Excess Mass Stress Tectonics - EMST
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | Excess Mass Stress Tectonics - EMST |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Stavros T Tassos, David Ford |
| Keywords | stress tectonics, electromagnetic processes, earth |
| Published | 2005 |
| No. of pages | 18 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
'Excess Mass Stress Tectonics' - EMST concerns the electromagnetic processes which have been altering low-iron silicates into becoming high-iron silicates, and how this on-going geodynamic and geochemical metamorphosis of Earth is being expressed, in terms of earthquakes, geotectonic, volcanic, and magmatic processes, in the context of a solid, quantized, and expanding Earth.
Overview
Stavros T. Tassos of the Institute of Geodynamics, National Observatory of Athens, sets out here the Excess Mass Stress (EMS) hypothesis, an Expanding Earth model in which the driving engine is not heat but stress. The paper appeared on the Return to the Expanding Earth website; David Ford is acknowledged for critical reading, English corrections and redrawing of figures. Its own abstract states the thesis directly: "the Earth expands and not due to a heat but to a stress engine. Below the depth of about 100 km in the Earth's interior, electromagnetic and nuclear forces, not heat and gravity, are considered to dominate."
The argument runs in three stages. First a sustained negative case that Earth cannot be a heat engine, and so cannot drive mantle convection, subduction or Plate Tectonics. Second a positive proposal: Excess Mass (EM) is bulk matter manufactured in the outer core by transformation of a cold plasma of electrons, protons and positive ions, through electromagnetic confinement, resonance, "laser clustering", shockwaves and controlled nuclear fusion; this new matter is emplaced concentrically at the core-mantle boundary and rises, so that the Earth's mass and radius grow with time. Third an account of earthquakes as the coalescence of crystal-sized solid EM "wedges" intruding upward — a mechanical, quantized process rather than the slow elastic accumulation of the standard model. Tassos also proposes that the whole system pulsates: during orogenic episodes intensified laser clustering reduces electron degeneracy pressure below gravitational pressure, so the Earth contracts; between them it expands again, superimposed on the general expansion.
The argument
Why Earth is not a heat engine
Tassos separates heat from internal energy. Heat is the kinetic energy of atomic translation, rotation or vibration; in a high-pressure solid, where atomic motion is constrained, internal energy is stored instead as "electronic-chemical energy" — free electron movement and compression of electron shells — with low temperature and low heat capacity. Since the deep Earth is such a solid, its energy content cannot be read off its temperature.
He then presses several quantitative objections to convection. With mantle viscosity of order 1021 poises and spreading at ~6 cm/yr, the strain rate in a ~1 km boundary layer is e = 2 × 10−12 s−1 and dissipation E = ηe2/2 = 2 × 10−4 W m−3; decoupling a 100 km layer over the Earth's ~5 × 1014 m2 surface then demands ~1016 W, some three orders of magnitude above the ~3 × 1013 W of the Earth's actual heat flow, and would require core-mantle boundary temperatures of 120,000 to 1,200,000 °C against the ~5,000 °C that plate tectonics itself assumes. He quotes Bott (1982) — "the answer to the question, are the plates driven by mantle drag? — is probably not" — in support.
Four further objections follow: penetration of crust into the mantle requires the mantle to be orders of magnitude weaker than estimated ("like saying that a vertical nail will eventually penetrate into a piece of wood simply because it is 2-3% heavier"); ridge-push/trench-pull demands compression at ridges and tension in the slab, "exactly the opposite of what is observed"; the ~30,000 km of trenches cannot balance ~120,000 km of spreading ridges; and earthquakes cluster at hot, ductile spreading centres while the cold rigid plate interior between ridge and trench is quiet.
He adds that ionization in an iron-melt outer core would need ~60,000 K (7.87 eV), hydrogen ~100,000 K, helium ~180,000 K; that radioactive decay is concentrated in the upper few kilometres of continental crust at ~80 ppb, while the Moon has more than three times that concentration and does not convect; and that primordial heat of ~6 × 1022 W would last only 200 to 20 million years if convection's requirements are one or two orders of magnitude higher than present heat flow. From the Stefan-Boltzmann law he calculates that the temperature giving the observed ~60 mW m−2 heat flow is ~33 K: "in other words the Earth is a very cold body."
Seismic structure without temperature
With Vp = [(k + 4/3 μ)/ρ]1/2 and Vs = (μ/ρ)1/2, High Velocity Zones are regions where the elastic moduli rise with density faster than density itself, and Low Velocity Zones where the reverse holds. Tassos makes this an EMS-controlled rather than a thermal effect: where EM penetrates it causes dislocations, defects and microfracturing, lowering the moduli and creating an LVZ; compaction elsewhere makes an HVZ. This, he argues, explains why LVZs coincide with positive gravity anomalies — which imply excess mass — and with high heat flow, a combination awkward for a purely thermal reading. He also inverts the standard interpretation of potassium in island-arc andesites: rising K2O with Benioff-zone depth reflects decreasing temperature with depth (~1% K2O at ~1000 °C and ~100 km, ~3% at ~800 °C and 200-300 km), and so records the mantle below rather than a descending slab.
Table 1 of the paper gives a proposed rule tying heat flow to temperature, distance from ridge, depth and age, using exponential fits: HFU as a function of distance d from ridge, HFUd = 2.0 e−0.00347d, and of age A, HFUA = 2.0 e−0.0139A. The summary ratio is 1 HFU : 1000 °C : 200 km from ridge : 100 km depth : 50 m.y. age. Energy transport is by free-electron conduction and short-wavelength radiation below the crust, radiant conduction in the nonmetallic crust, and vibrational conduction only at or near the surface.
Excess Mass and the composition of the core
The core is treated as "an electrically unbalanced real gas of particles subject to the exclusion principle": about 3.6 × 1051 nucleons, mostly 2H nuclei, against about 1053 electrons — an excess of roughly two orders of magnitude, which Tassos identifies as the source of the geomagnetic field, since magnetism arises from unpaired or unit-spin electron pairs. Protons at ~3 × 107 m/s generate shockwave pressures ~1030 Pa, far above the ~1026 Pa he takes as needed for fusion and vastly above the ~1011 Pa of gravitational confinement at the core-mantle boundary; deuterium nuclei tunnel, resonate and condense into a "coherent, friction free, and therefore 'cold' super-conducting state" before fusing.
Condensed superfluid 4He in the outer core is offered as the explanation of two seismic facts at once: no S-wave transmission (requiring a fluid) together with a Q of order 10,000 for P waves (requiring a friction-free fluid) — a combination he argues an iron melt cannot supply, since bulk flow would produce heavy attenuation, and which also sidesteps the Curie-point difficulty for an iron core.
The primordial Earth had a diameter about 40% of today's, with core radius ~3170 km and density ~45 g/cm3. Two phases of EM production are proposed: 4000-200 m.y. ago, slow, transforming under 3% of core plasma and building a granitic continental crust 300-350 km thick from large low-binding-energy atoms (23Na, 39K, 40Ca); and 200 m.y. ago to now, in which another ~65% was transformed at higher energies producing small, tightly bound atoms — above all iron at 8.8 MeV per nucleon — building the Fe-rich oceanic crust and more than 90% of the rigid mantle. Atomic size rather than weight governs what can enter a deep crystal structure, so large heavy atoms such as 238U and 232Th are expelled upward, which he offers as the reason they concentrate in continental crust and are nearly absent from oceanic crust.
The expansion rate
From ~60,000 km of ridges oriented broadly normal to the equator and an average total spreading rate of ~11 cm/yr, circumference grows by ~16.5 cm/yr and radius by ~2.6 cm/yr. Tassos calls this "in excellent agreement" with 2.8 ± 0.8 cm/yr he attributes to NASA satellite measurement, and with independent figures of 2.6 (Parkinson), 2.4 (Ciechanowicz and Koziar; Blinov) and 2.1 cm/yr (Maxlow). Table 2 back-projects radius, volume, density and mass: radius 3803 km and mantle mass 0.17 × 1024 kg at 200 m.y.a., against 6370 km and 4.08 × 1024 kg today, with present EM addition ~6.45 × 1016 kg/yr or ~3.86 × 1043 nucleons/yr. Crucially, total mass is held constant at 5.98 × 1024 kg throughout: mass is redistributed from core to mantle, and Tassos states the process "is in conformity with the conservation of mass".
Earthquakes as wedge injection
The standard elastic rebound model, Tassos argues, never says what real force fractures the medium; it posits an "equivalent system of external forces", a double couple of torques of order 1030 dyn cm for M ~ 9. In EMS the double couple is physical: crystal-sized (~10−6 m) solid EM wedges intrude, and their coalescence splits the rock. Wedge emplacement drops the effective strength of surrounding rock from ~1020 to ~1010 Pa·s, so it is "not the exerted stress but the tensile properties" that fix magnitude — one more wedge, "enough plus one", splits the timber. Earthquake swarms then reflect clustering of rising wedges rather than heterogeneity of the source volume; the 700 km depth limit follows because at very high confining pressure the thin wedges produce only cataclastic microfractures that heal; and each deep-focus event must create a new fault, which he identifies as a major failure of elastic rebound. He notes that intraplate stress drops (~10 MPa) and seismic efficiency (~0.05) exceed interplate values (~3 MPa, ~0.015), and draws the paradox that friction is greatest exactly where subduction is supposed to occur.
Assessment
The paper's strongest work is the negative half, and it is not cheaply done. Tassos does the energy accounting rather than gesturing at it, and the mismatch he identifies between the power needed to decouple and drive lithospheric plates and the Earth's measured heat flow is a real quantitative challenge stated in the right units. His use of published mainstream sources against themselves — Bott's own conclusion that mantle drag probably does not drive the plates, Gutenberg's correlation of volcanic lines, 80-150 km earthquakes and positive gravity anomalies — is legitimate and effective. Two observations he foregrounds genuinely resist an easy thermal reading: the coincidence of low-velocity zones with positive free-air gravity anomalies, and the ridge-to-trench length imbalance (~120,000 km of spreading against ~30,000 km of trenches), which any conservation-of-area account must answer. The wedge model of earthquakes has the merit of proposing a physical realization of the double couple, which conventional seismology treats as a kinematic equivalent rather than a force.
The positive half is far weaker, and the reason is consistent: nearly every step of the EM manufacturing chain is asserted rather than derived. "Electromagnetic confinement, resonance, laser clustering, shockwaves, and controlled nuclear fusions" name five processes and specify none. "Laser clustering" is used throughout as the mechanism that raises and lowers degeneracy pressure and so drives the orogenic pulsation, yet it is never defined, no coherence length or gain condition is given, and no reason is offered why an optical analogy should apply to a degenerate nucleon-electron plasma. The claim that protons travel at 3 × 107 m/s in the outer core is stated without a source of acceleration; that speed corresponds to kinetic energies far above any thermal or gravitational budget the paper allows itself, and the whole shockwave-pressure argument rests on it. The 1053 electrons against 3.6 × 1051 nucleons is a charge imbalance of about 1053 elementary charges: Tassos treats it as the source of the geomagnetic field but never confronts the electrostatic energy such a net charge would carry, nor why it does not neutralize.
There are internal tensions in the paper's own numbers. Tassos insists the model "is in conformity with the conservation of mass" and Table 2 keeps total mass fixed at 5.98 × 1024 kg — but the mechanism is the fusion of deuterium into helium and heavier nuclei, which converts mass to binding energy rather than creating volume, and the table's core density at 200 m.y.a. (32.8 g/cm3) and primordial value (~45 g/cm3) are asserted rather than obtained from an equation of state. He also allows, in the same paragraph, that "other processes or mechanisms" fabricating new matter would not surprise him, which weakens the conservation claim he has just made. Similarly, deriving the present expansion rate from the observed spreading rate assumes what is at issue — that no ocean floor is consumed — so the "excellent agreement" with other expansionist estimates is agreement among calculations sharing that premise, not independent confirmation.
The conflict with measurement is the decisive point. The 2.8 ± 0.8 cm/yr figure Tassos attributes to NASA satellites does not survive later work: space-geodetic determinations of the mean Earth radius rate from combined VLBI, SLR, GPS and DORIS solutions are consistent with zero at the level of a fraction of a millimetre per year, roughly two orders of magnitude below what EMS requires. Equally, an eightfold increase in Earth volume since the Archaean cannot be reconciled with palaeomagnetic determinations of ancient palaeoradius, nor with the palaeolatitude spans recorded by Precambrian pole positions, nor with the ~24-hour-day constraint from Devonian coral growth banding and tidal rhythmites, which a radius change of the size proposed would disturb through the moment of inertia. Tassos does not engage these. Nor does he address the seismic tomographic imaging of continuous high-velocity slabs descending to the lower mantle, which is the principal direct evidence for the subduction he rejects on energetic grounds.
The paper is best read, then, as two documents bound together: a sharply argued and quantitatively serious critique of the plate-tectonic energy budget, worth taking seriously on its own terms, and a speculative core-physics narrative whose central processes remain named rather than modelled. A reader wanting to test EMS would have to begin by asking Tassos to define laser clustering well enough to compute with.