Mankind's Greatest Hoax
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | Mankind's Greatest Hoax |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Lawrence S Myers |
| Keywords | Expansion tectonics, accreation, nebular hypothesis, subduction, global heat flux |
| Published | 2009 |
| No. of pages | 21 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
The Earth was created in six days? This paraphrase from Genesis in the Bible may be surpassed in absurdity by fanciful "creation" theories in older civilizations of the world, but this belief has endured for 2,000 years without any physical evidence or logical reason to support it.
Overview
Myers — a retired U.S. Navy cryptologist who describes himself as "a non-scientist (cryptolinguist/codebreaker) with no degrees" — argues that the "hoax" of his title is not the Genesis account itself but its secular descendant: Kant's Nebular Hypothesis of 1755 as modified by Laplace in 1796, which holds that the Earth condensed rapidly from a cloud of gas and dust about 4.5 billion years ago and has kept the same size ever since. In his reading, a creation myth was replaced by a scientific one that shares its essential defect, a planet made all at once and thereafter fixed.
Against this he sets a growth model he calls "Accreation" — creation by accretion — in which a captured comet fragment in solar orbit grows continuously by external accretion of meteoritic mass and dust, by internal thermal expansion of a gravitationally heated core, and by volcanism that builds an atmosphere and surface water. The Earth on this account is "still a young planet and destined to continue growing forever". The paper's polemical centre is the rejection of subduction, which Myers calls "not only false, but physically impossible" and "one of the most egregious and avoidable blunders in the history of science". Its practical demand is that NOAA and the National Geodetic Survey recalculate the Earth's diameter and publish a revised datum to replace NAD83, from which a rate of expansion into the future could be computed.
The argument
The case against a fixed diameter
Myers opens with a series of rhetorical questions rather than a derivation. Fossils and archaeological structures buried under lithified overburden imply that vast volumes of material arrived after the animals lived; where, he asks, did that overburden come from "except from outer space"? Dated strata in the Grand Canyon show Precambrian layers deposited when the layers above them did not yet exist. Heezen's 1977 World Ocean Floor map and NOAA crustal-age charts show, he says, that in the last 200–250 million years all of today's oceans have grown from nothing to cover 71% of the planet. And the Earth demonstrably receives, every day, between 100 and 200 metric tons of meteoritic mass and dust, which he converts to a radius increase of roughly ten feet per million years, or about 2,500 feet in 250 million years.
Why subduction cannot work
Subduction, in the standard account, removes ocean floor in the Pacific trenches at the rate new floor is created at the ridges, holding the diameter constant. Myers offers several objections in sequence. Arithmetically, spreading is not confined to the Atlantic: he cites growth of roughly 2–4 cm/yr on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, 4–9 cm/yr on the Indian and Southern Ocean segments, and 8–16 cm/yr (locally 18–20 cm/yr) on the Nazca Plate boundary, totalling more than 24 cm/yr, so that Pacific consumption would have to run at some 40 cm/yr — "an unbelievable velocity".
Logically, he argues, sustained subduction would eventually eliminate the entire Pacific basin and rejoin Asia and Australia to the Americas, while the Atlantic grew into a single world ocean — recreating, he says, Wegener's Panthalassa "that never existed". Mechanically, he holds there is no credible motive force capable of driving thin ocean floor beneath thicker, denser continental crust against the outward pressure of an expanding core: "Has anyone ever successfully plugged an active volcano?" Empirically, he claims the deep trenches skirting Asia and Australia are free of the scraped-off seamount debris and sediment they should be choked with, containing "nothing other than normal ocean sediments".
He adds a methodological charge: satellite GPS geodetic measurements are "extremely accurate but misinterpreted", because they are plotted on a 360° grid and on maps that have never been rescaled to reflect past growth, so a genuinely expanding surface is read as convergence.
Accreation and the life history of a planet
The growth model is stated as a sequence. A comet nucleus is captured by the Sun and enters an elliptical orbit; it accretes meteorites and dust from the space it transits, accelerating as its own gravity grows. On reaching a diameter of roughly 500–600 km it becomes spherical, and sphericity is the crucial threshold: it allows the body's whole weight to be focused by gravity on the exact centre, initiating what Myers calls "diamond-anvil" compression and core melting. Core melting drives chemical separation, distils H2O out of the rock, and eventually finds or creates an escape route to the surface as a volcano. Volcanism then supplies the atmosphere and surface water, thickens the protective air envelope, and plates new material onto the surface.
He treats comets, meteoroids, asteroids, proto-planets and planets as "only different-sized objects" on one continuum, all originating as fragments of an exploded star. The paper appends a "Table of Solar Bodies Arranged by Size", ranging from Icarus at 1.4 km to Jupiter at 143,884 km, with the note that bodies become spherical between Pallas (580 km) and Ceres (940 km). He observes a correlation he takes as confirmation: the Moon (3,476 km) has no active volcanoes, Io (3,660 km) does, Mars (6,794 km) has four dormant ones, and the Earth (12,756 km) has hundreds. The table, he notes, was adapted by Samuel Warren Carey for the appendix of Earth, Universe, Cosmos (2000) with his permission.
The mechanism Carey lacked
Myers presents the mid-ocean ridge — "a linear underwater volcano ~65,000 kilometers in length" — as the mechanism of surface growth, filling the gap opened by internal expansion pressure. This, he writes, "is the mechanism that eluded Professor Samuel Warren Carey and his Expanding Earth theory". His own entry into the subject he dates to October 1980, when an eight-foot edition of Heezen's map showed him that the trench system off Asia matched the curvature of western North America, and that the Vityaz–Tonga Trench continuing through New Zealand into the Macquarie Ridge fitted the bight of South America and wrapped around Cape Horn. He reported the fit to the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco on 14 December 1982.
He extends the picture to mountain building — ranges such as the Andes and the Appalachians as fractured crustal blocks tilted up along the line of continental separation — to earthquakes, which he treats as the surface "readjusting to a larger radius", and to the added leap seconds since 1972, which he attributes not to a slowing rotation but to an increasing circumference.
Heat flux and global warming
A substantial strand of the paper concerns climate. Myers accepts that "the global warming phenomenon appears to be real" but holds that its cause is unsettled and that the debate ignores the heat flux from the mid-ocean ridge and from terrestrial volcanism. He links El Niño and La Niña to volcanism along the Nazca Plate, and the 700–800 °F black-smoker vents to core distillation delivering "virgin new H2O". He also argues that fears of coastal inundation are overstated because the ocean basins are constantly increasing in volumetric capacity. The paper closes with an unusual coda: continuing expansion, not warming, is the long-term danger, and NASA should begin terraforming Mars in preparation for relocating humanity.
Assessment
Myers writes with a codebreaker's instinct for the assumption nobody checks, and the paper is at its best when it presses that instinct on the geodetic question. The demand that the reference datum itself be re-derived rather than assumed, and the observation that measurements plotted on a grid built for a fixed-radius Earth cannot independently confirm a fixed radius, is a fair methodological point about circularity, and it is stated more clearly here than in much of the expansion literature. The paper is also honest about its own status — Myers marks his more speculative moves as "the author's speculation" — and it does not hide that its author is an amateur.
The difficulties, however, are severe and largely arithmetical, and several of them can be checked against the paper's own numbers. Myers offers meteoritic infall as the source of the Earth's growth in mass, then computes from 100–200 tons per day a radius gain of about ten feet per million years. That figure, which he supplies himself, is some four orders of magnitude too small to build the ~40–50% diameter increase he claims for the last 250 million years; the accretion mechanism and the expansion rate are therefore not connected, and the paper never reconciles them. Nor does it address the mass problem at all: if the diameter has grown by 40% while the mass came almost entirely from meteoritic infall too small to matter, the early Earth would have had a mean density around 15 g/cm3 — denser than lead — and a surface gravity roughly double the present value, with consequences for sedimentary and biological evidence that go unmentioned. Thermal expansion is invoked as "a force greater than that of gravity", but no coefficient, temperature or pressure is given, and no calculation shows that core heating could produce a volume change of the required order.
The treatment of subduction relies on assertion where measurement exists. The claim that trenches contain "nothing other than normal ocean sediments" is stated without citation, and it conflicts with the recovered accretionary-wedge sequences and offscraped material logged by deep-sea drilling; more decisively, the paper never engages the Wadati–Benioff zones of deep earthquakes dipping to 700 km beneath the trenches, or the seismic-tomographic images of cold slabs in the mantle, which are the direct observational basis for subduction and which an expanding Earth must explain away rather than ignore. The rhetorical objection that subduction would eventually consume the Pacific is not an objection at all — the standard account predicts exactly that on a several-hundred-million-year timescale.
Elsewhere the paper's confidence outruns its sourcing. The attribution of added leap seconds to a growing circumference rather than tidal deceleration conflicts with the independently measured lunar recession of about 3.8 cm/yr from lunar laser ranging, which accounts for the length-of-day change without any change in the Earth's radius. The claim that mid-ocean-ridge heat flux is a major driver of global warming ignores the measured global geothermal flux of roughly 47 terawatts, some three orders of magnitude below the solar input the greenhouse forcing modulates — a comparison the paper could have made and does not. And the assertion that all of the Earth's water was distilled from its rocks is offered against, rather than alongside, the isotopic evidence from D/H ratios that bears on the question.
Finally, the polemical frame does the argument no favours. Presenting an entire discipline as deluded for 250 years, and its central mechanism as a "hoax" adopted "without adequate testing", invites the reader to weigh motives rather than evidence — and it obscures the fact that the expansion tradition Myers writes in, from Carey onward, has raised real questions about pre-Jurassic continental fits that deserve a better hearing than this presentation will win them.