Website material for Tectonic Globaloney

The purpose of this bookletis to minimize the scientific jargon in the two preceding books, MarineGeomorphology and Active Margin Geomorphology. Those were written with the intent of getting to the folks involved withthe data collection; that is, pointing out the data sets which had beencollected since the formulation of the plate tectonic hypothesis in 1966, orthereabouts.  On the advice of ThomasKuhn, who wrote that every field of endeavor is open to discussion, and thatdiscussion generally leads to an overturn about the current thoughts on any subject.  In this case, that subject is earthgeodynamics, or plate tectonics as is the current vogue.

     Plate tectonics can be summarized as a three part mechanismused to explain how Mother Earth got where she is at the present time, whiletrying to predict where she is going. Plate tectonics used the fields of magnetics, continental drift, asmattering of paleobiogeography, earthquake seismology, and hypotheticalgeophysics (which is in itself hypothetical). Magma from the interior was thought to rise to the surface through themidocean ridges, conveyor belts would take the newly formed crust away from themidocean ridges in a form of seafloor spreading.  Earth would maintain a rather constant diameter by the subductionof this crust at some time about 180 million years (Ma) in the future.  The thick-rooted, 600-km deep continentswere merely passengers in a 12-km-thick plate driven by a never-ending conveyorbelt, whereby the plates, consisting of basaltic rock, would sink at thetrenches back into the molten interior to be recycled.  The shapes of the continents, and thelocation of several indicator fossils, verified this hypothesis to the pointthat it was/is almost universally accepted as the truth in earth science.

     However, as much as this hypothesis gave a robust explanationfor the formation of the ocean floor, earthquakes, volcanoes, and hotspot(island/seamount) trails, in addition to the location of earthquakes andvolcanoes, it  failed to account for thetimes of their occurrences; it failed to explain why these natural phenomenaoccurred away from their plate boundaries; it failed in its explanation of thedepths of the occurrences; it grossly underestimated the age and physicalmake-up of the ocean floor; it mis-represented the sequential ages of in-lineseamount/island chains; and it failed in its explanation of the ages of oceanfloor rocks collected all over the global ocean floors.  In short, the plate tectonic hypothesisexplains nothing about oceanic data worldwide, NOTHING.

     Additionally, the ocean floor had hardly been seen at the timeof the “great epiphany.”  Severalsingle-beam survey lines were looked at across the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, thePacific Ocean was so large that very little information other than a roughfigure had been seen, and the Indian Ocean was a dream feature, containing the90-east Ridge, the midocean ridges, and a few other artifacts.  To this date the original 12 plates arebeing expanded upon almost daily with the inclusion of micro-plates as eachcruise discovers new ocean floor.  And,this discovery is not on an organized basis; rather, it depends entirely uponwho gets there “fustest with the mostest” in terms of the financing for thecruise itself.

     In this booklet I show data collected since that time.