
Scientists such as Otto Hilgenberg (1896-1976) in Germany and Samuel Warren
Carey (1911-2002) in Australia, working in the years before World War II, not
only noted how the continents bordering the Atlantic appeared to fit into each
other if pushed together. They also observed, and made models to show, that the
Pacific, Indian and Southern Ocean continents also fitted together - but as one
mass entirely covering an Earth half its present size.
Rather than accept this staggering proposition, though, scientists - without
being able to refute it - instead latched on to the more comfortable
alternative of Plate Tectonics Theory that didn't require any change in Earth's
size.
However, that scientific consensus occurred despite oceanic surveys and
deep-core sampling in the 1960s that began to plot a 65,000-km-long network of
undersea volcanic ridges that run like the seams on a baseball around our
planet - and which were found to be in constant and various stages of
"eruption."
Advanced radiometric age-dating then revealed something truly remarkable - that
the age of the oceans' floors increases symmetrically on both sides as you move
away from the volcanic ridges. And yet more stunning, the findings also showed
the ocean floors are nowhere more than 180 million years old.
>From the results of this research it was a short step for some scientists to
>postulate a process of seafloor spreading. This holds that new volcanic
>material erupting from the submarine ridges is constantly forming new oceanic
>crust which, with the help of gravity, pushes the older crust further away. It
>was an analysis that seemed to quite adequately explain what enlarged the
>Atlantic and pushed the Americas and Africa apart.
But if this spreading has been happening over geological time from all the
ridges, wouldn't that mean the whole planet must be growing in size?
Not necessarily said all those wedded to Plate Tectonics Theory.
In their collective mind, it was - and remains - more feasible that the surface
of the planet is made up of crustal plates that are either converging,
diverging or colliding with one another, all driven by heat from inside the
planet.
In essence, such thinking is an extension of 1929's Theory of Continental Drift
championed in the face of widespread skepticism by the English geologist and
pioneer of radiometric dating, Arthur Holmes (1890-1965). According to Holmes,
it is so-called convection cells in the mantle that dissipate radioactive heat
from beneath, which then propels the continents around.
So both the continental drift and plate tectonics theories allow Earth's size
to have remained relatively unchanged since its creation.
As far-fetched as the proposed mechanisms behind both these theories may have
seemed to some, they gained a new lease of life through the work of
seismologists Kiyoo Wadati (1902-95) at the Japan Meteorological Agency and
Hugo Benioff (1899-1968) at the California Institute of Technology.
After conducting research independently in the 1930s on deep seismic activity,
they theorized the existence of what came to be known as Wadati-Benioff Zones.
In these zones, they maintained that tectonic instability appeared to be the
result of one piece of crust being pushed - or "subducted," as they termed it -
under another.
Armed with this new perspective, advocates of both continental drift and plate
tectonics theories could now explain the relatively young age of the crusts
forming oceanic floors as being the result of subduction.
>From there it was but a short step to hypothesize that older basaltic crust
>underlying the oceans was either being swallowed by oceanic trenches or pushed
>beneath another plate, Wadati-Benioff style - and then "recycled" back through
>the magma to the oceanic rifts in a fashion resembling a conveyor belt.
But to cover all the bases in cases where neither of the above are happening,
Plate Tectonics Theory allows for denser but thinner oceanic crust 8 km to 10
km thick to somehow be part of the same plate as the ancient, granite
continental land masses up to 100 km thick. And, on some of the theory's
delineated borders, such as that between the African and Eurasian plates, it's
even OK for no tectonic markings to appear at all.
In short, it does seem the theory appears to make exceptions to fit each
situation.
Back in Australia, meanwhile, Carey had initially supported the Theory of
Continental Drift and set out to prove it. But his search for answers only led
to more questions. Finally, inspired by Hilgenberg's work in Germany, and a
growing list of similarities found in geological structures now separated by
oceans, he eventually became a foremost advocate of Growing Earth Theory.
But Carey was far from alone in his scientific stance. Among his contemporaries
was East German engineer Klaus Vogel, who in 1977 recreated a smaller
pancontinental globe without oceans inside a transparent globe of the Earth as
it now is, and Dr. Ken Perry of Wyoming, whose computer models corroborated
expansion tectonics with geometrical precision. Carey's downfall, though, was
that - like Wegener in the early 20th century - he was not a physicist and so
could not propose a mechanism that might cause what the geological record was
telling him had happened. Then when subduction reared its head, Earth no longer
had a need to be growing.
In late 1993, Carey symbolically handed off the baton in a letter to Australian
geologist James Maxlow, whose draft manuscript on Growing Earth Theory, Carey
said, "would satisfy the most hostile examiner."
That hasn't exactly been the case, but Maxlow has remained an active force,
disseminating research findings and various compelling evidence through books,
papers and seminars in the face of continuing disdain - based on precious
little scientific evidence - from mainstream scientists.
Undeterred, Maxlow continues to maintain that the difference between Growing
Earth Theory and Plate Tectonics Theory simply boils down to whether or not the
presumed need for a constant Earth-radius premise is true or false.
"The problem that mainstream geology imagines is that expansion tectonics is a
threat to their career, research programs, reputation, or at the very least a
threat to their intelligence," said Maxlow by e-mail.
"An expanding Earth is perceived by mainstream literature as having been proven
wrong, so why should they bother."
Whether that's entirely the case or not, what certainly seems to be true is
that rather than being pursued by the entire scientific community in a
dedicated spirit of inquiry, research into how the Earth came to be the way it
is now is tainted instead by dedications to dogma, whatever the exciting
results of new research
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