Carl Strutinski
Carl Strutinski | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | December 30, 1946 |
| Residence | Saarbr?cken, Germany |
| Nationality | Romanian / German |
| Known for | Earth Expansion, Orogeny |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Geologist |
Carl Strutinski (born 30 December 1946) is a Romanian-German geologist known for his work on orogeny and his support of the Earth expansion hypothesis. Over a career devoted to the study of metamorphic rocks and geotectonics, he developed a model of mountain building based on along-strike shearing (transcurrence) in the lithosphere as an alternative to the compression and subduction mechanisms of conventional plate tectonics.
Biography
Strutinski studied geological sciences at the University of Bucharest, obtaining his master's degree in 1969. He spent more than 15 years working in a geological enterprise for prospection and exploration, and then some 17 years at the Geological Institute of Romania, where he devoted himself to the study of metamorphic rocks and geotectonics. He completed his dissertation, written in Romanian, in 1997 and was awarded his Ph.D. in 1998. Since 2002 he has lived in Germany.
Scientific contributions
Strutinski became acquainted with S. Warren Carey's book The Expanding Earth (1976), which influenced him profoundly and led to a lengthy correspondence between the two geologists. In 1990 he publicly aligned himself with the Earth expansion idea by publishing the article "The importance of transcurrence phenomena in mountain building" in the Augustithis volume Critical Aspects of the Plate Tectonics Theory.
In 1991 he wrote a short note in French, "Expansion de la Terre et extinction des grands reptiles: une possible connexion", based on the assumption of an expanding Earth at constant mass and a progressively thinning atmosphere, drawing on the earlier conclusion of E. and A. Harlé (1911) that the Cretaceous pterosaur Pteranodon and the giant dragonflies of the Carboniferous could have flown only in a much denser atmosphere than today's. At the 1993 symposium "Frontiers of Fundamental Physics" in Olympia, Greece, he met Carey in person and presented "An orogenic model consistent with Earth expansion", published in the symposium volume by Plenum Press in 1994. The following year, at a symposium on Earth expansion in Wrocław/Sosnówka, Poland, he met Polish and Russian expansionists including Stefan Cwojdziński, Jan Koziar and E. E. Milanovsky, and presented the paper "Uses and misuses of the concept of transform faulting".
In his 1998 dissertation Strutinski set out a hypothesis on orogeny that rejected plate tectonics and incorporated Earth expansion, treating transcurrence processes in the lithosphere as the primary cause of mountain building. In 1998 he presented, together with A. Puşte, the paper "Shear-belt versus compression tectonics: the testimony of regional metamorphism" to the New Concepts in Global Tectonics community at Tsukuba, Japan; it appeared in 2001 in the journal Himalayan Geology as "Along-strike shearing instead of orthogonal compression: a different viewpoint on orogeny and regional metamorphism". His contribution to the Hilgenberg volume Why Expanding Earth? (2003), co-authored with two colleagues, gave an overview of "Geotectonic hypotheses at the beginning of the 21st century". His work also features in the volume The Hidden History of Earth Expansion.