Pangaea

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Pangaea

Postby Peter » Thu 09 Oct 2014 4:31 pm

An SIS “in the news” item on the 8th of October mentioned that when the Australian geologist, Sam Carey, built a model of the globe, on which he could move around the continents as part of Wegener’s theory about continental drift, he realised that the continents would fit together if the Earth was smaller. This “in the news” item is only the latest of quite a number featuring the “expanding earth” idea. It says that after the discovery in the 1950’s and 1960’s of magnetic strips on the sea floor Carey’s theory was trumped by the Plate Tectonics theory. The idea that the oceanic crust is constantly recycled, swept down into the mantle by subduction, supposedly not only explained why the ocean floors are comparatively young, none older than 200 million years, but also the constant rearrangement of the continents. It suggests we look at the computer animations that are referenced and see what we think about them, saying that both have persuasive features.

This may be so, but they both have things they don’t explain. The “expanding earth” theory has to explain where the Earth’s extra mass and its oceans water came from, while the “plate tectonics” theory has to explain why the whole of the earth’s landmass was once a single continent and what force could have driven the continental plates apart. As the plates are still moving, albeit very slowly, this force is presumably still active, but very much less powerful than it was in the quite recent past when it uplifted the Andies, the Rockies, the Alps and Himalayas; the weathering of these mountain ranges confirms their youth.

Charles Hapgood, in his paper The Punctuations Marks of Geological History, in Catastrophe and Ancient History, III:I, Jan. 1981, said there is evidence that enormous uplift of the Andies occurred during human occupation of the mountains surrounding the Titicaca basin where thousands of miles of stone terraces intended for agricultural production were built, some them at an elevation of 18,400 feet above sea level within the current level of eternal snow. This implies that the plate carrying South America has been driven many miles to the west over just the past few thousand years.

The “plate tectonics” theory not only needs to identify the forces that drove the massive recent plate movements and are presumably still driving current modest plate movements, but also needs to explain how the world’s landmass could once have been a single continent. The “earth expansion” theory may have an answer for why there was once a single landmass, but it also needs to identify the forces driving recent mountain uplift. Both theories are inadequate as they stand, but by adding in a recent cosmic catastrophe scenario the “plate tectonics” theory could explain massive plate movements and mountain uplift during the lifetime of mankind; the ultimate driver of the plate movements being the electromagnetic forces of Wal Thornhill’s “electric universe”. However, there still remains the problem of an ancient single landmass.

There is a clue to how a single landmass could have evolved under the “plate tectonics” theory in the Easthampstead Park conference address by Dwardo Cardona about the collapse of what he called the “Saturn Configuration”, see SIS Review, 2000. He maintained that prior to its collapse the Earth was in a close polar relationship to Saturn and had a lithic bulge in its north caused by the proximity of its massive neighbour that was immobile over its pole. He suggested that after the Earth was free from the gravitational force of its neighbour its crust adjusted to its new gravitational condition, implying that when solely under the influence of the Earth’s gravity plate movements redistributed the mass of the northern bulge more equally around the Earth. He suggested that the breakup of the single continent of Pangaea long before the advent of mankind could have followed the freeing of the Earth from a similar close relationship to its much larger neighbour. This implies that he thought that both his “Saturn Configuration” lithic bulge and the single landmass of Pangaea developed as a result of the Earth’s close relationship with its much larger neighbour and that it was the gravity of the neighbour that was responsible for both.

This raises about as many questions as it answers, for example - how did the Earth get captured in its close relationships with a larger neighbour? - how much closer must the Earth have been for a single landmass to have formed rather than a mere lithic bulge? – how long would it take to form a single landmass by plate tectonics? – and how was the Earth freed from its Pangaea creating situation? However, it does answer some other difficult questions. If Saturn was close enough for its gravity to have drawn the necessary material to the north to create a lithic bulge, it was close enough to affect the gravity on the surface of the Earth facing its giant neighbour and a reduction in gravity in the northern hemisphere while the Earth was in its “Saturn Configuration” would explain why mammoths and mastodons grew to as much as double the size of the largest modern elephant. The much greater reduction in gravity on the hemisphere facing its giant neighbour when it was close enough to draw all the Earth’s landmass together would also explain how the dinosaurs grew to the vast sizes they did. The ending of the Earth’s close relationship with its massive neighbour would not only have resulted in the breakup of Pangaea and a rapid redistribution of its constituent tectonic plates, but also in a significant increase in gravity on every continent because all were within the hemisphere that experienced reduced gravity when part of a single landmass

As a theory plate tectonics requires cosmic catastrophe as a driver, but so does the expanding earth theory, because there has to an external source for the Earth’s extra mass and its ocean waters. When it comes to the recent uplift of mountain ranges there is no contest; plate movements during cosmic catastrophes has to be the answer.
Peter
 

Re: Pangaea

Postby Robertus Maximus » Tue 14 Oct 2014 5:33 pm

Is Pangaea a red herring? When we look at a map of Earth it is easy to see the ‘fit’ between South America and Africa- it looks as if they split apart only yesterday!

However, that is just the problem- we are told the two continents were last in contact some 150 million years ago! During this time dinosaurs came and went, sea levels rose and fell and the occasional asteroid collided with Earth. Yet, during this vast expanse of time South America and Africa conspired to preserve their coastlines as evidence of a former connection (?) for our benefit today.
Given the known modern rates of erosion (just think of the UK’s crumbling coastline) the continents would have eroded to sea-level in some 10 million years (see: http://creation.com/eroding-ages).

In ‘Plate Tectonics: A Different View’ John Woodmorappe writes: ‘New evidence contradicts the widely held notion that there is a unique fit between South America and Africa, as well as that between other continents. This has led Dobson (1996) to the following conclusion: ‘The recent discovery of additional continental fits places earth science once again in the awkward position of having morphological evidence for continental configurations that are incompatible with the prevailing paradigm. This is similar to the situation that prevailed between Ortelius’ discovery in 1596 and the acceptance of continental drift in the early 1960’s. While there can be many different interpretations as to what these geometric fits imply about earth processes, there is little room to deny that they exist. If the new fits bear no relationship to earth processes, then we must view Ortelius’ discovery as merely coincidental, not a fundamental observation, and prescient only in an accidental way. Conversely, if the fit noted by Ortelius has meaning, then the newly discovered fits are equally likely to hold important clues regarding earth processes.’

(Note: the ‘newly discovered fits’ included, amongst others Australia and Eastern North America)

Could it be that the development of the new global tectonics paradigm of movable continents whether on a static or expanding Earth was misguided from the start? Based on a geometric illusion no more valid than seeing faces in the clouds?
Robertus Maximus
 
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