The Growing Earth (and planets)

Watch, enjoy, and share your thoughts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjgidAICoQI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQSrsy9xg70

Also I could not find the video, but there is one that makes a good case for the moon as well as mars.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

did anyone even watch this?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

http://aapg.confex.com/aapg/2007int/techprogram/A112575.htm

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

This topic has come up for discussion before, EndLightEnd.
The most convincing of Neal Adams' videos is the one on the Jovian moon Europa.
Those favouring conventional plate tectonics theories have always failed to explain why no part of Earth's ocean floor is not much more ancient.

 

I posted a better version of this theory on this forum - and have proclaimed it in earlier version more than three years ago elsewhere.

Basically:

1) The earth was smaller and lighter but with a thicker atmosphere, and all the continents closer together. Then

2) A very large, very slow moving (relative to the earth) ice comet hit the Earth, right about at the South Pole. It broke up as it came into the gravity, and it rained for forty days and forty nights. Water covered the earth. The main mass splatted on the South Pole, and some of it stayed frozen.

3 The Earth absorbed the water and swelled, breaking the land into pieces and driving them apart. The leftover water filled the gaps between them.

Now notice my theory explains a lot of stuff that lame video glosses over. It explains the true historical record of the Bible, it explains the large size of the dinosaurs (lower gravity, thicker air) it explains how the Earth increased in size, it explains the erosion and stuff as well as the evidence of buckling and violence in the mountains etc, it explains how we always see water and steam in volcanoes, it explains how Antarctica got so cold and all that evidence of "ice ages" and so forth.

I rule.

 

stars can expand (red giants) and contract, so maybe planets can do so also.

 

The thing is, to evaluate the evidence -- not the causality. People are disinclined to believe in Expanding Earth because they do not understand what the physical mechanism would be. Unfortunately, people like iceaura with crackpot explanations only tempt other folk to close their eyes to the fact that something so far inexplicable appears to be occurring. It often takes wisdom to say "I do not know".

Analogy: The scene of a crime requires investigation as a task in it own right, in a separate box, so to speak, from speculating upon the perpetrator.

 

River Ape - first of all I don't think that iceaura is being serious

secondly, plate tectonics predicts that oceanic rocks should be very young - which they are geologically speaking, not very old, so I'm not sure what you were driving at in your previous post.

 

I would echo both points: iceaura is absolutely taking the piss; young ocean floors are a predictable outcome of plate tectonic theory. Old ocean floors are found, but they are welded onto the continents. Now what do they call those??? Ah, yes: ophiolites.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

having watched most of the first bit, my suspicions were raised immediately when the narrator began describing things as "impossible" - good scientists are normally much more circumspect with their use of language - secondly there's no real examination of why subduction can be ruled out other than "its not really happening" and "its impossible" (I''m paraphrasing here a little).
If this was a genuine scientific attempt at an alternative explanation to "traditional" plate tectonics, the point would be not to focus on how the continents fit together as a result of reversing seafloor spreading - that's already pretty well accepted and understood, but to demonstrate clearly how and why subduction does not account for maintianing the earth at a stable size - the fact that this is pretty much ignored speaks volumes.

also if the earth has expanded in the last 90my or so where did all the water come from to fill the oceans? and why are large parts of the earth not hollow?

 

I debated this for a while - on another forum - directly with Neal Adams. The guy had done a good literature search, but was highly selective in the evidence he chose to acknowledge as sound.
The Europa example was interesting, but we are looking at local, not global effects. that pretty well invalidates it.

 

does he have any explanation of why the earth isn't hollow or where the water to fill the oceans came from?

these kind of fringe hypotheses usually go hand in hand with a political/religious motivation - what's his?

 

Sounds like the story of your life.

 

But it is the TOTAL absence of areas of OLD ocean floor that needs to be explained. Why does EVERY stretch of old ocean floor get "mopped up" (so to speak) before it gets very old at all? Why would anything so SYSTEMATIC happen amid such a HAPHAZARD pattern of global features?

 

who says its haphazard and not systematic? - the process of spreading and subduction seems pretty straightforward and systematic to me - indeed I understood that it was subduction that drove seafloor spreading - not the other way around - but hey, I'm not a geologist so I could be way off the mark here.

so why can subduction not account for it?

 

I would have to revisit the threads: it was a year or two ago. My recollection is that his motivations were more 'normal' - a desire to make a contribution to science and a name for himself at the same time.

1) Our analysis of ocean floors is sparse. There could well be the odd sliver here and there which is older than those yet identified.
2) That aside, the subduction process is very efficient. All we require is that all areas of the planet have a continent pass over them once.

A quick, on the fly, calculation: average rate of movement, say 5cm per year. Distance moved in 200 million years, 10,000 kms. With four or five continents flying around I don't see much of a problem. It is an interesting observation, but it does not - in my view - constitute a problem.

 

"Almost all of the earth's weight gain is from meteorites. The vast majority of them are tiny grains, but I seem to remember reading somewhere that it is estimated we accumulate about 100 tons a day in the stuff."

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080427123908AA1CsRW

 

You're the only one who's impressed by your understanding.

You can say that again.

 

Near as I can figure, the radius of the earth in Neil's video increased about 4 cm per year, and fairly steadily or linearly with time (to account for the age distribution of the seafloor rock) - which means the volume is increasing proportional to the cube of time.

That's quite the inflationary mechanism. A person can't help but be curious.

And it seems to have stopped ?

 

Ignoring for a moment that it seems to have stopped, if the radius of the earth is increased at a linear rate, does that not mean that seafloor spreading must have happened at an ever increasing speed to allow that?

edit -just worked it out for myself - the answer is no, the rate at which constructive plate margins move apart remains constant, however the volume of magma required to maintain this rate does increase exponentially