View source for Plate Tectonics is Expansion Tectonics

{{Infobox paper
| title = Plate Tectonics is Expansion Tectonics
| author = [[Karl W Luckert]]
| published = 2002
| journal = [[None]]
}}

==Abstract==

A number of conclusions at which popular Plate Tectonics has arrived shall be accepted at the outset as being basic. The crust of our planet appears divided into several fragments or ?plates.? With the continuous addition of rising magma, the plates are growing along the fissures and rifts that contour them. Cooled by ocean water, the rising magma cushions harden and thereby add new stripes of crust.<br /><br />At this point of theoretical visualization the various tectonic theories divide to continue along different paths. The majority of subscribers to Plate Tectonics believe that the Earth has maintained her size, and that for each fresh stripe of ocean floor that is being added a corresponding width is being subducted along continental coastlines or elsewhere in the great ocean. In order to better visualize the difficult wide-angled process of ocean floor subduction, along continental coast-lines, these scientists have postulated a process of subduction that is being kept in motion by currents of magma in the mantle.<br /><br />Nevertheless, the presence of tectonic plates and spreading rifts, as well as the widening of ocean floors, are more easily explained with the help of a general theory of Earth-expansion. The oceans widen, the distances between the continents are getting larger, and the Planet grows. My presentation therefore follows a path of plate-tectonics that accepts the possibility of Earth-expansion.<br /><br />Arguments for Earth-expansion do sort themselves into a variety of foci as well. First, there is a group of arguments that have been developed on the basis of physical theories. With their help one hopes to find an explanation for the suspected increases regarding the mass and volume of the Planet. Such arguments would enable us to explain Earth-expansion materially, but not necessarily tectonically. I personally consider the demand, that a credible theory of Earth-expansion must first explain the physical core of expanding matter, merely as a burdensome overload, which is demanded of Earth-expansionists but ignored by those who demand it when it comes to explaining their own convection currents or magma in the mantle. In my opinion, this demand only serves as a distraction from tectonic questions. I therefore limit myself intentionally to tectonic phenomena that offer themselves superficially as structures and which can be grasped as such. As the pioneering astronomy of Nicolas Copernicus has been purely structural or ?tectonic? astronomy?which never really touched upon the substance of the universe?so it should be possible, to begin with and still today, to approach the problem of Earth-expansion tectonically.<br /><br />Among tectonically oriented theories of Earth-expansion, one can find again several hypothetical placement patterns for the primeval continents. These differences pertain mostly to the continents of Australia and Antarctica. Earth-expansionists who still work in the tailwind of Alfred Wegener do project, upon their reduced Earth models, Australia most often into the northern Pacific; they place Antarctica into the southern Pacific. The round of Antarctica, inasmuch as it happens to be somewhat ?round,? they try to place into the Bight of Australia.<br /><br />With this present-day ?almost established? solution I do not agree. First, the round of Antarctica is too large for the Bight of Australia, and second, for the Wegenerian arrangement there would not have been available, during the Paleocene and Eocene, some continental units with tough and coherent underlying strata that could, with any kind of leverage, have been able to tear these two continents apart. Our continents were not born as freely wandering vagabonds, just somewhere, as Wegener with little knowledge about the ocean floors has still imagined?or as the supporters of present-day Plate Tectonics still like to move them about in their Pangaea puzzles. Rather, the rims of the still sleeping continents were, along the bottom of the lithosphere upon the expanding sphere, weakened by Earth-expansion already during the pre-Cambrian period. To obtain horizontal tearing upon the expanding sphere, tough-cohesive lower layers needed to be overcome.<br /><br />The Earth-expansion theory which is offered here seeks to derive Antarctica with its entire tectonic plate out of the Pacific cavity. In addition, there is postulated an original connection between the Cape of South America and the Bight of Australia. The amount of cohesion among the present continents in the north, and the widened spaces in the south, together with the magnetically based ocean-floor chronologies in the Pacific and in the southern ocean, along the marginal seas of East-Asia, as well as in the eastern Indic, they all support the direction of the conclusion that is being presented here.<br /><br />As far as the large mountain ranges along continental margins are concerned, the popular field of Plate-tectonics has always tried to explain their uplift on hand of a postulated subduction of ocean-floors. However, utilizing a clump of painter?s putty, and a rubber balloon, I shall demonstrate analogously the tectonic origin of mountain ranges along the continental peripheries?having recourse only to spherical expansion, and making do without a process of subduction.

[[Category:Scientific Paper|plate tectonics expansion tectonics]]

[[Category:Structure|plate tectonics expansion tectonics]]