EXPANDING EARTH
PREDICTIONS AND EVIDENCE
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PLATE TECTONIC EXPLANATION
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EMPIRICAL AND
THEORETICAL PROBLEMS
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Part I
Previously Confirmed
Predictions of Expanding
Earth
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Formation of ocean crust
between continents via
spreading centers.
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Originally denied by mainstream
geologists until the 1950's, when "the
great global rift" was discovered. The
fact of seafloor spreading was combined
with Wegener's view of Pangea into PT
theory in the late 1960's.
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Although unpredicted, PT has now
subsumed the EE mechanism of seafloor
spreading.
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The age of all ocean basin crust
is <200 Ma
(i.e., that 2/3rds of the Earth's
surface has been created since
the Triassic.)
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Originally denied by mainstream
geologists before 1960's, now attributed
to tectonic happenstance. Trenches
have formed in just the right locations
such that every remnant of pre-Jurassic
ocean floor has been subducted.
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Must attribute exclusively juvenile nature
of ocean floor to coincidence -- and must
rely on the ad hoc hypothesis that the
reason we do not find any ancient
seafloor is that every square meter of
Panthalassa has been subducted in the
last 200 my.
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Paleozoic geological
connections between southern
Laurasia and northern
Gondwana.
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Originally ignored by plate tectonic
cartographers into the 1980's; now
attributed to formation and destruction
of three different oceans, migration of
terranes, and a convenient reuniting of
all fragments into their original Paleozoic
configuration.
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Unpredicted, ad hoc, convoluted, and
coincidental.
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Originally denied by oceanographers
until very recently (sealevel rise was
assumed to be the exclusive result of
temperature and salinity related
changes); now attributed, without
verification, to continental sources.
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Unpredicted and ad hoc. Assumes
constant ocean basin volume. Assumes
hydrothermal vents and other geothermal
processes cannot be contributing more
than a non-negligible fraction to global
sealevel rise.
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Decreased volume of ocean
basins in the Mesozoic
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Unexpected. Now required to explain
such incredibly high sealevels in the
Cretaceous.
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Unpredicted, ad hoc, and coincidental.
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Part II
Recently Confirmed
Geological Predictions
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The Eocene-Oligocene Aleutian
Zodiac fan, requiring a
continental source, is located on
the northern part of the Pacific
plate.
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Contradicts the hypothesis of vanished
ocean plates between the Pacific and the
Bering land bridge, which would place this
fan in the middle of the ocean, thousands
of km south and west of any possible
source
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The unexpectedly northern placement of
the Pacific plate has falsified the fixed
Hawaiian hotspot hypothesis and PT
paleomaps of the Late Cretaceous
Pacific. The unexpectedly southern
placement of East Asia and western
North America is a currently unresolved
issue and focus of much debate.
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Contradicts the hypothesis of massive
vanished ocean plates, occupying 40 to
50 latitudinal degrees, between the
northern part of the Pacific and the
surrounding Laurasian regions.
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The separation of South
America from Antarctica
necessitates the same
separation or greater of North
America and its Bering Bridge
from Antarctica, resulting in a
corresponding increase in the
latitudinal extent of the Pacific
ocean basin since the
Cretaceous.
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Contradicts the hypothesis of massive
vanished ocean plates, occupying 40 to
50 latitudinal degrees, north of the Pacific.
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LateTriassic trans-Panthalassa
biotic links between East Asia
and North America, including
terrestrial tetrapods, marine
tetrapods, freshwater fish,
plants, shallow marine taxa.
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Cross Panthalassa seamount and island
hopping of shallow marine fauna and
marine tetrapods respectively.
Cross-Pangea range expansion at high
latitudes for terrestrial fauna and flora
despite climatic differentiations and a
lack of fossil evidence.
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As is no longer denied, the trans-Atlantic
disjunctions confirm its closure
pre-Jurassic, yet trans-Panthalassa links
involve a greater quantity of the same
type of taxa. The same PT rationalizations
for these disjunctions have been used by
defenders of continental stabilism to
explain away the trans-Atlantic
disjunctions. All other known examples of
such trans-oceanic disjunctions of poor
dispersers are explained by vicariance.
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Tropical and southern
trans-Panthalassa /Pacific biotic
links of poor-dispersers from the
Late Triassic through the Early
Tertiary involving Neotropics,
South America and the most
ancient West Pacific Islands.
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Mostly cross ocean dispersal, including
an 8000+ km rafting trip of the banded
iguana, Brachylophus (Pregill & Worthy,
2003) and a similar rafting voyage of the
flat oyster, Ostrea chilensis (O'Foighil et
al., 1999.)
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The obvious biomechanical limitations of
these problematic taxa and their absence
from all other oceanic islands raise
questions about the plausibility of each
one of the numerous dispersal
hypotheses.
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Essentially all of the
problematic, extant, southern
trans-Pacific disjuncts are
limited range taxa that do not
occur on other island groups.
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Currently unexplained.
(Arguments suggesting that taxa
capable of cross-ocean jump dispersal
are not more likely to be wide ranging
may be rejected. )
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Remote oceanic island biogeography
confirms that taxa that have reached the
middle of the ocean, let alone crossed its
full breadth, almost always have a
wide-ranging pedigree, which is to say,
are descended from taxa that have
colonized other suitable and available
oceanic islands (Kingston et al., 2003).
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Wide ranging analysis of
Gondwanan taxa (Sanmartin
and Ronquist, 2004) shows that
the Mozambique Channel and
Arafura Sea have provided a
greater barrier to dispersal for
both plants and animals than
the entire South Pacific Ocean
between New Zealand and
South America.
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Markedly contradicts the distance effect
--a foundational premise of island
biogeography.
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Complete Cretaceous
circum-Pacific continental
enclosure required by terrestrial
taxa, typically dinosaurs, linking
East Asia <-> North America
<->South America <->Antarctica
<->Australia <-> East Asia.
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Confirms the Cretaceous Pacific was
significantly smaller, not larger than today.
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