INTRODUCTION/MAIN
Introduction/Main
BACKGROUND
Seafarer's Challenge
Why This Interest
Continental Drift
Oppositions to Drift
Craftsman's Approach
EMPIRICAL MODEL
The Empirical Model
Expansion Basics
Model Construction
Expansion Basics
Model Construction
Model Demonstration
Riverbed Formation
Video Demonstration
CONCLUSIONS
Conclusions
Summary of Evidence
The Mid-Oceans Crests
Making Mountains
& The Pacific Ocean
Moon Expulsion
Earthquakes
An Impact Vision
EXPANSION CARTOGRAPHY
Expansion Cartography
The Big Picture
Waterworld
Inland Evidence
EXPAND HOW?
Expand How?
Owen's Plasma Core
Continental Shelves
EPILOGUE
Epilogue
BOOK INFO
Book Info / Feedback
Catastrophism
The theory that certain Earth developments have been accelerated, occurring suddenly through violent and unusual events such as celestial body impact or interference of near-passing meteorites.
A first approach with this thesis to a renown magazine ended with a refusal and the words "interesting, but here it is returned... and best wishes". In other words, "try to sell it". Two months later, Spectrum Ref 9 ran a treatment of Dr. Hugh Owen's Atlas of Continental Displacement: 200 Million Years to the Present Ref 10 published in 1983. While at the British Museum (Natural History) Owen found, after painstaking research, that "a reduced curvature of the Earth would give a better fitting of the separated continents if they were brought together", the same conclusion garnered here. At the same time, Owen also introduced an ingenious idea: "Are the pressure and heat in the interior of the Earth enough to maintain a plasma core? They probably are, and the solid nickel-iron core of the textbooks may be a myth". According to the transmission of seismic waves through the Earth's core and the composition of meteorites, it had previously been thought that the inner core was solid, composed of nickel, iron and probably sulphur. The outer core was assumed to be molten. Owen explains that "the behaviour of waves passing through a plasma core would be similar to that in a solid iron-sulphur core". He suggests that if the inner core is plasma there is a potential for expansion when the core changes from a plasma into an atomic state. The Earth's outer core may be molten because it has already changed into its atomic state. (This author adds that an explosion potential would also be present if the gravity envelope had been broken by an impact catastrophe.) Mercury, Mars and the Moon appear too low in mass to sustain plasma cores much after their formation. On the other hand, Venus is almost as massive as the Earth and may still have a plasma core. Information about its surface so far indicates a highly mobile crust. Owen points out that a plasma core provides a better explanation for the behaviour of the mantle which surrounds the Earth's outer core. The mantle lies directly beneath the crust and its convection currents are responsible for the creation of new crust and continental movement. Furthermore, the Earth's magnetic field can be generated as effectively by a plasma core as by one of nickel-iron. Owen emphasised that, "as far as the Earth's interior is concerned, these are only ideas". An understanding of these matters is not yet clear. Such knowledge is necessary to fully understand the how of expulsion and expansion. According to Owen though, the development of the Earth's crust is "however, something that can be tested critically. The field data fit an expanded Earth model; they do not fit a constant modern dimension Earth model". Both Owen and S. Warren Carey propose a global expansion of millions of years. A tremendous disturbance of a gravity-condensed plasma core, such as a break in its envelope by a celestial body impact, could have produced the same effect in a much shorter period of time. A subsequent renewal of the planet's equilibrium would, as a result, produce an expanded Earth and not an expanding Earth. Continual expansion would jeopardise all of the consolidated measuring axioms.
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