The Growing Earth
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | The Growing Earth |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | David de Hilster |
| Keywords | expanding earth, GPS, pangaea, subduction, sea floor age, Neal Adams, Samuel Carey |
| Published | 2008 |
| No. of pages | 24 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
It is quite obvious to most casual observers that South America and Africa were at one time joined. But it is quite unknown to almost all that Asia, Australia and the Americas also were at one time joined. This evidence leads to only one conclusion: 200 million years ago, the earth's continents were all together on a much smaller orb and since then, the earth has been growing significantly. There is strong visual evidence that other bodies in the universe are also growing including other planets and moons. Although there currently is no one accepted mechanism that causes this growth, there are a number of scientists proposing mechanisms although it will probably take some time for these to be confirmed experimentally. In the mean time, evidence is mounting that the earth has grown including in the areas of geology, paleontology, flora and fauna fossil records, GPS, and simple physics that clearly show that the earth's diameter and mass have been increasing and continues to do. This evidence points to the most important question in science today: what is the mechanism that causes this growth? Although not covered in this paper, this mechanism must necessarily span the subatomic to the macro structures such as galaxies and everything in between.
Overview
This is a survey paper rather than a research report: a structured review of the evidence for expansion tectonics assembled from the geological, paleontological, geodetic and planetary literature, with two observations the author advances as his own. Its organising claim is that the continents fit together on a globe of smaller radius with essentially no deformation of their shapes, and that they do so not only across the Atlantic — where the fit has been remarked since Ortelius in 1596 — but around the Pacific as well, once the young sea floor is removed by age. If that is right, the Earth's radius has increased substantially over roughly the last 200 million years.
De Hilster's rhetorical strategy is to separate the evidential question from the mechanical one and to insist that the first can be settled without the second. He acknowledges directly that "there currently is no one accepted mechanism", devotes a section to six candidate mechanisms without endorsing any, and argues that the demand for a mechanism is not a principled bar: "a lack of a mechanism exists for gravity and light and yet we describe and accept the existence of both." His conclusion states the position plainly: "It is no longer a matter of if the earth and other celestial bodies are expanding, it is a matter of why."
The argument
Historical line
The paper opens with a chronology: Ortelius (1596) on the matching Atlantic coasts; Snider-Pellegrini's 1858 map, the first drawn with the continents deliberately joined; Yarkovsky in 1888 proposing that aether absorbed by the Earth is converted into new chemical elements; Mantovani (1889, 1909) on a smaller globe; Arthur Holmes in 1928 proposing mantle convection, "the mainstream's current reason for continental movement"; Hilgenberg's 1933 expanding-Earth globe models; and the pivotal event of 1956, when S. W. Carey — already a recognised contributor to continental drift — found he could not close Pangaea on a fixed-radius globe and turned to expansion. De Hilster quotes Carey's own account: "At the Hobart continental drift symposium in March 1956, I first realized that Pangaea could not be reassembled on the present-size Earth without unacceptable anomalies, particularly the unavoidable gapping fore between Australia and East Asia."
Visual evidence
The 1960s dating of the ocean floor is treated as the decisive dataset: no sea floor older than about 180–200 million years, against an Earth of 3.5–4 billion. Expansionists, he writes, "took this data and used it by systematically removing the youngest sea floor segments and reconstructing the earth on the smaller globe until the entire sea floor was gone", which he presents as giving the reconstructions a method rather than an eye. The Pacific is argued to be under-appreciated for two reasons: a "blind spot", since the Asian and American margins cannot be seen simultaneously on a globe, and its size, the Pacific being on this account the first basin to open. He also catalogues growth fracturing after Shehu and Carey — cuts, furrows, and the shatter fractures exemplified by the basins and swells of Africa and by an over-inflated football.
Other bodies
A substantial section reports Neal Adams's reconstructions of the Moon, Mars, Europa and Ganymede, built from elevation maps, crater density, albedo and surface colour to distinguish "older" crust from younger. De Hilster notes Adams's observation that lunar maria — lower, darker, less cratered — lie almost entirely on the near side, and Adams's explanation that the Earth's gravity permits expansion preferentially where "gravitational pressure" is lower. For Europa he quotes NASA's own page ("Heat generated by the expansion and contraction may be enough to melt part of the crust underneath the surface") and reproduces Adams's closing of the surface bands so that severed lineaments rejoin. Ganymede, with its 2005 surface map and sharply bounded light and dark terrains, is called "probably the most striking example of evidence of expansion other than earth in our solar system."
Biogeography, palaeomagnetism, geodesy
From Dennis McCarthy the paper takes the trans-Pacific sister-taxa argument: narrow-range organisms — freshwater fish, terrestrial vertebrates, shallow bottom-dwellers, weak fliers, salt-intolerant plants — show disjunctions across the Pacific, and of more than 25,000 Pacific islands only New Zealand, New Caledonia and Fiji are old enough to have neighboured South America on expansion palaeomaps; those three are exactly where the problematic disjunctions occur. The example given is the Fijian banded iguana, whose closest relatives live in California and Mexico, with no iguanas on any other central or west Pacific island.
Maxlow's palaeomagnetic work is reported as showing the south pole tracking from Africa toward present Antarctica in a way that fits an expanding Earth, with the claim that "the North and South poles are diametrically opposed on a growing earth while that is impossible on plate tectonic reconstructions." For space geodesy the paper lists VLBI, satellite and lunar laser ranging, GPS and DORIS, concedes that "the interpretation of this data is difficult given that many the measurements are not congruent", and cites a 2008 Wuhan University study reporting expansion of at least 0.5 cm/year from ten years of GPS data.
Tectonic reinterpretation
Two mainstream mechanisms are recast. Continents are held to be anchored parts of the crust that do not change shape, on the argument that floating continents should show more heat beneath them than beneath oceans, whereas the opposite is observed. Mountains are attributed not to collision but to "three dimensional flattening of the continents as the earth grows": a continent moulded to a tighter curvature must crack and buckle as the radius increases, a pattern de Hilster reads off Maxlow's continental altitude profiles.
Mechanisms and consequences
Six candidate mechanisms are surveyed without preference: Yarkovsky's aether conversion; accretion (rejected as insufficient in volume); Dirac's 1938 decreasing gravitational constant as developed by Pascual Jordan; nuclear or "atomic core" processes analogous to those in stars; Adams's "prime matter" transforming to matter at planetary centres, developed by analogy with pair production from a photon; and graviton models in which mass gain accompanies gravitation. De Hilster distinguishes "expanding" (radius only) from "growing" (radius and mass), notes that most current proponents mean the latter, and stresses that "matter creation" here means transformation, not creation from nothing. Downstream claims are collected: water, oil and salt manufactured within the Earth rather than delivered by comets or buried biology; and the gigantism of dinosaurs, giant dragonflies and human-sized crustaceans explained by a weaker past surface gravity, following Stephen Hurrell's inference of past g from body size.
Objections addressed
The longest critical section attacks subduction, "the biggest contention between the growing earth and the plate tectonic community". Six points are raised: Africa and Antarctica are ringed by spreading ridges with no surrounding subduction zones; ridges exceed subduction zones in length and area, and no "bottle-neck pile-up" of crust is seen approaching trenches; on a best-case accounting spreading exceeds subduction by at least 33 per cent; mantle convection is itself unproven, so the no-mechanism objection cuts both ways (citing Lyustikh 1967); ancient sediment should accumulate at trenches and does not; and lighter crust should not descend into denser mantle. He also argues, following Adams, that a fixed-radius Pangaea leaves an unbalanced Earth with an enormous Pacific, and requires ad hoc morphing of continental outlines.
The author's two contributions
De Hilster identifies two observations he believes are not in the literature in this form. The first is a three-dimensional curvature match: the South American and African coastlines do not close in two dimensions — "no matter where you match the continents, they start gapping with increased distance" — which he attributes to continents having been flattened as the radius grew, so that they close only when re-curved to a smaller globe. The second is contour matching in the Pacific: the shape of the South American margin is reflected in the East Pacific ridge and again beyond it toward Australia, which he argues could not survive the drifting and reshaping that fixed-radius tectonics requires.
Assessment
The paper's strengths are those of a good survey. It is organised, it names its sources, and it separates cleanly the two questions that expansion arguments usually run together — whether the radius has changed, and what could have changed it — declining to let the absence of an answer to the second silence the first. That separation is methodologically defensible, and the analogy with gravity and light is not empty: theories have been accepted on evidential grounds before their mechanisms were understood. The paper is also honest about the state of its own side: it concedes that geodetic measurements are "not congruent", that accretion is quantitatively inadequate, and that the graviton model does not explain a sudden onset of growth 180 million years ago. The sister-taxa material is the most interesting evidence assembled here, because it is the one line that makes a checkable prediction — that anomalous narrow-range disjunctions should occur on exactly the islands old enough to have been adjacent — rather than an appeal to fit.
The difficulties are equally clear, and they are mostly about what is not computed. The paper's central claim is a claim about the Earth's radius over time, and no radius-versus-time curve appears anywhere in it; nor is the required growth rate ever derived from the sea-floor area to be added and compared with the geodetic bound. That comparison is the crux. The cited Wuhan result of "at least 0.5 cm/year" is orders of magnitude short of what a smaller-orb closure of the Pacific demands, and it also sits against the standing geodetic result from the same techniques: global analyses of VLBI, SLR and GNSS constrain any secular change in Earth's mean radius to well under a millimetre per year, a limit the paper does not mention. Similarly, mass growth of the magnitude required would alter surface gravity, the length of day and the Moon's orbit; lunar laser ranging constrains the fractional change in G to below about 10−13 per year, and no accounting against that measurement is attempted.
Several individual arguments are weaker than their placement suggests. The absence of ancient sea floor is the observation subduction was introduced to explain, so citing it as evidence against subduction assumes the conclusion. The claim that lighter crust cannot descend into denser mantle is answered in the standard account by the densification of cooling oceanic lithosphere, and by the seismic imaging of Wadati–Benioff zones and tomographic slabs, which the paper does not discuss — a serious omission, since those are the direct observations of subducted material. The Antarctic and African "enigma" is real as a puzzle about plate motion, but is handled in the mainstream literature by ridge migration rather than requiring net crustal creation. And the visual-fit arguments carry the weight the paper places on them only if the fits are quantified: no residual misfit statistics, no rotation parameters, no error bars are given for any reconstruction, which makes the striking figures hard to distinguish from favourable projection choices — exactly the criticism the paper levels at fixed-radius Pangaea reconstructions.
The two contributions the author claims as his own are of unequal weight. The three-dimensional curvature point is genuinely interesting and, unlike much of the rest, is in principle testable: the residual gap between the South American and African margins as a function of assumed palaeoradius is a computable quantity, and computing it would turn an observation into a measurement. The Pacific contour-matching argument is harder to assess, because coastline and ridge outlines are both irregular and the eye is a poor judge of whether such a resemblance is more than chance; without a quantitative similarity measure, the claim that plate tectonics "says these should not match" is asserted rather than shown. Finally, the planetary material is the least secure part of the paper. Europa's bands and Ganymede's terrain boundaries are unquestionably extensional, and the NASA quotation says so, but local or regional extension driven by tidal heating and ice-shell dynamics is not global volume increase, and treating the two as the same conflates a well-measured phenomenon with the one at issue. Read as what it is — a case for taking the question seriously, addressed to readers who have never seen the Pacific reconstruction — the paper does its job; read as a demonstration that the radius has changed, it leaves the decisive arithmetic undone.