6-New Views of Earth
To a very small minority (perhaps fewer than 100 individuals scattered around the world), adoption of subduction was an egregious error that must be reversed because the concept is false. The error can be proved with a little logic and a minimum of research effort but subduction is now rooted in the scientific literature and minds of today's scientists; consequently, reversing the error will not be easy.
As one of that small minority who has known for 35 years that the Earth must be, and IS expanding, the past 20 years of my life have been devoted to proving the fact. Convinced by the evidence that the Earth is expanding, finding ways to explain and illustrate it turned out to be more difficult than it should have been.
There it was, plain as day--empirical morphologic evidence on the Heezen and Tharp map that should be immediately obvious to anyone familiar with Alfred Wegener's Pangaea and his continental drift theory. But at scientific meetings no one seemed to comprehend that the Andesite Line and its fit with the western coasts of North and South America proves that all the continents fitted together at one time and consequently the Pacific Ocean basin is a recent structure created entirely within the past ~200 Ma and did not exist earlier any more than the Atlantic Ocean existed at that moment in time.
Several different approaches were tried searching for a way to breach the intellectual barriers. In retrospect, it appears that lumping everything together-- problem, evidence and solution, along with a totally new cosmology--was too complex and too confusing for people not comfortable with complex problems. Perhaps the greatest barrier was that most of the ideas and evidence were completely new and untested--too revolutionary and too conjectural.
The problem then became a search for a way to simplify my attempts to convince the scientific community that the Asian and Australian ocean trench systems were at one time conjoined with the western coasts of North and South America. The connection is identical to the former connection of North and South America with Europe and Africa that is no longer questioned, so why should it be so difficult to understand? The ultimate conclusion to be drawn from this earlier connection is that the entire Pacific Ocean basin seafloor was created late in Earth's history-- during the same period in which the Atlantic Ocean basin formed.
Then came the crucial question of a causative mechanism. There was absolutely no doubt that the Earth is expanding, very rapidly, and that subduction is a physical impossibility because thermally-driven core expansion projects its force outward from the core. Therefore, expansion must be an overwhelming tectonic force of Nature that makes it impossible for tectonic plates to retreat back into the core. Core expansion itself results from compressive heating generated by gravity omnidirectionally focused on the exact center of a spherical body.
The causative mechanism of expansion proved to be both external and internal, and a never-ending process applicable to all planets and the solar system itself. This directly contradicts the nebular hypothesis of birth of the Earth and the other planets that has guided scientific research for the past 200 years.
Supporting evidence for the accreation process came to light in a copy of Reader's Digest found in a dentist's office. The physiographic diagram (Figure 3) of the Grand Canyon walls and its dated geological layers made me realize that incessant accretion of extraterrestrial matter over time is reflected in, and proved by, successive layers of the Grand Canyon walls, coal deposits, and deep ocean sediments that are now covered by hundreds of meters of overburden accreted in later years. But each of those layers was, at some past moment in time, exposed to the Sun as the surface of the Earth!
Core expansion as the mechanism of expansion was another intuitive idea that occurred to me on the morning of 14 February 1981 during the Saturday morning review of Professor Carey's Earth Expansion Symposium in Sydney, Australia.
The dynamic internal mechanism of gravitationally-focused compressive heating was a deduction derived from a compilation in 1987 of solar bodies in order of size, from smallest to largest, which showed that all solar bodies attain spherical shape after reaching an approximate diameter of ~400-600 kilometers. This phenomenon suggested that sphericity would enable gravitational force to be focused omnidirectionally on the exact center of a spheroid, thereby generating compressive heating and melting of the central core.
The idea that sphericity is a fundamental factor was strengthened by a realization that this principle underlies everything in Nature. For instance, water droplets from a faucet and liquids floating in weightlessness assume spherical shapes, and the Civil War technique of dropping molten metal into a vat of water from a height to make cannon balls are perfect corollaries. This also led to a speculation that the mechanism of gravity can be defined as: The attractive force exerted omnidirectionally by the sum total of all atoms in any given body (possibly expressed as total atomic weight). A further speculation is that gravity is linked to, or an integral part of, the massive binding force of the atom.)
Passive external addition of mass gradually increases the overall external size of any body, and the added weight, gravitationally-focused on the exact center of any spherical body, generates ever-increasing compressive heat and a molten central core that grows ever larger and gradually expands the planet at an accelerating rate while it concurrently melts away and thins the underbelly of the mantle and crust. At some future time the core must eventually melt its way to the surface, and a further speculation is that this may account for Jupiter's Great Red Spot.
The next step was contemplation of the future course of Earth's development that was stimulated by Sam Elton's book "A New Model of the Solar System" [1966]. The planetary growth pattern was clear from my 1987 compilation of solar bodies --each planetary body progresses through successive stages of growth from small to large, and then larger, until each eventually becomes another proto-Sun like Jupiter appears today.
Having passed through earlier stages when it was the same size as the Moon, then Mars, then Venus, Earth's next stage of development should be expansion to the same size as today's Neptune--from 12,756.274 km (7926.75 miles) to 50,538 km (31,434 miles), a four-fold increase in diameter. This was a sobering thought, considering that we are now in the throes of worrying about "global warming" at Earth’s present size. This may be an early warning signal that Man's continued presence on Earth, and the future of Mankind itself, may be in jeopardy.
My research resulted in a firm and unshakeable conclusion that the Earth is rapidly increasing in mass, diameter, circumference, total surface area, water volume and atmospheric density. Earth's relative density may be decreasing, but its surface gravity must be increasing, particularly if Elton's hypothesis is confirmed that any body's gravitational power is increased appreciably when heated. [Elton, 1978]
The rate of increase of each component appears to be accelerating and will likely continue to accelerate to endangerment of the human race. Right now we are handicapped because we just don’t know the rate of extraterrestrial accretion of mass or the rate of internal expansion.
The first step to a final resolution of this debate is to organize an international effort to measure Earth's diameter to satisfy skeptics that it IS expanding and then determine the rate of expansion. Once these two crucial parameters are measured the world will have a benchmark and an incentive for everyone to work together cooperatively to concentrate on defining and refining the many diverse elements of geophysics that will be involved in Earth's future transformation.
Only then will it be possible to speculate about the future course of Mankind.
Note
This is part 7 of a series of articles written by Lawrence S. Myers in the late 1990s on the Expanding Earth theory. Click "next" to read the subsequent article.
