CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
A Texas association proclaims the slogan "Stop Continental Drift," in its attempts to foil the trend to believe that the Earth's crust has been, and is, in motion. The crust is thin below the ocean bottoms and thick beneath the continents. It is broken up into a dozen major plates whose boundaries are defined by faulting, heat, and turbulence. The plates show signs of having moved great distances over time. Most scientists have been converted to this mobile perspective from a static one during the past generation. "We now have a new, mobilist orthodoxy, as definite and uncompromising as the staticism it replaced." So writes Stephen Jay Gould in Natural History Magazine [1] .
Now and then, goes the theory of continental drift -that is, every couple hundreds of million years, the plates renew themselves. The continents do not. They may be split asunder, or bash their fenders, but they move on and on, majestically riding upon the same material, their own mantle magma.
They carry a two-billion-year record of life, while the ocean bottoms have deposited their sediments periodically beneath the sea shores of continents, or beneath other plates which they may be jostling, so that now they carry no more than the last 160 million years of sediments. The plates are pushed around, it is said, by convection currents. These are hot rock moving up to the cooler surface areas and pushing them aside until these bump into other plates which are being also pushed; then they are forced to descend (or force the other plates to descend); they melt once more and become deep mantle material.
Much of this theory is incredible, we shall argue. We accept gladly the facts that the continents were once together and then moved long distances and still exhibit minute motion. We accept also the facts showing the ocean bottoms to be geologically very young. Several other facts are grist for our mill, and some minor theories are also credible; we have mentioned several of these and will mention others. But we shall concentrate upon the quantavolutionary theory that an exoterrestrial catastrophe brought about the movements of the Earth's crust recently, and we begin with the most obvious fact in topography, namely that the continents of the Earth are concentrated opposite the oceans. "This means that 82.6 percent of the total continental area is antipodal to oceanic area." [2]
So saying, C. G. A. Harrison goes on to describe how, on a computer, he rotated randomly coordinates representing the continents on a sphere, in order to discover how often the actual antipodal percentage would appear. He simplified the continental areas into circles and fed their numbered forms into a computer which then randomly placed them to see how much land would be antipodal to oceanic area. He repeated the random placement 2000 times. "The median percentage of continent opposite ocean to be expected from a random distribution of circular continents is 68.0 percent of the continental area. The observed figure of 82.6 percent is exceeded in... 9.6 percent of all cases. Thus from this evidence alone it would appear that there is a probability of only 0.096 that the present distribution of continents is random over the surface of the earth." He repeated the test with triangular instead of circular simplifications of the proper areas and the results were similar. He concluded that "there is less than 1 chance in 14 that the present antipodal distribution of continents and oceans is the result of a random process."
This is hardly surprising. If the Arctic-Atlantic ocean were closed up, if Australia and Antarctica were fitted to their apparent points of departure from southern South America and Africa -that is, if the continents were rendered into a single mass as they appear to have aggregated before the present age of "drift" began, then all of the existing continental land would be antipodal to oceans.
The implication is strong that before the drift began, the ocean areas were in fact land-covered. The major differences between the Pacific Basin and the other oceanic basins, we have noted, indicate that continental material was blasted out of the former and pushed aside from the latter. The movements of the continents since this time can be interpreted upon the premise of a sudden removal of over half the Earth's crust in what is mostly now southern hemispheric ocean. The land of both the eastern and western hemispheres has traveled towards this vacated area. So have Australia and Antarctica.
The so-called plate movements have not been random, nor can they be interpreted in any other way. The continents all exhibit "lunagenic tropism" and nothing much else. They have moved in the particular direction of the lunar-vacated, now south-central Pacific Basin under the special stimuli of global fracturing, electrogravity slide, earth expansion, hydrostatic equilibration, and isostasy. We define isostasy here (and elsewhere) as the process by which all mutually affected elements in a system, consequent upon any change in one of them from within or without, share the effects of the change by changing themselves in closest accord with their peculiar sites and natures. When a change is introduced to Earth from outside, all possible responses of the Earth's motion and masses are drawn upon to incorporate its effects and to do so in accord with their ranked most possible behaviors. Isostasy has to have a function; in the great post-lunar diastrophism, isostasy functions as a tropism. It moves the continents not randomly, nor to the poles or the equator, nor to gather surviving animals for the Ark, but to repair and redress the lunagenic basin.
Propelled by three rifts in all and with a blasted out area east of it, the exception to lunagenic tropism would appear to be the Indian subcontinent. India moved east faster than Africa. But since the continental world was moving generally south as well as east, why did India move north? Relatively Eurasia was moving south, and this is part of the suggested answer. Also India and Australia were simultaneously and together disconnected with a large land mass from Africa and Antarctica by the Atlantic-Indian and Mid-Indian Ocean Ridges; India was simply at the northern end of a plate and could not pivot southwards; northward lay the old Tethyan Sea region, which was now being compressed and closed up. India was pushed by the largest expansive fracture complex per land unit: this "lava grease" worked upon it like the currents of a powerful river moving a raft downstream. When it arrived at the southern shores of Asia, it encountered the Tethyan shear with weakened rocks and islands, all of which it overran, thrusting and folding its edge over them until the Himalayas were produced, meanwhile elevating, with an assist from the swelling mantle, the great Iranian plateau area. (Two surviving races, one African and the other Indo-European or Tethyan, found themselves on opposite sides of the great mountain mass. They encountered one another thousands of years later, when the Proto-Indian civilization was battered by natural disaster and the Indo-Europeans came down from the Plateau.)
The low continental Pangean mass to the south and east ultimately was partly flooded by the waters of the sky, never to reappear again. Higher elevations constituted the South Seas islands of today. This can be called Australasia. It is a land that has the Tethyan shear and moon basin through its northern belt, the northern trans-Asiatic rift to its west, and the South Pacific fork moving eastwards and finally up to mark its southern and eastern limits.
The northern extremity of Pangea was depressed originally by the ice cap and is still rising, although at a decelerated rate. The fjords mark sheared continental mass, sharp, clear, new; the low-lying lands that compose the great flat watery islands and the Arctic Sea (which is mostly continental) signal the former land mass under the ice cap load. Some of it was additionally compressed by the new ice cap formed in the Age of Jovea.
The Antarctic Sea was opened up at the south polar forking fracture, and the Antarctic continent, denuded of ice, was pushed southwards to center upon the new south polar axis. It, too, received a new ice cap beginning in the later "Age of Jupiter," but, to follow Hapgood's "Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings," possibly not until exploration, after a period of civilization, when maps of the coastline were drawn to a considerable degree of accuracy.
Some 450 specimens were recovered at Coalsack Bluff, Central Transantarctic Mountains. Found there were terrestrial amphibians and reptiles of lower Triassic, typical of the same age in Africa, India and China, especially genus Lystrosaurus. These creatures had no "long way around." "The interchange of Lower Triassic tetrapods between Africa and Antarctica could have been only by a direct ligation of the two land masses," probably at Southeast Africa [3] . The Labyrinthadont, the first land vertebrate to be found in Antarctica, has also been found in Africa, South America, and Australia [4] . Marsupials are now placed in South America, Antarctica, South Asia, and Australia.
The infinitely complex faulting of the Earth's surface rocks, aside from the major morphological transformations, is an expected phenomenon of the multiplex pressures of rafting land masses. Additionally, the phenomenon expresses surficially what were more profound upward pressures during the Uranian period. The "latest" evidence supports Alfred Wegener's view that the continents moved only once, this in the Mesozoic, and that there were two continental masses, one to the north and the other to the south [5] . These "findings" are expected in our theory. The Tethyan equatorial waters of Pangea probably are the source of the belief that there were two masses. As for the Mesozoic, 65 to 225 million years ago by conventional reckoning, this period is being rapidly invaded by similar species from both directions, but there may have been a period of terrestrial isolation when the Tethyan waters intervened.
If the continents split asunder or were "born separate" and moved several times, there should be abundant evidence of the events. There is little fresh data on this score. The most prominent basin, the Pacific, hardly gives evidence of having been traversed by continents, though they all drift toward it. Mostly, old theories of the lifting and dropping of land during ancient orogeny have been dusted off and varnished to claim the several periods of movement. Fossil ice ages have been claimed, too, as proof of former dislocations of the continents, but these have been embarrassments to ice age theory from the earliest discovery of pertinent evidence; the presence of pebble drift and till, and of glaciers or high mountain freezing may be referred to dense material fall-outs such as were discussed earlier.
"In the whole of geophysics," Defant once wrote, "there is no other law of such clarity and certainty as that there exist two preferred levels in the Earth's crust." [6] Continents are like ships in a frozen sea. "The continents, steep-sided massive blocks surrounded by an enormous world-encircling sea, have deep roots which project 30,000 or 40,000 meters into the earth's mantle while the ocean crust is but a thin 5000-meter-thick film frozen over the earth's massive mantle." Thus report Heezen and Hollister. These continental blocks, I have maintained, are splittable only by a great external force and a responsive expansive force, while the ocean basins are easily producible by fissure volcanism.
The post-catastrophic process is followed by a rapid relocation of the continents and reencrustment of the globe. The continents were not "just drifting"; they "were going somewhere." A. L. du Toit was veering toward reality when he offered in his early (1937) book, Our Wandering Continents, the idea of a "gravity slide," the creeping of continental masses toward rimming geosynclinal depressions. He gave at the same time perhaps too much encouragement to the idea of thermally driven currents in the mantle. These were, as we may establish, an accessory after the fact.
When F. Tuzo Wilson, reviving du Toit, and the spirit of Plato's ancient words for that matter, exclaimed, "the earth, instead of appearing as an inert statue, is a living, mobile thing. The vision is exciting. It is a major scientific revolution in our own time...," [8] he was thinking of continental drift but could better have been speaking for a continental trot, or rafting, or lunagenic tropism of the continents.
Continental drift theory has invented convection currents to move the Earth's plates with whatever continental land may be aboard on long journeys over the Earth. The convection currents cycle vertically between the mantle below and the crust above; the currents push the plates about the surface like the uplifted trays of waiters in a crowded café, except that waiters as they weave and duck are known to descry paths between the bar and the tables, while noone can even guess why the convection currents go one way or another, if indeed they exist. For example, Harrison, after proving that a non-random process had to account for the counter-oceanic distribution of land, mentioned large-scale convection currents in the Earth's mantle as a possible cause. This seems to put too much directiveness into convection currents, which are already overloaded with the task of pushing huge tectonic plates around the globe. A better hypothesis would have been "lunagenic tropism," the tendency of the continental land to move toward the crater of the Moon and to fabricate new crust in compensation for the excisions. Still, the convection current hypothesis is worth considering, if only because at the moment it is the height of fashion in geophysics.
Tall mountains, a trillion geological faults, islands, bays, and most other morphological irregularities denote that the continents were not peaceful bystanders to the creation of the oceans. The Earth is slightly flatter at the poles than its present rotational velocity would explain. The difference is 1%, which is a disappearing relic of the period of rotational deceleration. The great depressions found in the Hudson Bay, Greenland, and North Eurasian areas, which when refitted, fit the shape of the destroyed ice cap, are also relics of the lunarian crisis.
The trans-Atlantic coastlines, above and below the Tethyan transverse fracture area, fit together well. The probability that the jagged and curved pieces would fit as they do by random development is negligible. South America and Africa, North America and Europe, have many points of topographic, lithospheric, and biospheric identity. The blocks of the continents on both sides of the Atlantic Basin are steep and sharply outlined at the edges of the continental shelves.
The west coast of the Americas are also steep and sharply marked. The western mountains seem to be a unit from Alaska to Chile; this in itself must have great significance: the nearly 180 degree belt of rock had a single, simultaneous experience; how can geology, geography, and geophysics ignore the simple meaning of so magnificent a display? The Andes are so continuous with the Rocky Mountains, and the Mid-Atlantic so parallel to the two Americas, and South America so congruent with the Albatross Cordillera that they must all have been engaged by approximately the same vector forces during lunagenesis.
The force of lunagenesis affected profoundly the now western terrain of the Americas even though its epicenter was probably emplaced on the old equatorial Tethyan belt and thousands of kilometers west of Central America. The western shelves of the Americas are of the same age as the East and West Atlantic shelves. But they poorly match the continental shelf morphology across the Pacific Basin. If the steep shelves of the Americas represent one side of a fracture, where is the western fracture to match? The Americas have moved westward; they have risen greatly; they have probably climbed over and rest upon their once opposing land as upon the fracture itself in the north. Part of the sunken continent of Mu, to pre-empt some wag, is below California and explains why it is so.
The East Pacific Rise pushed up and out rapidly; its transverse fractures struck out far to the West. It met little resistance. The crust had been vaporized, and the upper mantle was boiling, just as it was along the great fractures. To the west of the craters was the larger land mass of Asia, to the southwest the morphological disorganization produced by the fracture system and to the southeast that affected by the elliptoid Moon Basin.
The new coasts of the south and west of the Basin were attracted toward the basin; fragments separated and rafted faster than the larger mass to become the offshore islands of South and East Asia. Oceania was born, much of it in arched array, moving inward upon the swatch cut by the main explosions.
The wide Tethyan tropical belt of Pangea was generally trampled upon by the shifting continents, disappearing beneath the Middle East, South Asia, and the Moon Basin. The "Mediterranean" seas were swept north and south and the area was partially fractured and closed as Europe moved down. The Pyrénées, Alps, and possibly the Balkans were then created by shearing forces as Africa rotated southeast beyond Europe. [9] In the withdrawal of Africa the Mediterranean Basin opened up and waters from northeast, east, south and finally the Atlantic filled it. Later movements may have sunk the Tyrrenian plateau. Later, too, the Triton Sea of the Sahara was emptied leaving a great desert.
The complex Mediterranean morphology reveals deep bowls and large shelves. Hsü has reported investigations of its western bottom, evidencing a dry, desert terrain at one time. The deceleration of the old globe would have promptly dispatched its waters north and south to higher latitudes, supposing it had before been tropical. Huge submarine canyons depict a scene of inpouring waters afterwards. The mouth of the Nile River discloses a narrow, deep gorge cut 700 feet below the sea level of today, which may at that have been several thousands of feet deeper, according to Chumakov. Libyan off-shore canyons are also impressive, as reported by F. Burr and associates.
Geophysics, not having yet considered our hypothesis, has not clearly expounded the original torque of the continents. Earlier I wrote that the Mid-Atlantic ridge veers sharply east at the Equator and explained it as the result of the Earth's sudden deceleration of axial rotation. To this I may now add that five major occurrences signify the same slowdown of rotational velocity. At the same time they explain the location of several land masses.
The first is that the larger of the two branchings of the Mid-Atlantic fracture, arriving at about 50 ° South Latitude, swings in the direction of the Earth's rotation, east, that is. The fracture is pursuing its original route and continues while the Earth as a whole is slowing. It is following the direction of greatest stress, too, where the greatest need to fracture exists.
Second, this bifurcation of the fracture may have happened where the old South Pole may have been; but, more likely, the fracture had not achieved its 'objective, ' the old South Pole, before it was forced to split into two. This giant forking might, as M. Cook has suggested, be the normally expected effect of the decelerating explosive fracture of a globe; it might also be an effect of the resumption of mondial rotation, within an hour or so following the halting that may have produced the aforesaid Mid-Atlantic transverse movement of the fracture. The split to east and west now cut off Antarctica, which because it was in a low latitude and neither east nor west, was rendered safe from lateral movement and became a polar continent.
But, third, the fracture, continuing, divided again. This was logical, too, one fork continuing east, but the original torque reversing on the sphere and heading back north. The east fork severed Australia from Antarctica and the north fork cut between Australia and Africa.
Fourth, Australia proceeded swiftly eastward propelled by the crustal slowdown and the attractiveness of the lunagenic basin to the east. Fifth, India, cut off from Africa, rotated clockwise, as expected, and headed, also as expected, north by east.
Since the world-girdling fracture system will be encountered sooner or later no matter in what direction one goes, any area enclosed by fracture boundaries can be called a plate. Ignoring most fractures or rifts that traverse the continents, one may conclude that some ten (Gould) or twelve (Toksöz) such areas or plates exist. Curiously, they are of greatly different size; the Pacific Plate, for instance, covers most of the Pacific Basin, while the Cocos Plate encompasses a smallish region between Central America and the East Pacific Ridge. Inasmuch as a very slight annual movement of several centimeters seems to be occurring at the edges of most plates, and the boundaries of most plates include some portion of the volcanically and seismically active oceanic ridges, it would appear that the whole of the Earth's surface is somehow in motion, and therefore, a science of "plate tectonics" must be devised to account for the "drift" of the combined, inseparable continental-oceanic lithosphere.
That the Earth may have expanded or be expanding in volume along its fracture lines is a theory not to be dismissed, but geologists for the most part prefer to portray crustal, lithospheric drift (carrying the continents) as a perpetual steady-rate movement, which disgorges molten rocks from deep in the mantle, along one and another plate boundary, while engorging rocks at other boundaries of the plate, thus maintaining a constant global surface area. To account for this upwelling and subduction is no small task; "an area equal to the entire surface of the earth would be consumed by the mantle in about 160 million years" at the presently calculated rates of movement up and down [10] . That would be about 510 million square kilometers, of which 310 would be true ocean basin of about 8 kilometers in depth of rock. Granted a uniform rate of exchange and the time allowed for it (which is roughly based upon the age of the oldest portions of the oceanic rocks ), something like 1.55 cubic kilometers of crustal rocks has to be subducted annually.
The preferred instrument for subduction is the once altogether mysterious but impressive submarine canyons. These line up along the coasts of western South and Central America, also along the western Pacific Basin arc from the Aleutians down to New Zealand, and then too stretch westward off the southern boundaries of Indonesia. Lesser lengths can be discovered in the Caribbean, and in the extreme South Atlantic ocean. Altogether over 10,000 kilometers of submarine canyons are notable.
The time allowed for subduction is conveniently long, so that very little work is required at any given time and place.
To the average kilometer of these canyons is assigned the task of ingesting .00015 kilometer or 1.5 cubic meters of the Earth's surface per year. This is a modest undertaking, but also one can call for help from the old standby, orogeny. India is still smashing into Asia, hence the Himalayan range is piling up debris from the plate edges. South America is being pushed away from the welling-up Mid-Atlantic Ridge and also away from the East Pacific Ridge; perhaps it too is rising from the east while the oceanic crust of its west is being subducted into the long western trench.
The convection cell is a natural heat machine. Hot material deep in the Earth's mantle rises to the cooler regions of the surface, breaks through as a plume or fissure and pushes aside the colder rock; the colder rock is moved along to a subduction zone where it is mechanically forced downwards into the deep mantle. There it assimilates to the hot surrounding material, and may even return to an area where it will rise once again to repeat the process. The scheme is almost entirely theoretical, although one may, by watching a stew pot, see a similar occurrence, the heated mixture arising from the bottom of the pot to displace the cooler surface mixture which then sinks to the bottom, is heated, and then rises once more.
To observe any part of the convection process, even indirectly, is difficult, but bits of data can be made to fit. Thus, the fact that submarine canyons are coincidental with earthquake and volcanic and mountainous zones implies a turbulent function, such as subduction would be. One cannot deny the evidence of upwelling magma along the great oceanic ridges; there is an output, and there is a movement away from the output.
But is there a subduction? The submarine trenches appear to be cleared for action tomorrow, but not the scene of yesterday's action. They have scanty sediments, whereas they ought perhaps to be full of oceanic sediments, not to mention continental sial that would happen to be subducted. In what was the first attempt at observing an actual subduction of sea floor, Heezen and Rawson made four dives to the floor of the Middle-America Trench in a U. S. Navy submersible, DVS Turtle, at around 1600 meters of depth. They observed a set of escarpments moving steplike down to the bottom floor, then an "apron", which shortly encountered the abrupt landward wall of the trench. The apron was bisected parallel to the wall by a "line of contemporary deformation;" this "is interpreted as the sea floor trace of subduction." [11]
But the scene is peaceful. "We observed no features which could be attributed to turbidite erosion or deposition." Further, "at the present time no movement is occurring at the base of the landward wall and probably no significant deformation has occurred there for decades or centuries... Perhaps the most surprising observation was that most of the steep wall is covered by smooth undisturbed ooze." The trench here is obviously long defunct or inadequate for the task assigned it. The stepdown escarpment into the trench seems to be a normal faulting occurrence, like much of the African rift, denoting dropped blocks, in connection with a pull-back motion of the landwards wall of the trench. Still, even if this were an "average" point of a trench, the activity of subduction might be too miniscule to observe.
Several years later, the Glomar Challenger was drilling into oceanic sediments north of Barbados at an apparent plate boundary and discovered older Miocene sediments overlying younger Pliocene deposits. [12] The phenomenon was explained by plate tectonic theory as a product of an underthrusting (subducting) sediment-loaded oceanic plate. As the plate went down its older sediments were sheared off and ended up overlying its younger sediments. All of these formed now part of a mass that culminated in sub-aerial volcanic mountains. The volcanism would be an effect of the descending slab, which generates heat by friction, shear stresses, and rock faulting. Channels for explosive heat escape would be provided in the course of structural adjustments between unlike rock masses. Earthquakes occur until the masses become thermally indistinct, never below 700 kilometers; there the rock can no longer behave in a brittle manner [13] .
The occurrence of earthquakes up to this point is taken to indicate the correctness of subduction convection cells, and plate tectonic theory.
Here is Toksöz' summary of the current theory of the subduction of the lithosphere.
The lithosphere, or outer shell, of the earth is made up of about a dozen rigid plates that move with respect to one another. New lithosphere is created at mid-ocean ridges by the upwelling and cooling of magma from the earth's interior. Since new lithosphere is continuously being created and the earth is not expanding to any appreciable extent, the question arises: What happens to the 'old' lithosphere?
The answer came in the late 1960's... The old lithosphere is subducted, or pushed down, into the earth's mantle. As the formerly rigid plate descends it slowly heats up, and... is absorbed into the general circulation of the earth's mantle." [14]
Interestingly, "in certain areas convection currents in the asthenosphere may drive the plates, and in other regions the plate motions may drive the convection currents." Lest the reader hoot at the picture of a driver driving the car but sometimes the car driving the driver, it should be interposed that this latter possibility is a broad hint of what may be the truth of the matter, namely, that so far as the evidence goes, the paving and expansion that went on in the past, and their faint stirrings today, would have to, and do, generate currents, even cyclical currents, in the mantle. How could they not do so?
Where plates collide, to resume the theory, a trench is forced open and one or the other plate descends the trench into the mantle, thus letting the ridge, perhaps thousands of kilometers away, continue to churn up lava and pass it along, so efficiently indeed that folds or thrusts are hardly to be found in the vast expanses of the abyss nor alongside the ridges. The trenches "accumulate large deposits of sediment, primarily from the adjacent continent." (This contradicts another view, Heezen and Hollister's, that the trenches are scarcely sedimented.) "As the sediments get caught between the subducting oceanic crust and either the island arc or the continental crust they are subjected to strong deformation, shearing, heating and metamorphism... Some of the sediments may even be dragged to great depths, where they may eventually melt and contribute to volcanism. In this case they would return rapidly to the surface, and the total mass of low-density crustal rocks would be preserved."
Skillful drawings enhance the text by showing some sediments being scraped off on the opposite side and other sediment being miscilated and conveyed below. Without wishing to burden this one article with problems universal to its genre, one cannot but allude to additional contradictions. There should be enormous masses of plate-served detritus on the inward side of a receiving trench. Indeed, the whole of a previous world of sediments should be dumped in such heaps or carried down into a mantle reluctant, because of its higher density, to receive it.
There are, of course, no such masses. The sediments by the trenches, if they exist at all, are mostly igneous masses, which foregather there in as ordered or disordered a condition as anywhere else. As for the metamorphosed rocks, they show no preference for trenches and can hardly amount to the quantity under consideration, unless this is to be the origin of new granites. The balance of new and old sediments, it appears, is impossibly askew.
The trenches, according to the prevailing notion, have good appetites, but are slow feeders and neat eaters. Perhaps that is why they have never been observed while at dinner. Toksöz refers to low and high subduction rates and draws several diagrams of the subduction process, but offers no proof of subduction other than gravity anomalies (whose findings, he grants, are belabored by uncertainties) and seismology. "The most compelling evidence of the subduction of the lithosphere comes from seismology." Seismic wave behavior in the vicinity of the trenches, where earthquakes are common, has exhibited differences, as might be expected, showing different depths of activity and these have not been interpreted satisfactorily. Now these seismological differences have been assumed to be measures of different depths of the mantle's alimentary canal, so to speak, where different stages of rock digestion are occurring. The argument is almost totally deductive.
If the oceanic plates and basins have been completely renewed every 160 my, then they will have been renewed about 35 times since the Earth originated. Each time these plates would have scraped off some of their sediments upon each other. By now the continents of the Earth should be presented in heaps of sialic rock randomly distributed as islands around the globe. Such sediments scarcely exist. Or they are unrecognizable as such. The sediments of the oceans are less than a kilometer deep on the average. Call them a kilometer; double this to match the disproportion of sea to land; and multiply this volume 35 times. The result, a column over all the land of 70 kilometers, far exceeds the present continental sediments (if the only source of these is oceanic sediments) nor does it appear in any large sedimentary masses distinct from the indigenous continental mass.
The present mass of sedimentary rocks is about 32,000 X 10 20 grams. It is about 5% of the crust. From the deepest trench to the highest mountain of the Earth is about 20 km. Some 44% of this is pre-cambrian, 56% of it of later origins. Most has been recycled several times, but not all, else we should not possess fossils indicative of all ages. "The whole sedimentary mass has been turned over five times." [15] The oceans are thought to have been in a steady state throughout all of this time, picking up and delivering sediments.
Most of this conjecture becomes nonsensical if a single fact is considered: consistent stratification of species around the world, such that exceptions are considered anomalies. If oceanic plates repeatedly dumped their "young" sedimentary contents at the base of the onshore sedimentary heaps, the phanerozoic order would be reversed, as in the Glomar discovery just reported; the older the sediment, the higher up it would be stratified. Such not being the normal case, one is compelled to reject the theory of subduction and perpetual plate renewal. Marine sediments are the majority of all organic facies; they are loaded in temporal order according to the principle of superposition. They did not arrive on the land by plate tectonics; they arrived by tides, floods, land rising, and other quantavolutionary mechanisms. For subduction, forceful convection cells are required. "All the fountains of the deep must be broken up," in a parody of the unique event of the Bible, not once but continuously and forever, over billions of years, enough to move the furniture of all the Earth's land around the world every 160 million years, inch by inch. The path of upward and downward movements cannot be smooth; at the least it is different beneath the thin sima than beneath the thick sial; furthermore, some interception must occur at the two or more levels of the mantle where striking seismic discontinuities are observed; indeed, it should perplex the conductionists that these seismic barriers even exist, for would not eons of convection have effectively erased what, after all, can only be levels of chemical mineral differentiation? Seismic studies show that the Earth below the surface is stratified; what else could seismic discontinuities mean?
The thickness of the Earth's crust, as the physicist P. Jordan once said, is a breath of air blown upon a desk globe. The breath should be unevenly blown, for the continental portion is 40 km and the oceanic crust is only 5 kilometers thick. This is using the Mohorovicic Discontinuity as the boundary between crust and mantle. At this "Moho" boundary the velocity of a seismic signal increases sharply, indicating a density increase from 3 to 3.3, the mean for the crust being 2.8 g/ cm 3 and that for the incomparably more massive mantle 4.5. The increase in velocity (and density) occurs within a band of rocks of under five kilometers thickness. Below the oceanic crust, the Discontinuity zone is less than half a kilometer thick. The Discontinuity seems to be caused by "a difference in chemical composition between crustal rocks and the underlying mantle rocks. " [16]
The theory of plate tectonics visualizes the conveyor belts of ocean crust moving along between ridges and trenches just above the Moho Discontinuity. In cases where the plate is oceanic and encounters a plate carrying continental material, whether supposedly built up of primordial granites and sediments or of trench debris folds, the conveyor belt (convection current) dips down, and, of course, the Moho dips too and resumes at about 40 km below the continental rock. In all of this process, the Moho is conceived to be independent of the tectonic process presumed to be taking place.
This is incredible. It is much more likely that the Moho Discontinuity marks the level at which the continents marched around the world after the Moon erupted, and, below the ocean, the level above which new crust had to be created from the uppermost magma of the mantle with atmospheric chemical participation. A new, subaerial, low-pressure, hydrated factory produced the oceanic crustal basalts out of upper mantle material. The continents and ocean bottoms are probably still in motion along the Moho Discontinuity, as they were, but much more rapidly, when the Discontinuity was born as the boundary between crust and mantle.
There are, besides the Moho, two more major discontinuities in the mantle, one at 400 km depth and the other at 650 kin. In both cases density and chemical composition are believed to change markedly. Inasmuch as both of these discontinuities, as well as the Moho, pervade the globe as "shells" they must be continuously penetrated by rising, falling, and lateral convection currents. It is perplexing to consider how the currents could be maintained throughout Earth history without erasing the discontinuities. Since there is evidence of the Discontinuities but not of the convection, the existence of the convection cells must be doubted. Moreover, as with the Moho, these other discontinuities may represent secondary and tertiary torsion levels, as the Earth, more than once, suffered deceleration of its rotation.
The fact of the general uniformity of depth of the Moho Discontinuity around the world is also an indication that it was formed at the same time as part of an epochal event whose negatively exponential tailing-off was temporally brief. The fact that the continental blocks move at a distinctively different, lower depth in the mantle has less to do with their "greater weight" (relative to the oceanic crust) than with the historical fact of their quite different genesis.
Quantavolutionary theory explains the occurrence of earthquakes along the global fault system, even where no trenches are subducting. And the convection cell theory is susceptible to challenge simply on the basis of insufficient energy, while the theory of plate tectonics as a whole does not pass a number of tests.
Regarding the first point, earthquakes have long been associated causally with faults, even before the oceanic ridge system was known. The submarine trench can be construed as a magnificent type of fault, almost always near an earthquake zone. But a great many earthquakes occur away from trenches. If they occur because material is being stuffed into the bowels of the Earth by a plate, there is yet no evidence of it, and one may as well maintain that the seismism denotes the relative motion of rocks, as was said earlier. The movement is often vertical so that, relatively speaking, some rock is often moving down, but that is not the point. It would be more in order to demonstrate that all the earthquakes occurring landwards of the trenches (and this is mostly the case except in the Java-Sumatra region) bring about increased elevations as the debris is refused by the depths beyond the trenches.
Moreover, if the continents shifted and the ocean bottoms were repaved by an exoterrestrial and hence surficial force, then the disturbance of the Earth's crust and mantle would form a large area of surface directed as a narrowing cone into the mantle until it reached a point below which seismism could not be energized. Such may well be the case. The points would lie along the global fracture system and also where meteoroidal impacts have occurred.
The fact that an overwhelming majority of earthquakes is registered on the sial of the continents rather than upon the sima of the oceanic crust has surely to do with the greater depth of the continents as contrasted with the oceanic crust, but it also has to do with the greater age and rigidity, hence recent disturbance, of the plutonic land rocks. One may surmise that the sima is "better adapted" to movement because it was "born of movement." The very planar, uniform, featureless character of the sea bottom evidences that it has not participated in terrestrial diastrophism, but has, like the water itself, filled in with molten and flexible rock wherever the land has been removed.
The heat required within the deep mantle to expel excessively heated rock up to many thousands of linear kilometers on the surface is, of course, great; and, at the other end of the conveyor belt, or surface convection current, the rock must be dense and cold enough to sink, with a mechanical force assisting. Elaborate calculations have been made to demonstrate the possibility. None are convincing. It must be in many thousands of degrees celsius, enough to burn the bottom of the pot, if the favored analogy of the boiling cauldron is pursued.
However, although the presence of radioactive minerals deep within the Earth is only a postulate, rising radioactivity-produced heat is given as the source, rather than some internal fire. Metaphysical figures are not difficult to come by, my critics will have been observing; so I can assert the same. There must be an irregular distribution of giant kettles and small kettles (because the surface areas of the convection process are vastly different) and hence some zones of radioactivity must be chemically different than others.
It is well known that volcanism gives off great heat into the atmosphere and beyond. Why, with this naturally effective heat venting apparatus, would the cumbersome convection cell be required? There is no limit but the universe itself to the heat ejected sub-aerially; the bubbling stew is without a lid. Why should there be vast surfaces (between plate boundaries) bereft of volcanic outlets while the enormous mass of molten rock is pushed so delicately sideways as to not break the surface? Repeatedly the convectionists and subductionists use the quantavolutionary words "collision" and "plunge" to denote operations occurring at a scarcely observable rate out of "collisions" between bodies which are already impacted and therefore scarcely able to collide, though capable of jostling perhaps (wherefrom we might receive the submarine trenches). Still we read often that plates "collide"; one plate "plunges" beneath another.
They are in a desperate theoretical fix: their instruments tell them that they have only about 160 million years to sweep around the globe; the energy for this must occur by a relative heat emanating from radioactive decay. Some scholars must long for a young Earth whose interior might still have its "primordial heat" to give away. Their belief in stable astronomical motions of the globe and its solar system neighbors precludes their introducing thermal and inertial forces to abet the heat emerging from radioactivity and pressure.
To speak of flowing rocks as the convectionists do, and to a degree all must, is to employ the word viscosity. "Viscosity is a function of the chemical composition, temperature... and pressure..." [17] A high viscosity marks a slow flow: measured in poises, water flows with a 0.01 poise, honey creeps with 100 poises; and the rocks of the Fennoscandian uplift (where presumably once an ice cap and a polar region had produced Earth-flattening) exhibit by one estimate 2.4 X 10 22 poises [18] .
Summarizing and developing several studies, Cook publishes figures of about 10 22 poises as the average viscosity of the crust and upper mantle, a viscosity of 10 13 to l0 14 poises at the bases of continents and about l0 11 poises at a depth of 150 kilometers. A minimum viscosity or maximum fluidity would occur at about the 150 km depth, both geochemical and seismic observations being seemingly in agreement on the matter. But if there are no reasonably short gradients of viscosity thereafter, it is hard to visualize a large-scale convection dynamic in operation, much less a host of a dozen giant cells or a pattern of a thousand smaller convection cells working within the mantle. Not unexpectedly, then, Cook and Eardley calculated that to move the continents even in 200 million years would require forces "a billion to a trillion times greater than those that should be generated by the postulated mantle convection currents." [19]
Some scientific creationists, as exemplified by G. R. Morton, cannot accept continental drift, much less rafting as here described, because by their calculations, "neither convection cells nor any other [lateral] forces could have separated the continents within a few thousand years, if the viscous forces were involved in that movement." [20] The heat generated would have to be in the millions of degrees and would vaporize the Earth. Morton concludes that "either God separated the continents outside of natural agencies or that the Earth expanded in such a way that the viscous forces were not involved." Creationists generally avoid naturalistic exoterrestrialism, Patten being exceptional. So Morton does not consider the possibilities that led the present author to the model of Solaria Binaria: heat can be exploded and fresh atmosphere brought in from a fuller plenum rather than the thin present air of Earth. However, Morton remarkably adds a final sentence, irrelevant to all that he has said before: "The expansion of the earth caused by an expansion of each individual atom due to a change in the permittivity of free space (the electric force) is a possibility which could avoid the viscosity problem." Thus he finally grasps for "the electric force," which, we have seen, is a heat-saver.
We are led back to the only mechanism that can produce low viscosity and provide it where needed, an exoterrestrial and hence surficial force suddenly applied to set the crustal blocks containing the continents -that is, the remaining blocks -into lateral motion. First, an explosion of surface must occur, with heavy electrical attraction and expansion. Then what Cook writes (and he uses the northern ice cap as a self-mover, without exoterrestrial assistance) is à propos: "Crustal distortions under a force sufficient to cause continental drift should then have amounted to from hundreds to thousands of times more than witnessed in the recent uplifts. In a catastrophic drift process viscosity breakdown along the shear surfaces would permit relatively easy flow compared with that of a threshold drift process." [21] Once in motion away from the rifts, the blocks (or plates) will have provided their own "grease" for a movement enduring several thousand years and exponentially declining to today's minute rates of drift. Overall, the pattern of movement was lunatropic, directed at resurfacing the Earth.
That nevertheless some collisions would ensue was to be expected, for the fractures around the globe necessarily expanded to move crustal fragments towards one another as well as toward the lunar basin. It is not surprising that modern studies detect contrary motions, as, for example, South America is being pushed westwards from the Atlantic Ridge and eastwards from the East Pacific Rise at the same time. These are not contradictory motions, so far as the theory of lunagenic tropism is concerned.
Most geologists and geophysicists today are satisfied that the heat generated and in part used to move the dozen plates of the world around is not so great as to make life impossible today or for a billion and more years past. A minority, as here, is not so sure. The issue is complex, technical, and abstract to the edge of pure speculation. This, however, is certain: an exoterrestrial and sub-aerial force can require less continuous heat and dissipate it more quickly; it operates with heat as more of a waste product than the key to the movement of the crust. The greatest portion of the heat given off to set the continents in motion would be explosive and would disappear into cold space with the exploded crust.
The resistance to the movement of the remaining crust would be much less than if the crust of the Earth had remained intact throughout Earth history. The continental blocks would require much less energy to move into the large areas heretofore occupied by continental material but now unoccupied save by an erupting and boiling mantle material. Only several soft kilometers of depth would need to be ploughed through by the continental blocks heading toward the lunagenic basin.
Further the quantavolutionary theory, as proposed here, would rely upon earth expansion, largely owing to electrical discharge, as a precipitator and facilitator of the crustal movement. Except most rarely, as with Carey, the writers on continental drift ignore an obvious probability and even necessity, that when continents drift around the globe and the whole Earth's surface moves -no matter how slowly -the Earth's surface cannot remain a constant quantity, as if some secret ordinance has determined that the globe must have retained its precise figure of today through hundreds of millions of years, no more, no less, no matter what heats burn, what pressures invest the rock masses, what atmosphere bears upon it, what collides, what escapes. Lately, orogeny has come to be added to the marvels created by plate tectonics; the Alps and Himalayas are thus explained; so too the mountains and islands that stand landwards of some submarine trenches. The aforesaid secret ordinance must decree that extra plate is created for every mountain rise, or else admit some expansion of the crust. But if some expansion, why not much expansion? The material that is rising from the hot mantle must bring with it an expansive pressure; it is less dense; but when it cools upon erupting at the ridges does it become more dense? Not if it is like the famous stew pot or porridge in the analogy of convection cells. What remarkable chemical properties the magma must have: having had its backside scraped of sediment by the razor-bladed trench, it returns to the deep mantle millions of years later and hundreds of kilometers away and resumes its former thermo-chemical state.
Scientific advance of an important kind occurs when an acceptable interplay of theory and fact occurs. On the issue of the movement of continents, tropism towards the lunagenic basin was suggested as long as a century ago, by Osmond Fisher. But little was known of the ocean basins and the time scheduled for the event was in the dim beginnings of the Earth. W. H. Pickering of the Harvard College Observatory argued the case in 1907, [22] and it was well publicized. Meanwhile H. Baker was evolving his theory. "The separation of the continents by fission," wrote Pickering again in 1923, has for 18 years "been attributed to the great convulsion that occurred at the time of the birth of the Moon, from the side of the Earth. This explanation of the origin of our Moon is at the present time almost universally accepted by astronomers. We see the same phenomenon occurring in many close double stars." [23] He placed the "center of origin" of lunagenesis off the southern tip of New Zealand.
However, Pickering held to the view that, although terrestrial lunagenesis and the Atlantic fission must have occurred late enough so that the continents possessed their modern forms, the time had to be early: "that a catastrophe involving the sudden removal of three-quarters of the Earth's surface could occur without destroying all life, both vegetal and animal, appears impossible." Therefore he disputed Alfred's Wegener's contention that the Atlantic Basin opened up at the end of the Cretaceous period or in the early Tertiary.
Thus an impasse occurred until the present day. Wegener's continental drift theory is accepted but not its cause. Instead geologists cling to their terrestrial ideology and posit convection currents. The effects of ripping some 50 kilometers in depth off of most of the Earth's surface were conjectured to be utterly destructive of the biosphere. Today much new geological and geophysical evidence can be adduced from an examination of the Earth and Moon, tending to support the terrestrial origin of the Moon and the connection between lunagenesis and continental break-up and movement.
Moreover, the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary is increasingly understood to mark the extermination of most species. Whether this boundary happened at sixty million years or twelve thousand years ago (which I construe to be the case) does not much matter on the issue of biosphere survival. I have pointed out elsewhere that biosphere annihilation was not necessarily predicated during lunagenesis. The immense typhoon that conveyed the crust of the Earth into space would have carried away with it most of the heat generated in the transaction, while at the antipodes of the event, downwards draughts of the then much more voluminous atmosphere would have cooled and regassed the land.
This is only one instance of the physical arguments that can be brought into play to establish that the biosphere would survive. To be borne in mind, also, is the prolific regenerative capacity of all species, no matter what their method of reproduction. The proper question to ask regarding biosphere survival is: what chance did one or more reproductive units of each of a million species have of surviving the conditions of lunagenesis?
To conclude, the tectonic plates are with declining force moving to restore the global holospheric symmetry lost in lunagenesis. They are constrained and directed by the global cleavage system. The subduction theory is demonstrably incorrect. The convection theory, which aside from its weak force and its dependence on subduction theory, depends upon a place to go, is impossible. Quantavolution theory, on the other hand, copes well with continental drift theory, assimilates it, simplifies it, and gives it a strong foundation in cosmogony.
Notes (Chapter Twenty-four: Continental Tropism and Rafting)
1. "The Continental Drift Affair," 17.
2. "Antipodal Location of Continents and Oceans," 153 Science (Sept. 9, 1966), 1246-8.
4. "Continental Drift," V Ency. Britannica (1974), 112.
7. Heezen and Hollister, op. cit., 521.
9. "Mother Earth...," op. cit., 12.
10. M. Nafi Toksoz, "The Subduction of the Lithosphere," Sci. Amer. 89.
12. Roger N. Anderson. "Surprises from the Glomar Challenger," 293 Nature (1981), 261-2.
15. Fred T. Mackenzie, "Development of the Oceans," 13 Ency. Britannica (1974), 480.
16. A. E. Ringwood, "Structure and Composition of Earth," 6 Ency. Britannica (1974), 51.
17. M. A. Cook, "Viscosity-Depth Profiles...," 68 J. Geophys. Res. (June 1963), 3515.
18. G. Robert Morton, "Creationism and Continental Drift," 18 Creation Res. Sci. Q. (1981), 42.
20. "Creationism and Continental Drift," 18 Creation Res. Soc. Q. (June 1981), 43.
21. Cook, Prehistory and Earth Models, op. cit., 271.
22. Am. J. Geol. (1970), 23; cf. CXV Harper's Monthly (1907), 120; Scot. Geog. Mag. (1907), 523.