http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20091122x1.html
Oceans of data: This map, using radiometric data compiled by the U.S.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, illustrates the process by
which the ocean floors have been created within the last 200 million years.
Pink and red indicate the most recent additions; greens followed by blues are
the oldest. Detail added by researcher Neal Adams' Continuity Associates breaks
the growth into 10-million-year sections. Humans have existed on Earth only
during the time indicated by the pink lines. NOAA / CONTINUITY ASSOCIATES
Our growing Earth?
Put aside that stuff about continental drift and tectonic plates explaining the
world as it is, and consider a globe that may be getting bigger all round like
a pumpkin on a vine
By JEFF OGRISSEG
Special to The Japan Times
The world is awash with wild theories, conjecture and speculation about
everything you could imagine - and then some.
However, one theory that popped up some time ago stands out due to its
unexpected curiosity: Earth is enlarging - in the way a pumpkin both balloons
and adds mass.
Could this theory offer one simple explanation for the current distance between
Earth's continents, and the death of the dinosaurs - without involving a
Hollywood-size asteroid - and turn the long-held notion of India smashing into
Asia on its head?
Is it merely a coincidence that you can reassemble the continents into a single
supercontinent that would encase a much smaller Earth?
Growing Earth Theory says yes, yes, yes - and no; geology is not big on
coincidences.
Though much of the theory is routinely ignored or dismissed by mainstream
scientists, as its specifics reveal themselves, a nagging awareness persists
that "dismissed" does not mean "disproved."
Indeed, the prevailing explanation of how the continents came to be where they
are today - Plate Tectonics Theory - was also generally dismissed by mainstream
science until well into the 1950s.
That theory, incidentally, draws on much the same data as Growing Earth Theory.
Plate Tectonics Theory assumes the Earth has been about the same size since it
was created some 4.5 billion years ago out of material thrown across space in
the so-called Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.
That assumption has gained further traction due to a lack of evidence that our
planet may have been smaller or may be growing according to the 18th-century
Kant-Laplace nebular hypothesis about the formation of our solar system in an
ever-expanding universe.
On the other hand, as its name suggests, Growing Earth Theory has it that the
Earth has grown over the eons - and indeed is still doing so. Start by taking a
look at the complex makeup of this planet we inhabit.
Earth is 40,000 km around the Equator. It has a solid iron-nickel inner core
measuring about 70 percent the size of our moon. Around that inner core swirls
an outer core of liquid metal, about 2,260-km thick, that generates Earth's
magnetic fields. This is all encased in a 2,980-km thick blanket of magma -
semisolid rock kept just below its melting point by tremendous pressure bearing
down on it from what is called the mantle.
At points of weakness in this solid rock mantle, magma melts due to the reduced
pressure and then escapes through it to the surface in a volcanic eruption.
This is followed by the magma's cooling or crystallization as it gradually
becomes an additional part of Earth's relatively thin crust.
The mostly granite crust beneath the continental land masses is around 3.5
billion years old and averages 60- to 100-km thick, though it is deeper in some
places. It is either resting on, or rooted into, the mantle.
The crust beneath our oceans, however, is markedly thinner and younger.
Consisting mostly of dense basalt (volcanic rock) and gabbro (crystallized
basalt), it is only about 8- to 10-km thick and 200 million years old at most.
Meanwhile, under our oceans and running almost entirely around the planet is a
65,000-km-long network of volcanic rifts, through which new volcanic material
is being continuously added in an accepted process called sea-floor spreading.
However, scientists favoring Plate Tectonics Theory maintain that this new
material is not actually new, but is material that is recycled in a theoretical
convective cycle called subduction.
This cycle posits that the tectonic plates are moving and that they force the
material down from the surface (or the mantle) back into the molten magma
blanket - from where it eventually re-emerges. This analysis allows the surface
of the planet to remain the same size.
The problem with Growing Earth Theory, mainstream scientists say, is that it
would require the creation of brand new matter - a mechanism for which they
claim has not been confirmed and therefore is not accepted as happening.
However, it probably doesn't help that it also leads to a reassessment of the
planet's very evolutionary nature and, with it, humankind's rise to dominance.
All that aside, Growing Earth Theory, summarized in detail from here, is really
quite simple and even explains a number of paleontological mysteries - but
beware: this is the stuff many dismiss.
The theory has it that, since the Archean Eon some 3.5 billion years ago, our
planet has been ever so slowly growing in size and mass - and expanding
radially outward like a balloon being inflated.
In fact the theory states that, over the past 200 million years, Earth has
approximately doubled in size and the rate of growth has also been slowly
accelerating.
During the Permian Period, from 300 million to about 250 million years ago, the
annual rate of growth cited by the theory's proponents was about the width of a
human hair. Currently it is estimated to be about 22 mm a year - or some 2.2
meters every century. Certainly, widespread measurements have confirmed that
the equator is expanding, but tectonic-plate theorists attribute that to what
they call "polar flattening" - without explaining the rationale for that.
Growing Earth Theory, however, winds the clock way back to when a
supercontinental granitic crust was covering a half-size Earth like the shell
of an egg.
There were no large mountains or deep oceans in those times, just shallow seas,
although about 70 percent of the surface was covered, as now, by water.
Then, when the growth of the underlying mantle (due to forces not yet agreed
upon), became more than the supercontinental crust could take, the volcanic
fissures started to appear. These are the fissures that now underlie the ridges
we see today in all the world's oceans.
We know that from these oceanic rifts there spews a continuous outpouring of
volatile gases, mineral-rich water and molten rock up from the mantle - magma,
just like from a volcano - which, when exposed to cold ocean water,
crystallizes to begin forming a new, thinner crust.
In the accepted process of sea-floor spreading, constantly erupted material
settles and starts forming new crust while at the same time pushing older
material away from the ridge with the helpful pull of gravity. All of our
oceanic basins were formed this way.
As this volcanic spreading pushed the continents apart, Growing Earth Theory
has it that most of the ancient seas drained off the land masses and started
forming the oceans.
Indeed, it also holds that the volume of water, which, in a hydrogen-rich
universe is readily produced (Enceladus, a moon of Saturn with a diameter of
just 600 km, spews water from its southern pole), has increased in proportion
to the amount of Earth's growth - just as the planet's gravity has increased
along with its increased mass.
In terms of mountain building, too, it's interesting that none of the large,
nonvolcanic mountain ranges on our planet, such as the Alps, Andes or
Himalayas, are more than 100 million years old.
In terms of geological time, that makes them quite recent arrivals.
However, rather than attributing their formation to what would be an improbably
rapid movement leading to the collision of tectonic plates - or to ancient
shields (like that of the Indian subcontinent) breaking loose from the mantle
and sliding about - Growing Earth Theory puts their formation down to folding
and stacking resulting from sea-floor spreading.
This has the effect of flattening the Earth's curvature, but - because the
Earth's granite crust is so thick - it tends to retain its curvature as it
can't bend or stretch. Then as gravity tries to recurve it to the flattening
surface of the growing planet, it cracks and breaks and throws up
mountain-range-size ripples such as today's Himalayas. For 160 million years
until 65 million years ago, dinosaurs were the dominant species and roamed this
planet unhindered by oceans, often migrating much as birds do today, Growing
Earth Theory posits. Indeed, fossil evidence of like dinosaur species continue
to be found on multiple continents now separated by oceans too vast to
traverse. From the fossil record it has also been learned that the bones of
dinosaurs had about the same density as animal bones do today, yet many
dinosaurs were three or four times larger than any existing animals, yet were
probably just as maneuverable. The reduced gravity on a smaller planet with
less mass could well account for this, growing Earth theorists propose, as well
as accounting for the significantly larger flora of that time.
And as for the mass extinction of the dinosaurs in geologically short order,
the theory has it that because they were the dominant species for so long, as
oceans formed between the continents and climatic zones changed, their habitats
and migratory life cycles were fatally disrupted. Moreover, the known decline
of the dinosaurs coincides with the emergence of mammals, which both protect
their eggs internally and will readily feed on those of other species (such as
dinosaurs) left lying around. So the "terrible lizards" simply did not adapt
fast enough as the Earth grew, and that is what killed them off - not some
CG-like impact from outer space. There it is. We are growing from the seams as
new crust is added at the undersea volcanic ridges. No need for giant rocks
from outer space, runaway continents or credulity-straining subduction zones to
consume and recycle epic masses of material.
But if you remain skeptical, or just plain dogmatic, about Plate Tectonics
Theory, the crustal-age map produced in 1996 by the U.S. National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration may yet tip the balance. The colored bars on the map
that are in the ocean areas represent various ages of the crust, as measured by
what's called radiometric dating of electromagnetic radioactivity in the rocks.
For clarity, this rainbow of color has been further graduated down into
segments of 10 million years. The pink and red areas in the very middle are the
most recent additions to the Earth's surface; the yellows, greens and then
blues near the continental shelves represent the oldest.
The data was originally compiled - paradoxically, to back up plate tectonics
theory - because geologists and paleontologists could not find fossils in the
deep oceans older than 70 million years.
For those deft at visualizing 3D processes, working backward in time,
progressively remove each age stripe on the map in your mind and close up the
empty space to see our planet as Growing Earth Theory sees it back through the
eons. Alternatively, simply cut up a world map and then reassemble the pieces
on a smaller-size ball or globe.
Few theories are without their flaws, but Growing Earth Theory certainly has a
way of growing on you.
Jeff Ogrisseg is a Tokyo-based journalist with an abiding interest in Earth
sciences.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
