The Nonsensical "Growing Earth" "Theory"

Discussion in 'Pseudoscience Archive' started by Robert Schunk, Aug 15, 2011.

  1. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

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    That does not explain why there are no deep earthquakes under mid ocean ridges.
     
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  3. florian Debunking machine Registered Senior Member

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    What do you think about "because there is not buried lithosphere under mid ocean ridges"?
     
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  5. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

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    I think that fails as an explanation under Scaleras paradigm (and yours by extension) because neither of you invoke buried lithosphere as an explanation at subduction zones.
    I think that if the subducting slabs are not buried to depths of more than 70km, then some other mechanism is required to explain earthquakes at depths greater than this. That mechanism, as identified by you, is phase changes in rising mantle material. However, according to your paradigm, rising mantle material also exists at mid ocean ridges (which according to your paradigm evolved from subduction zones), and it does so without earthquakes at depths greater than 70km.

    So I think that your paradigm is not internally self consistent, because it predicts that rising mantle generates deep earthquakes as it undergoes phase changes, and yet we have rising mantle which undergoes those same phase changes, but does not give rise to deep earthquakes.
     
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  7. florian Debunking machine Registered Senior Member

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    Wrong.
    Read one more time: "I have a different interpretation which is that of Brudzinski: deep earthquakes are due to phase changes that take place in the buried lithosphere."
     
  8. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

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    So then you, personally disagree with Scalera?

    And you, personally, believe that the subducting slabs are buried at depths of up to 660km?
     
  9. satmour Banned Banned

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  10. florian Debunking machine Registered Senior Member

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    Absolutely. I'm convinced that metastable olivine in buried slabs is at the origin of earthquakes at depth between 400 and 650 km.

    Such a depth is not really impressive, knowing that the mantle swelled by about 700 km (radius) in the last 30 millions years.
     
  11. wlminex Banned Banned

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    Last edited: Sep 17, 2011
  12. florian Debunking machine Registered Senior Member

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    I read the full paper at science mag. The transport from the lower mantle is well evidenced by the assemblage of typical "lower mantle" mineral phases. The 13C isotope composition hinting for an organic origin vs a local reservoir is always a bit more controversial.
     
  13. wlminex Banned Banned

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    . . . we need (sometime) to quantitatively revisit the effects of (mantle) phase changes vs density vs expansion, taking into account the limiting counter-action of subduction effects . . .

    wlminex
     
  14. Hoyasaur Registered Member

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    The difference between science and pseudoscience

    Mr. Schunk, You use the term "pseudoscience" (among others) to reject and ridicule the expanding earth hypothesis. As you are no doubt aware, Karl Popper famously argued that falsifiability is the criterion of demarcation that separates science from pseudoscience. Popper's criterion requires that a genuine scientific hypothesis or theory must, in principle, be falsifiable by making testable empirical predictions that can be compared with the evidence. If those predictions are borne out by the evidence, then the theory is tentatively validated; if they are not, then the theory is falsified.

    Since you apply the term "pseudoscience" to the expansion hypothesis, you must be asserting that it is not testable, i.e. not falsifiable. Unfortunately you are quite wrong. The expansion hypothesis makes very specific empirical predictions. Moreover, the expansion hypothesis actually PASSES those empirical tests whereas the prevailing Earth science "paradigm", plate tectonics, which implicitly assumes an Earth of fixed radius, does not.

    In the abstract of his article, The Necessity for Earth Expansion (1983), the late S. Warren Carey -- an Emeritus Professor of Geology at the University of Tasmania, a past president of the Australia-New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science, and the leading proponent of expansion -- wrote:

    "Pangaea, reconstructed on a globe of present Earth radius, occupies a little more than a hemisphere, the remainder being the EoPacific Ocean. Opening of the Arctic, Atlantic, Indian, and Southern Oceans, nearly doubled the area of Pangaea. Hence on a constant-radius Earth the Pacific would have been reduced virtually to zero. This is not so. Instead, each of the continental blocks around the Pacific has separated from its neighbours by large amounts in the direction of the Pacific perimeter, so that the Pacific, far from reducing to near zero, has greatly increased in area. This is impossible except on an expanding Earth.

    "Paleomagnetic measurements show that all of the continents except Antarctica have converged on the Arctic by several tens of degrees since the Permian. Wholly independent data from the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous give the same conclusion in progressively diminishing degree. Yet throughout this time the Arctic has been an area of extension. This is absurd unless the Earth has greatly expanded.

    "Several other independent sets of data set out herein require Earth expansion. All the characters of orogens - heat flux, volcanism, plutonics, attitudes of thrusts and lineations, incidence of metamorphics, distribution and incidence of seismicity, and others, fit better the expansion model of diapiric orogenesis than the subduction model."

    If you're interested in more details, and I'm sure you are since you are obviously a seeker of truth, you can find it at

    frontier-knowledge.com slash earth slash papers slash 1983.Carey.The Necessity%20for%20Earth%20Expansion.pdf

    (Sorry, I couldn't insert the actual URL because of the silly and arbitrary "20 post" rule on this forum, but you should be able to figure it out.)

    By the way, the sarcasm in your post does little credit to your views.

    Bill Erickson
     
    Last edited: Jun 23, 2012
  15. Epictetus here & now Registered Senior Member

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    You do realize that Robert Schunk started this thread 15 August 2008, never replied to any of eight pages of responses after he wrote post #3, and he has made no postings at all since 9 September 2011? Just thought you'd want to know.

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  16. AlexG Like nailing Jello to a tree Valued Senior Member

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    You also realize that actual measurements have found no expansion?


    http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/earth20110816.html

     
  17. Hoyasaur Registered Member

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    Many of the posts fall in the "mine is bigger than yours" category. Also, none that I saw directly addressed Schunk's use of the term "pseudoscience," though a lot of people talked around it, but they all seem to ignore what Popper had to say about it, which I consider very relevant.

    Have you seen eprints.bice.rm.cnr.it/3820/1/4951-8292-2-PB.pdf ? (No W3 prefix.)

    Also, it's entirely possible that expansion is episodic, including some contraction episodes. Several Russians believe that and Lester C. King believed most of the continental displacement (i.e. expansion) occurred in the Late Mesozoic. King differed with Carey and Owen on that, both of whom believed that expansion has been continuous.

    Regarding the cause of expansion and the possibility of mass formation (but not ex nihilo as some posters allege), which is certainly the fundamental problem of earth expansion, you might want to take a look at Halton C. Arp's website -- haltonarp.com -- in particular the article on Le Sage gravity, and also the late Tom Van Flandern's articles on the same subject at metaresearch.org. Also, google "kinetic gravity growing earth" and look at the article by Blinov. (In general, the Russians seem to have a very different view of things, especially gravity and the Earth.)

    I realize that all of this can easily be dismissed as "fringe science," and I'm sure many people will do just that, but continental drift was also fringe science as late as the 1950s. Of course, the fact that expansion is dismissed today as "fringe" does not prove that expansion will be "true" tomorrow. But it does prove that just because the vast majority of scientists believe a certain thing at any given moment in history does not necessarily make it so. It's quite common for people living in the present, including many scientists, to look down on those who had the misfortune of living in the past and dismiss them as ignoramuses, as though we in the present have a monopoly on the truth, but without giving much thought to what people in the future will think about us.
     
    Last edited: Jun 23, 2012
  18. florian Debunking machine Registered Senior Member

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    The methodology used in this paper is unsuitable to refute the expansion of Earth. See a critical review of the methodology in this post.

    I'm actually quite surprised that this paper did not receive more critics.
     
    Last edited: Jun 23, 2012
  19. Hoyasaur Registered Member

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    And just why are you surprised? "Forget it Jake, it's... Chinatown." Thomas Kuhn's Normal Science in action. Musn't undermine the paradigm.

    Based on your posts on this thread, it's obvious to me that you passed when they handed out the kool-aid. Therefore, you must be some kind of crank or crackpot since everyone who's Anyone knows that expansion is pseudoscientific crap.

    Keep up the good work!
     
    Last edited: Jun 23, 2012
  20. florian Debunking machine Registered Senior Member

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    Actually, despite having lived in Nebraska for a while, I never became fond of kool-aid

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  21. Hoyasaur Registered Member

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    Good call.
     
  22. Gneiss2011 Registered Senior Member

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    You do not want to show, explain or discuss those arguments/details here?
     
  23. Hoyasaur Registered Member

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    On the contrary, I'll be happy to. I just thought it would be easier to provide links to source docs and let the forum participants look at them first hand, rather than having me produce lengthy posts repeating or paraphrasing the very same information.

    But you asked for it so here goes.

    Earth expansion (EE) and Plate Tectonics (PT) share some areas of agreement. In other words, each explains certain facts in more or less the same way. For example, both EE and PT agree that the continents were once assembled as recently as the Permian and Early Triassic into a single supercontinent, Pangaea, which has since "broken apart" into the various continents that exist today with new oceanic lithosphere formed between them -- the Atlantic, the Arctic, the Southern Ocean, and the Arabian Sea (western Indian Ocean). So far, so good.

    Early reconstructions of Pangaea by Wegener and others depicted the former positions of the continents in an approximate way but not with much rigor or accuracy. (Just take a look at Wegener's depictions of Pangaea, which are more sketches than maps. These are readily available online). Warren "Sam" Carey, who became a "mobilist" in the 1930s even before he finished his doctorate, may have been the first to attempt to reconstruct Pangaea accurately. He recognized that attempting that on 2-D projections, as Wegener had done, was futile. So he built a desk with hemispherical desktop on which he could fit the continents together precisely. Unfortunately, whenever he found a satisfactory fit in one region, a large "gaping gore" (his term) appeared in another, which Carey knew to be false based on the regional geology. "Starting from the assembly of Africa and South America, a yawning gulf appeared between Indonesia and Australia, although the [regional geology] indicated that Indonesia and Australia belonged together. Starting from Australia and Indonesia there was no hope of closing the Arctic...." (Carey, 1976, p.39). (Even the classic "Bullard Fit" (1965) across the Atlantic left a huge improbable gap between Turkey and Arabia.)

    Carey worked on this problem unsuccessfully for many years, all the while assuming that the Earth's radius had remained constant. But eventually, he began to question that assumption, and much to his surprise he discovered that when he reassembled Pangaea on a smaller globe, the difficulties vanished.

    Now, before going any further, it should be obvious that Carey recognized the implications of all this. He was a geology professor after all, and one of the first things he must've thought was "what caused the earth to expand?" Although a smaller globe in the past may solve some geological puzzles, it raised all sorts of very obvious and troubling geophysical and petrological issues, to say the least. But rather than simply dismissing the idea of expansion out of hand as "physically impossible," Carey let the cartographical and geological facts speak for themselves; and the facts showed that the only way to reconstruct Pangaea with any rigor and accuracy was on a smaller globe.

    So, those of you on this forum who dismiss expansion as "pseudoscientific crap," or believe that it requires the creation of matter "out of nothing," or simply believe that EE is physically impossible and PT is correct, must refute Carey's empirical findings and, to be specific, be able to reconstruct Pangaea on an Earth of fixed radius, but minus the "gaping gores." The successful reconstruction of Pangaea is the first of many "crucial tests" that allow us to compare the predictive/explanatory power of PT vs. EE. And in this regard, EE passes with flying colors while PT flunks the test.

    I suspect that more than one of you will attempt to get around this problem by denying the existence of the gaping gores or perhaps by proposing secondary ad hoc hypotheses to "save the appearances," and that's okay and perfectly legitimate. As Kuhn showed, that's the way "Normal Science" works, so go for it. But watch out for Ockham!

    That's enough for now, but stay tuned... Coming up next: the Arctic Paradox, same Bat time, same Bat channel!
     
    Last edited: Jun 24, 2012

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