Expanding Earth??

Some pretty funny stuff there gunga.

Rather silly when you look at. Water makes up 71% of the earth's surface which means in order for the present land to make up all the earth's surface the diameter of the earth would have to be about 1/2 of what it is now.

Then we look at the volume of a sphere. If I did my math correctly about 85% of the earth's present volume would not fit in a sphere 1/2 the size of the present earth. This means that the earth would have to be denser for it to be smaller. Unlikely under current physics.

This was already posted in another thread (Diest TKO?), and the author asked FM to comment. It's horseshit.

Gunga wrote:



Hummmmm.




I think you are right!

What I mean is, I don't know of anything which could cause the Earth to expand that much in the amount of time available.

I was trying for a laugh, Gunga...not an explanation.

So where did all the water go, or conversely where did it come from? And if it wasn't there, how did life exist(He's tallking about dinosaurs and platypuses--we're all mostly water remember). Where did the mass to increase it come from? If there are no plates moving around, why do we have midocean mountain ridges where they're moving farther apart? If there are no tectonic plates why do we have mountains being formed where they're bashing into each other? IIF there are no tectonic plates, why do we have earthquakes where they're rubbing against each other? At last, though, we have a weird science theory which gunga apparently does NOT believe, and that's a first.

Amen. Somebody give that man a cee-gar . . .

The close fit of the continents with each other has always been the starting point of the early proponents of Continental Drift. What the You Tube piece is trying to say is that by merely expanding the planet like a balloon we can account for all continental drift without the mechanism of sea floor spreading. While its a simple proposal, it doesnt comport with evidence

1We know by the "tracks" left by moving landmasses that these masses didnt all move at the same time (Thi would be a bugaboo to the expansion theory when he couldnt explain why, say, India seemed to ahve moved separately and independently of the movement of Asia itself.

2We have really good evidence that continental drift episodes have occured at least 3 times before the last (Gondwana) separations. (If the expanding earth folks are right, they would have to propose a model in which the earth would puff up and deflate, then puff up and deflate (etc) several times.

3. Best of all, is that we know that the mid ocean ridges contain the "engine" of separation by generating new crust. Further, by seismic records we can clearly see the discontinuities that allow the crust to overide the Moho. Also, at the continental margins are great areas of subduction where we can, (Again by seismics) track the sinking down and assimilation of these ocean crusts. All along these "Leading" continental margins, we can see resultant volcanoes that provide the chemistry that parallels the rock makeup of the nearby oceanic and continental landmasses. Thats why volcano chemistry of HAwaii is different from that of California and California is different from Peru.

While there may be some tidal bulging going on , this had been going on for a long time and we just dont have evidence of any substantial expansion that would account for all the continental drift. It, like many other ideas, make good stories but dont have much credibility .

BEST BOOK on this subject is "Continents and SUpercontinents" (2004) John Rogers and M Santosh, OXFORD PRESS. ISBN 0-19-516589-6