Aardwolf wrote:CharlesChandler wrote:"For mountain-building to be a function of a changing degree of curvature, you have to assume that the degree of curvature is changing in the absence of expansion."
This doesn't make any sense. Why do we need to assume the degree of curvature is changing in the absence of expansion? In GET there is no absence of expansion. The curvature is changing while it expands. The rifting is occurring at the weakest points in the crust which are already established.
OK, there are two implications to expansion: 1) buckling at the joints, as you're saying, and 2) rifting at the joints, as I'm saying. But I "think" that the rifting will be more dramatic than the buckling. I'd have to plot out the geometry to get real numbers, but I "think" that you'd get a big gaping rift between the continents where they split apart where they were weakest, and which would preclude any lateral stress.
Also, for the upper portion of the crust to get scrunched at the joints, you're assuming that as the Earth expands, the crust maintains its former degree of curvature, while the larger Earth "flattens" underneath it (i.e., as the radius gets bigger). But this assumes no elasticity whatsoever in the crust, such that it cannot flatten out. I don't think that the crust is that rigid.
Aardwolf wrote:Also, have you found an explanation yet as to why every rift surrounding the Antarctic plate indicates that it is moving away from every other plate it borders? Where is it going? Off Earth like a blister? I think we would have noticed.
I didn't really understand the question until you posted the image. It certainly appears that everything is moving away from Antarctica. Then the question is: why?
Like I said earlier, the global continental fit, and the adjacencies in the fossil record as noted in the Expanding Earth Hypothesis, are somewhere between interesting and compelling. Just be careful of that "all-or-nothing" thing, or you could end up being wrong even when you were right. If you had something that is basically right, but which isn't the whole story, the part of it that has been over-extended will fault the whole thing (if such is the case). Before you conclude that Shock Dynamics cannot possibly be part of the answer, you should study it, because Fischer really did a thorough job. I disagree with him, because he thinks that it was all over and done in 26 hours, whereas I think that the impact set things in motion, and they're still in motion. But I'm not going to toss the whole thing just because there's a part that I don't get.
Likewise, I'm not going to toss Expansion because I'm not convinced that it's the whole story. Everybody else goes all-or-nothing, but I don't know of anything in the real world that isn't a combination of a wide variety of factors, so I always try to keep an open mind, until/if/when I see a model that can explain everything.
So I might have to toss my "Granite Skid Mark" hypothesis, if the Expanding Earth Hypothesis is correct, because those two hypotheses
are mutually exclusive. You can't have a skid mark from a celestial collision that just happens by chance to be in a shape that would completely cover a smaller Earth. But neither of those hypotheses are mutually exclusive with Shock Dynamics. Either the continents formerly covered the entire globe, or they were in one big supercontinent after the collision with Theia (i.e., the Moon). And
then there was an impact that broke up the supercontinent. Either way, 2 out of 3 hypotheses survive.