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Posted by don findlay on April 13, 2006, 9:56 pm
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Henry Spencer wrote:
> >> The motions of Earth's tectonic plates are now routinely directly
> >> measured, by VLBI and precision GPS. There is still some uncertainty
> >> about some of the details in Earth's interior, but the division of Earth's
> >> crust into separately-moving plates is beyond reasonable doubt.
> >
> >Horizontal movements of the Earth's receiving stations prove nothing...
>
> *Independent* horizontal movements in directions matching predicted plate
> motions prove a great deal:
But there is nothing *independent* about them. And the "directions
predicted" implicate spin
http://users.indigo.net.au/don/ee/madagascar.html
...which certainly does prove a very great deal, but not in the way you
are, I suspect, saying. There is more to Plate Tectonics that just
breaking up the crust and having bits of it "move about". Even
according to Plate tectonics they don't move at all. They grow and
they shrink, ...they grow at the ridges and shrink at subduction zones.
That was the original concept: check it out.
<"plate tectonics" Hess shrinking >
<"plate tectonics" "plates grow">
..a combination which was (for convenience) converted to "movement",
and the concept of "transform faults", where movement 'coming up' was
converted (transformed) to movement 'going down', ...which plate
tectonicists ever since have not questioned (how 'coming-up movement'
in vertical (transform) slices/ segments, converts to 'going-down'
movement of the entire ocean floor), at the same time as having no
answer whatsoever to how transform faults form. Not just one that I
don't agree with, but none of their own. Prove me wrong, ..find
someone you think can answer that one and the comingup/ goingdown
question.
I think from what you say (and have said in the past) - if I may take
the liberty of being presumptious and say that you have the rather
normal but naive idea - (since you have taken the liberty of calling
me a crank) - which is common to find on the internet that " The
Himalayas, as it turns out, started forming about 40 million years ago
when the Indian Plate collided head-on with the Eurasian Plate, shoving
and folding rocks that had formed below sea level into lofty peaks",
.,.when quite clearly the Himalayas and their various contained peaks
are not "shoved and folded, but are grossly more or less flat-lying:
http://users.indigo.net.au/don/nonsense/mtbldgcollis.html
and the only way Plate Tectonics can explain this conundrum is to say
(behind its hand) that, well, no, ...they didn't collide at all, but
India slid under Asia (when crust cannot subduct) and lifted it up.
Note that they don't cite the correct version, which is that Asia
lifted up and collapsed over India, because that would spoil the story
(..about plates) (..moving about) (..independently). Not to mention
all that business of cities falling down and making people homeless,
and Tsunamis, ..and the Himalayas still lifting depite the best efforts
of erosion to rub them away, and (in case you're wondering about India
doing it) the big extensional structure of the Ganges Basin that lies
between it and the Himalayan front. Not to mention the even bigger one
that lies between Africa/ Iraq and the Alps- Zagros, which is why there
is all the oil there and people getting killed with bullets instead of
being washed away by Tsunamis.
See what I mean about the geology? And ignoring it?
But the spin thing. ...You mean to say you don't find that
"interesting"?
> as I said, the division of Earth's crust into
> separately-moving plates is now a directly-verifiable fact.
Yes, but as *I* say, There's more to Plate Tectonics than just
breaking the crust up and moving the bits about. That's an obvious
prerequisite for emplacement of the ocean floors. But everything to do
with emplacement of the ocean floors implicates the Earth growing at
the ridges.
> (And it has
> practical implications, too -- in particular, precision tracking of
> planetary missions must correct for the tectonic motion of the antenna
> sites on Earth.)
Sure, and dropping bombs. But would the vertical adjusment needed,
implicated in the space of time between launch and 'detonation' /
landing make too much of a difference? I think not. The point is
probably not a valid one, given 'geological time'. If you think it is,
then you had better pay attention.
> Doubting it is like doubting the rotation of the Earth:
> it marks you as a crank, who's made up his mind and doesn't want to hear
> inconvenient facts.
"Inconvenient facts"? I've still to hear one. The Earth getting
bigger accommodates everything of the facts supporting plate tectonics,
... and more besides. As far as I'm aware that is not the mark of
crank science. But making unwarranted assumptions (such as there must
have existed an ocean floor exactly the size of the present day one,
and that we happen to live in a happy moment in time to witness it
closing the door on its disappearance) most certainly very much is!)
(another convenient ('fact') of Plate Tectonics). You can witness
another one here, every day, in the way that shrinking (*in brittle
crust*) keeps up with growth (*in brittle crust*) here:-
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/
Today, ..five balance 179.
> >it's a natural consequence of outwards movement and crust-mantle
> >decoupling...
>
> Except that there is no "outwards movement", since the precision-GPS
> measurements in particular are three-dimensional and don't show any
> systematic pattern of upward motion (except very locally in specific
> volcanic/fault areas, an important use of this measurement technique).
I think if you check the various stations, you will find there is
plenty of evidence of upward movement.
http://sideshow.jpl.nasa.gov/mbh/series.html
Whether or not it's "systematic" of course remains to be seen. And I
think many more stations would be needed on this one. (There is an
interesting seasonal overprint.) But surely it must occur to you that
just as (according to plate tectonics) sideways movement originates in
the very specific location of the spreading ridge, upwards movement
will occur on the Earth's surface "very locally in specific
volcanic/fault areas", exactly as you say, and on the big faults that
are known to move (and kill/ make homeless millions of people). How
else? But it seems the upwards movement on those faults is ignored in
Plate Tectonic theory, interested as it is only on the sideways. I
think it's a sad indictment, that you care to label an alternative way
of looking at things "crank" just because it doesn't fit with
consensus, when consensus is anyway at a loss for answers, just about
every way it turns (check out 'questions for the bored' thread).
> >To draw the conclusion you do is overly simplistic. To assume that
> >vertical movements would be (a) uniformly distributed, and (b) on the
> >crust (with receiving stations) (and not on the spreading ridges where
> >there aren't any) and (c) happen in our lifetime to a significantly
> >measurable extent, is 'scientific' in the extreme.
>
> Here we have one of the classic signs of pseudoscience: when a strongly
> predicted effect (consistent upward motion of receiving sites) is not
> seen, make excuses for it instead of conceding that the theory might
> simply be wrong. One of the most important properties of a scientific
> theory is falsifiability: being able to identify a specific set of
> observational results that would definitively prove it wrong. If you can
> make excuses for anything, what you have is religion, not science.
(And here we have the classic response.) As far as falsifiability is
concerned Plate Tectonics is very easily tested: simply interpret the
geological (and GPS etc) data without the overlay of the fundmental
assumption given birth by Harry Hess's "must therefore be shrinking".
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=%22plate+tectonics%22+Hess+shrinking&btnG=Google+Search&meta=
and since you mention religion, there are indeed many parallels with
'consensus science'. You may be interested to read Pliny's (the
younger's) take on the crank cult of christianity, in his letters to
the Emperor.
"Making excuses", is a charge that can be far more accurately levelled
at a model that assumes destruction of the crust commensurate with
enlargment, and ties itself in impossible knots trying to substantiate
it, than a wysiwyg model that says the crust has been dilated by the
extent of the ocean floors, and everything ties together in a framework
of spin symmetrical (over time) with the Earth's rotational axis.
Nothing "crank" about it. It's self evident, ..I suspect, even to you.
> Considering (a), what mechanism would make it non-uniform, except the
> urgent requirement to reconcile an invalid theory with inconvenient data?
> As for (b), there are some receiving stations on or near spreading ridges,
> e.g. in Iceland, and uplift under the oceans but not under the continents
> would quickly have detectable effects on sea level. As for (c), tectonic
> drift is detectable over a period of months with modern instrumentation;
> even setting aside issues like the near-constancy of sea levels observed
> over thousands of years, any global expansion must be very small for it
> not to be easily and unambiguously detected from a precision-measurement
> history now decades long.
>
> >Maybe you would have a go at the QUESTIONS FOR THE BORED ? :-
>
> I've wasted too much time on this already.
>
> (Similarly, don't expect further responses from me unless some genuinely
> new and interesting issue -- not just further crackpottery -- is raised.)
And you don't think that relating the deformation of the Earth to its
spin is interesting? Although I see you do not doubt that the Earth
does rotate, you are not too keen on relating the deformation of the
Earth to it. Nor even in picking up the possibility of the point. (For
a planetary scientist, that's pretty good, Henry.)
> spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
> mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. | henry@spsystems.net
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