Continental Drift Contradictions (CDC)

Jim,
Seismotomography has long been showing that the continents are deep-rooted and not freely floating in the theoretical Standard Model's planetary ocean of magma that you allude to. The continents appear to be stuck, embedded in a mixture of solid and liquid magma, most likely a heavily fractured but solid mantle with magma filling fractures and cavities, lakes, small seas but no oceans, a scenario more consistent with my explanation than Continental Drift, more analogous to Shackleton stuck in the NW Passage than Cook exploring the Southern Seas.

Also, VLBI and other measurements of crustal movements have yet to confirm/contradict Continental Drift. Movements detected so far are consistent with reverberations and other forms of noise, again consistent with my impact "fracture-melt" explanation of surface features, with watery Freeze Effect on oceanic/permafrosted rocky planets . . .

Your resistance to impact explanation is contradicted also by the important fact that the non-oceanic rocky planets are all heavily cratered, consistent again with my explanation . . .

I explain general resistance to impact explanation, especially super huge impact, the most likely producer of landforms, in my ebook's 5.3, 5.4, in terms of the Earth's surface features being generally important as "cultural landscape" AND that dominant cultures are anti-Catastrophist, because societies evolve, and anti-Catastrophism has survival value, hence ultimately, ubiquitous moral authority.

ScienceWorld leaders have always gotten their standing, recognition, prestige, ultimately funding for Science organisations within dominant societies in accordance with those morally authoritative ideologies, as Kuhn has explained. Geologists have for this reason been nodding to anti-catastrophism with their Uniformitarian ideologies/orthodoxies, starting with Lyellian Uniformitarianism ~175 years ago.

"I've no interest in Orthodoxies." --- Norman Mailer, 2006

Deep roots on continental rocks makes no sense from a thermodynanic perspective. The mantle is hot and the rocks making the continents would melt at a uniform depth. There are a lot of errors in the modeling currently done in plate tectonics but overall it makes much more sense than what you have faith in to explain how the surface of Earth got where it is. The continents are light and cold, the mantle is heavy and hot. You are right about the existance of impact craters but they don't explain the facts about seafloor spreading of the perfect fit of all the continents into one land mass way back. How would you apply the evidence assuming you know about it?

Jim, Your ". . . rocks making the continents would melt at a uniform depth" is true only if the mantle is generally molten liquid at that depth, which it is not, as seismotomography shows. It is true that "the continents are light and cold, the mantle is heavy and hot", but this does not mean that the mantle is liquid, just because some of it is. Much of planetary mantles and cores are solid, because increasing pressures with depth raise melting points. This is why planetary core centers are often solid, like the Earth's solid iron center.

You ended with: "How would you apply the evidence assuming you know about it?" A short version, sometimes quoting you:

"Impact craters . . . explain the facts about seafloor spreading" in terms of extreme impact energisations of Earth's oceans. These extreme "fracture-melt" energisations produce plumes raising mid-ocean ridges along ocean "serm" cluster bisectional faultlines ("serbils"). Ridge uplift causes the observed subsidence of seafloors downhill, as observed.

The lineal congruencies implicit in "the perfect fit of all the continents into one land mass way back" are explained in terms of a "multi-Gondwanaland" meaning: A planetary scale resonating object (3.1's PIRO-IRO) echoing around the Earth in a thousand places. If you go to my ebook's Volume 3, paper 1, Fig 1 and look at my 1mm acrylic 1st approximation PIRO-IRO template you will see that it comprises the oceanic continents fitted together in a Gondwanaland-like way, except that they overlap in many places.

I have never believed in a super-continental Gondwanaland. I was close enough to one of its inventors, Sam Carey ~45 years ago, to know that the meta-geological physics intuition involved was very basic. As for the geological matching of stratas across Gondwanaland's "sutures", well that too is easily explained:

Gondwanaland disintegration was an anti-Catastrophist theory with great public imaginative appeal which suited society leaders, as explained in my last post AND it was easy to prove, because of those congruencies AND extreme geological complexities of the oceanic continents allowing strata matching between almost any two regions. The rest is History of the Sociology of Science.

Ironically, those congruencies and complexities which allowed that fiddled strong resistance to impact explanations were produced by super huge impact energisations at or sub-horizontally ahead of and antipodal to impactors, as explained in my 11 Jan. posts.

"I've no interest in Orthodoxies." --- Norman Mailer, 2006

Jim, Your ". . . rocks making the continents would melt at a uniform depth" is actually NOT true. It is not what we see in seismotomographs AND it is inconsistent with the fact that latent heat is required to melt anything, while the temperature of the mantle is close to melting point and radioactive heating is thinly distributed and not very powerful.

The mantle has remained a mixture of liquid and solid rock since the last super huge impact just as, and for much the same reason as Arctic Ocean surface waters are a mixture of liquid and solid water.

"I've no interest in Orthodoxies." --- Norman Mailer, 2006

The mantle is primarily solid, as is indicated by its seismic transmission of both transverse (shear) and longitudinal (pressure) waves over long distances. The inner core, which begins at a depth of slightly under 3000km, is liquid, based on its non-transmission of shear waves.

When you find yourself on the side of the majority it is time to reform. -- Mark Twain

Thanks, mafischer. So is it the outer core that's solid, or none of the core? . . .

The above argument about how solid the mantle is is of course not the end of the Continental Drift (CD) argument, because of the longstanding notion in Geology that even the most solid parts of Earth's mantle creeps . . . longstanding since Lord Kelvin, the original proponent of a solid mantle made the grievous mistake of not believing in Deep Time. Hence his solid mantle idea becoming a "baby [thrown out] with the bathwater".