@farmerman,
farmerman wrote:
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I never claimed to have a complete TOE. I am trying to figure it out for myself and I've never excluded the possibility that there is information/knowledge out there that will suffice. I just have no other way to seek knowledge than to actively/critically think about the information
Instead of getting all full of yourself and claiming that science is all BS, why not ask questions to better understand. If you dont believe what Im saying , go find some other geologists who are teachers or who maintain a license to practice(Most states require 12 hours a year of prof devel ed .
I don't know if you've ever taught students, but if you have, do you like it when they just listen to what you tell them and repeat it back without thinking critically and working to really make sense of the knowledge and develop an active grasp of how it works? I don't, so I try to be the student that I would want to teach by thinking actively and critically about questions I have before consulting experts.
It's not "getting all full of yourself" or "claiming that science is all BS" to approach learning using the same scientific method that scientific research is based on, i.e. formulate a question based on the information you have, develop hypotheses, and seek further information that can shed more light on your hypotheses and cause you to develop them further, revise them, and/or discard them as untenable.
What you seem to want to do, which many if not most science worshipers do as well is to jump the gun grasping at straws to reject anything that isn't in immediate agreement/submission to established academic dogma. It's like you are so afraid of upsetting someone whose career depends on a certain theory that you don't want to do proper scientific diligence and take existing knowledge/information/theory as food for thought instead of as gospel.
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Some hypotheses I have explored regarding how the plates move is that the subducted sediments mash together with other sedimentary layers that still contain fossil fuels at the bottom of the plates and that the mixture heats up to the point of forming a lubricating layer
We call these STRUT formations or glie planes. THERE ARE NOT IN ANY WAY the energy behind the movement of plates. Whoever wrote tht is just blowin it out their asses.
Strut formations allo large parcels of sediments (usually stuff like ganister of the Pine Mountain Thrust belt or organic rich units like th chattanooga shales to do slip faulting for 50 or more miles, with gravity as the "motor")
The great "beer can experiment" developed by two oil field geologists back in the 50's had proven how such formations provide glide surfaces as the coefficients of friction are overcome by pressure and high prmeabilty an saturated conditions ) This was how the models of the Pine Mountain thrust were first developed . Modelling led to field drilling and the faulted zones showing large lateral zones of slippage could be read by analyzing the cores where micro "drag faults" developed
Many shallow landslides are caused similarly.
However,]This has nothing at all to do with Tectonic plates moving from ocean ridges to subduction zones.
Based on everything you know and think about what you know, is your opinion that the Earth is a gradually-cooling ball of magma that will someday lose its magnetic field because there is not enough energy being captured/subducted to maintain constant core/mantle conditions sustainably?
In other words, do you expect Earth will someday solidify from the crust to core completely, or do you think that fossil-fuel buildup (along with new nuclear material from meteors) will be sufficient to sustain the magnetic field?
Quote:Quote:The thing is that if distant supernovae can send nuclear fuel to Earth across the galaxy, then we should also consider that our own sun can send energy into Earth's interior by an 'infinitesimally slow' build up of biological sediments.
If y wanna believe that stuff, you better prepare for some pushback by undergrad students .
You realize that the sun's nergy is presented to different areas of the plnet in highly different caloric mega "Bundles" . EG, the high Arctic and Southern Oceans have similar tectonic ridges as the mid Atlantic and Pacific (eg the Menard Zone is between Antarctica and NZ and plates there dont move any differently than in places like The Azores, yet, these oceans are bathed in darkness for many month a year.) So these plates march along at about the same rate all over the planet .
What does that prove? Why couldn't there be currents/flows/rivers of energy/magma that snake around below the crust to all those places? That would be assuming there's more energy subducted in more equatorial zones than closer to the poles; but is that even a valid assumption when you consider that the boreal forests contain as much or more carbon/energy than tropical rainforests?
Mountain ranges on land act as dams where clouds get compressed and rain down, forming deserts on one side and rich forests and valleys on the other. If we look for the same phenomenon in undersea ridges, could there be similar mechanisms at work, such as biological sediments building up more thickly in some areas because of fish/etc. getting dammed in the same way clouds do over land-mountains? I feel like there's a lot we don't consider is going on in the oceans because their 'atmosphere' is liquid instead of gaseous like ours as land-dwellers.
Quote:Id be willing to discuss a way to monitor a "breathing planet" where plate movements are affected by geoid shrinkage or inflation. But not piles of leaves.
What would cause the shrinkage and inflation then?
Biological sediments are more than just leaves. They include all the animals, fungus, and bacterial activity that converts sugars into oils and other denser compounds. Deer eat leaves, for example, and compact the sediments into dropping that are more oily because the deer has a liver that converts sugars into fats, as well as accumulating dietary oils into a denser format. People used to say that crude oil was made out of dinosaur carcasses, but there have been a lot of other animals, fungus, and bacteria operating and dropping sediments since Jurassic times besides just dinosaurs.