Planet Earth is growing - fast.

8:10 AM | BY ZeroDivide EDIT



Master of the Universe
Neal Adams reinvented Batman, revived the X-Men, and reshaped the comic book world. His bold new vision: Forget continental drift. Forget E=mc2. Planet Earth is growing - fast.
By Jeffrey M. O'Brien
Forty years ago, Neal Adams belonged to a poor man's gym: a Coney Island moving company. This was years before he reinvented Batman and X-Men, almost single-handedly reviving the wheezing comic book industry. He had talent and drive, but the comics business was tough to crack into, so he did whatever it took to make ends meet. These days, the 59-year-old artist pays to do his lifting twice a week at the Chelsea Piers Sports Center, a beautiful-people jockopolis on Manhattan's West Side. Today, with Ethan Hawke shooting baskets a few yards away, Adams is working his chest.
Except that he's doing more talking than lifting. At the bench press, with 360 pounds resting 2 feet over his head, he's holding forth about a radical scientific theory he dreamed up, one he believes is supported by an undersea map published in 1996 by the National Geophysical Data Center, a division of the US Department of Commerce. The map illustrates that nowhere on Earth is the seafloor older than 180 million years. This has Adams very excited. If Earth is more than 4 billion years old, as most experts believe, how could the ocean floor be so young?
The answer, Adams says, is simple - and it forms the core assertion in his new, 28-years-in-the-making book, A Conversation Between Two Guys in a Bar OR A New Model of the Universe. The map is proof - proof! - that Earth is growing, steadily increasing in mass and volume. The planet isn't just getting older; it's getting bigger.
It should be noted up front that Adams isn't a scientist. He's a self-taught science buff, a man operating in the grand outside-the-academy tradition that has produced both greatness (Thomas Edison, Steve Wozniak) and not-so-greatness (Erich von Daniken). Adams has been fascinated by science for as long as he can remember, and he travels between disciplines like a car zigzagging on the freeway. For him, the notion of a growing Earth is just a starting point on the way to debunking not only a core principle of geology - plate tectonics - but the very underpinnings of geophysics, cosmology, particle physics, even Einstein's assertions about the speed of light. If the Earth is growing, he insists, this means the total amount of matter and energy in the universe is increasing - which means matter is infinite, not finite like big bang theorists believe. Adams doesn't even believe there was a big bang. It was more like a whimper, a birthing cry to herald what's really been going on ever since: Matter is being created all the time, in astounding quantities. The Earth, the sun, the moon, the stars, the entire universe - it's all growing. Not just expanding relative to one another through space. Growing.
It's all explained in the book and accompanying video, which Adams plans to sell for $60 to $80 at www.nealadamsentertainment.com and in comic book stores around the country. The initial print run is 10,000, but if he can generate enough buzz he'll print a lot more and try to airdrop his theories into scientific institutions, school libraries, and bookstore chains. Because information this hot, Adams believes, should not be kept from the masses.
If the book's title seems unlikely to appeal to academics, so does the format. It's a 125-page graphic novel, complete with frames, speech bubbles, and any number of self-conscious puns. Nor is it a natural for the legions of fans who remember Adams mainly for his pulp comics. The illustrations are amazing, and the implications fantastic, but the actual story line is pretty dry and repetitive. Two table-pounding scientists - a radical theoretician and a straw man - work their way through a loooong conversation en route to a telegraphed conclusion: Everything we know is wrong. It's like My Dinner With Andre costarring L. Ron Hubbard.
For Adams, the book is a personal mission. If he succeeds, his elaborate theories will get a hearing in the scientific community, and he'll go down as a modern Galileo. "There's all kinds of things that can come from this," he says. "I want to see it get past the point where it's ridiculed, to a point where people are considering it so we can see what happens. I want to see antigravity. I want to see intergalactic communication. If I'm right, those things will happen."
Of course, he's probably not right, and Einstein is likely to remain standing on his pedestal, frizzy and unbowed. But that doesn't mean Two Guys isn't worth a look. Though it may never win Adams a Nobel Prize, the book is audacious, crotchety, and eye-popping. What more could you ask from an aging comics genius?
At the bench press, Adams finally stops talking and gets ready to lift. As I stand above him, looking doubtful, he hoists the bar off its notches. Quickly, he brings it down near his chest and thrusts it up again. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
Two reps shy of a set, he sits up, beaming. Not bad, his face seems to say, for an old fart.

 The decor in the 45th Street offices of Adams' Continuity Studios is right out of 1975, complete with a mix of paneling, red carpeting, and once-mod mirrors that now seem dreary. Many of the employees are family members, which makes the place homey, though it's also a bit stifling. Especially considering that Adams' current wife, Marilyn, runs the place and his ex-wife, Cory, answers the phones. But this family-saturation approach makes Adams comfortable, and at Continuity that's job one.
Although Adams hasn't published any comics for years, the fame he earned in the late '60s and early '70s is still paying dividends. He draws occasional prints for Warner Bros. stores, and he has designed a few theme park rides, including Universal Studios' T2. Ten years ago, Continuity opened a beachhead office in Burbank, California, to do illustration work for Hollywood, and Adams has plans to break into movies once Two Guys is behind him. Until then there are bills to pay, mostly by way of low-res animation for ad agencies. But that's only when he's not promoting or explaining the book, which he does with unique gusto.
In a typical sprint - a nine-hour lecture he delivered to me one sunny day in November - Adams' stream of often-profane verbiage is interrupted only by swills of Diet Coke and a few bathroom breaks. Sometimes he grows angry at one foe or another ("People are assholes, that pretty much explains everything") or becomes incredulous at the very notion that science is complicated: "I could teach you all you'll ever need to know about physics in a term!" He doesn't stop to eat. He doesn't even wait for questions - he asks and answers everything himself.
His interest in geology dates back to the early '70s, a few years after researchers accepted the notion that the continents rest on tectonic plates that drift slowly around the globe. Adams was struck by the Pangaea theory, which holds that all of Earth's landmass once existed as part of a single supercontinent, until roughly 200 million years ago. He didn't buy it. "Put yourself in my place," he says. "You listen to this and as an artist you try to visualize it. And it occurs to you that this is totally wrong."
First problem: The whole arrangement - with the übercontinent Pangaea on one side of the globe and empty ocean on the other - looked lopsided. "The Earth is spinning," he reminds me. "When you spin something, everything on it evens out." Second: It's obvious that the landmasses bordering the Atlantic fit together - South America into Africa, North America into Europe, et cetera. But it was obvious (to him, at least) that the lands bordering the Pacific would also match up if you pushed them together. The Pangaea theory couldn't account for this fact, and no one dared acknowledge it, Adams reasoned, because it would be impossible for the continents to be joined along both the Atlantic and Pacific seams at once. Unless ...
He began tracing the continents and pasting them on basketballs to see if they might all fit together into a single sphere, and ... it worked! Yes, he decided, Pangaea once existed, but it wasn't a big lump surrounded by water. Instead, it was a shell that covered the entire planet. From this insight sprang Adams' revolutionary theory: The planet was once a third the size it is today, and it's been growing ever since. He believes that in another 200 million years, Earth will be the size of Neptune.
The big bang was just a birthing cry. Matter is being created all the time, in astounding quantities.
To get a fair hearing for this somewhat twisted geological theory, Adams knew he'd have to explain where all this new matter - the extra stuff necessary to fuel Earth's growth - was coming from. He started reading physics textbooks to learn about the atomic structure of matter. Along the way he decided that the universe contains a fundamental building block that scientists haven't yet discovered, an electromagnetically balanced neutral particle that he calls "prime matter," which makes up 90 percent or more of our cosmos. This undetected particle, Adams contends, affects everything that passes through it. For example, it controls the speed at which light travels - which means, among other things, that the speed of light is not a constant, as presupposed by Einstein's famous equation, E=mc2.
As Adams describes it, prime matter sounds a bit like the ether, a pervasive physical essence that 19th-century physicists believed was the propagating medium for light. But it may have more in common with so-called dark matter, a mysterious particle, first theorized more than 50 years ago by Swiss physicist Fritz Zwicky. Scientists have observed dark matter through its effects on celestial bodies, and recently they've begun attempts to isolate and deconstruct an actual particle. This effort promises to be one of the great scientific stories of our time.
Adams already knows what those scientists will find when they isolate dark matter: potential. Dark matter, prime matter - call it what you will, Adams says it's nothing more than "matter in waiting." Given billions of years and the right conditions - like those at the center of the Earth and on the sun - it will evolve into the various elements of the periodic table.
Adams insists that this supposedly impossible phenomenon - the creation of something out of nothing - has been recorded many times. He cites the experiments of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Carl David Anderson, who in 1932 discovered the positron - a positively charged version of an electron that appeared seemingly out of nowhere while he was trying to photograph a cosmic ray in a cloud chamber. Today, the positron is considered a form of antimatter, because at the nanomoment it appears, it searches out an electron and the two essentially cancel each other out, leaving behind a trace of gamma radiation and, Adams believes, an infinitesimal amount of extra energy as the only evidence of their existence. "They call it antimatter," Adams says, "because they say it destroys matter. But that's not what it is."
Almost five hours into Adams' dissertation, my mind begins to wander. He notices me looking bleary-eyed. "Stay with me," he commands, "because I'm about 10 minutes away from really fucking up your brain."
He launches into a round of rhetorical questions: What if the positron isn't antimatter at all? What if it destroys itself in scientific experiments only because it's close to an electron? What if the positron couldn't find an electron? What would it do? Adams holds that a positron attracts - if there are no electrons nearby, it will seek out something else. But what?
His answer is that the positron will attract particles of electromagnetically neutral prime matter. Once these particles join with the positron, they become "neutron material." Maintaining the positron's positive charge, the prime matter will build in layers around it until the whole arrangement is 1,998 times larger than the positron - exactly the size of a proton, which is what the thing has become.
Now, when the proton encounters an electron, the positron at the proton's core is so insulated that the two won't snuff each other out. Instead, the electron will orbit the larger proton. And voilà! You have matter.
In his book, Adams goes into exhaustive detail about how these first particles of matter assemble into hydrogen molecules, then add protons and electrons to form helium and, ultimately, every other element in the periodic table. But he realizes that many people will get bogged down in all the pages of physics. So he's producing a fun Two Guys companion video - an animated Nova -style docudrama that depicts the growth of the Earth over the past 400 million years. He's also rendered the growth of the moon. Why the moon? Because there you can see the stretch marks - the geological features called mares - left by its growth over time. Adams is certain that this visual aid will blow people away. "Everyone I've ever showed this to has said, 'How could it be any other way?'"

 As a child, Adams was drawn to both art and science. He dreamed of a scientific education, but there was no money for college - his dad skipped out when he was 13 - so in the early '50s he enrolled at a vocational high school for aspiring artists, the School of Industrial Arts (now the High School of Art and Design) in Manhattan, intending to study comic book illustration.
This was a turbulent era in comicdom. Thanks in part to a sensationalist book called Seduction of the Innocent, which linked juvenile delinquency to comic books, the industry had instituted the Comics Code, a now infamous form of self-censorship. "It was a strange time," Adams says. "People were looking for spooks under every bed. And there were some pretty disgusting comic books back then. So by 1954, that was it."
At DC and Marvel, Adams was a great craftsman, a crusader, and a colossal ego - fearless, hard-nosed, but no hero.
The school had stopped teaching comic book art, but Adams and a few classmates convinced one teacher to offer a course. When Adams graduated, he thought his portfolio would get him a job. It didn't. An assistant at DC Comics told him his stuff was good, but he was wasting his time: The industry was dying. He got a little work at Archie Comics, and then bounced around, doing some advertising stuff and a comic strip called Ben Casey.
With a more developed portfolio, Adams tried DC again in 1959, and got a warmer reception; he began working on War Stories and Deadman. Then he told the editor, Julius Schwartz, that he'd like to take a shot at improving Batman, which, in the mid- to late '60s, was like the TV show - it featured what Adams calls "men running around in gray underwear."
Schwartz said no, but Adams had better luck with the editor of The Brave and the Bold, which in each issue paired Batman with a different DC character - Aquaman, the Flash, and so on. He quickly shook things up. "When the scripts came in with Batman entering a room, I wouldn't have him walk through the door," Adams says. "I'd have him come through the window or step out of the shadows. I found ways of altering him without offending the writer - making him more mysterious, dark, dangerous."
Readers responded with a slew of letters arguing that The Brave and the Bold's Batman was the real Batman. This convinced Schwartz to put Adams on Batman in 1969, teaming him with writer Denny O'Neil. Although Adams' work on the Caped Crusader shaped our modern image of the characters - inspiring Frank Miller's Dark Knight series in the '80s and Tim Burton's Batman movies - his tenure was brief. After two years, he took on another assignment: Green Lantern. Working with O'Neil again, Adams partnered Green Lantern with Green Arrow and sent the superheroes out to tangle with issues like overpopulation, the court system, even Richard Nixon's White House. It was the first in a wave of socially relevant comic books, and the beginning of the end of the Comics Code.
One in the series - Green Lantern/Green Arrow #85 - is among the most famous comic books of all time. Its cover featured Speedy, Green Arrow's ward, shooting up heroin. At first DC refused to publish it. But Adams says that DC decided to go ahead with #85 after its main rival, Marvel Comics, ignored the code and published an issue of Spider-Man in which a character "popped a few pills and walked off a roof." Soon thereafter, the Comics Code was relaxed; today it's all but ignored.
Even while he was working for DC, Adams was intrigued by the work coming out of arch-rival Marvel Comics. He approached Stan Lee about taking over X-Men in 1969. By then, most of the characters, including Professor Charles Xavier, had been killed off, and the series was about to be canceled. But over the course of nine issues, starting with Uncanny X-Men #56 in May 1969, Adams and chief writer Roy Thomas reconstructed what would become the best-selling comic book series of all time, playing out an elaborate scheme to bring the dead characters back to life. The most important task was to revive Professor X: Adams and Thomas decided that he had faked his death so he could retreat into a period of mental training that would allow him to link minds with all the Earth's benevolent forces and thwart a coming mutant invasion. "By the time I was through, whatever they had done to take it apart, I put back," Adams says. "After that, every new artist who came to Marvel wanted to do X-Men."
None of this made Adams a hero at Marvel or DC, however. He was notorious for missed deadlines and a tremendous ego. And he was a troublemaker, battling over compensation and benefits. In 1970, Lee started the Academy of Comic Book Artists, to help promote comic books as an art form. Lee declined to be interviewed for this article, but in 1998 he told Comic Book Artist that Adams "wanted to turn the whole damn thing into a union. ... I walked away. Neal was elected president, but ... the whole thing collapsed."
But not before Adams got his way. Today, artists generally retain ownership of original art, and many comics cognoscenti look up to Adams as both a craftsman and a crusader. "Neal Adams is regarded as one of the top five comic book artists of all time," says Jon Cooke, editor of Comic Book Artist. "He introduced a realistic dynamic to comic book art. But he also demanded change. There's almost a serf mentality in comics, toeing the company line. Neal is fearless. He's hard-nosed on his principles. Some people wish he'd just shut up and draw."

 Adams is trying to shake up the scientific world, but he's hardly the first layman to arrive on the scene with earth-shattering theories. Publishers, universities, and academic scientists receive countless manuscripts written by lone-wolf visionaries who howl that the establishment is deluded about evolution or cold fusion or the nature of gravitation. Looking for guidance, I set up a meeting with Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education in El Cerrito, California, and a fellow with the Committee for the Scientific Investigations of Claims of the Paranormal. She evaluates fantastic claims all the time, and I want to ask her where Adams fits on the continuum.
For Scott, the primary indicator of weird science is a reference to conspiracy. "Real scientists don't convince you by telling you that others are lying," she says. By that measure, Adams is definitely out there. He claims the scientific community speaks a language of exclusion in order to lock out the layperson - and that it discourages alternative thought with ridicule. He doesn't consider these actions intentionally malicious; he realizes that it's easier to go along with the status quo. "People tend not to want to question dogma," he says. "But I'm afraid of dogma."
If I really want to deconstruct Two Guys, Scott tells me, I should read "A Consumer's Guide to Pseudoscience," a classic essay by James Trefil, a physics professor at George Mason University. One of Trefil's key indicators of fringedom is a simple question: Are established scientists putting in time on the alleged phenomenon?
That's difficult to judge with Adams, because his theories are so vast. So I narrow my search to scientists who share his fundamental idea that the Earth is growing. As it turns out, unbeknownst to Adams, there is a faction of active growing-Earth theoreticians, many of whom live in or near Australia. The Australia cluster may owe a lot to the influence of S. Warren Carey, the godfather of the theory and founder of the geology department at the University of Tasmania.
As a scientist, researchers say, Adams draws really great comics. His secret weapon: massive amounts of enthusiasm and verbiage.
I talk to James Maxlow, one of Carey's disciples and a PhD candidate at Western Australia's Curtin University. Maxlow is finishing up a dissertation called "Global Expansion Tectonics," and when I tell him about Two Guys, he gets very excited by the prospect that the book might draw attention to the cause. Maxlow says he's not qualified to comment on Adams' physics, but he thinks Adams has a lot of the geology right. He's even thinking about jettisoning the word "expansion" in favor of "growth" - because growth has a better ring to it.
All of which is good for the Adams cause. Unfortunately, though, Maxlow sometimes reaches into the conspiracy grab-bag himself when he's making a case. "A lot of funding for research is going into plate tectonics," he says, "so scientists are reluctant to have me stir the pot."
As it turns out, that's about it for supportive colleagues. By and large, the university researchers I speak to say that as a scientist, Adams draws really great comics. At UC Berkeley I visit a geophysics professor named Mark Bukowinski whose reaction to Two Guys leaves little room for interpretation: "We do all kinds of measurements," he says. "The Earth is not growing."
Stephen Hsu, a physics professor at the University of Oregon (and a childhood fan of Adams' comics), says Adams' physics is entirely wacky, that he just picked a conclusion and backfilled the proof - much like he brought Professor X back to life. "I admire Adams' enthusiasm," Hsu says, "but there's a reason why physics is a professional subject."
To give Adams an opportunity for rebuttal, I propose a conference call with Hsu. After the introductions, Adams launches his secret weapon: a massive amount of verbiage. He recounts the history and breakdown of his book, with nary a beat for Hsu to step in, and says dark matter's discovery bolsters his assumptions. Hsu admits that he has doubts about whether geologists are right about everything. "To us hardcore scientists," he begins, "it seems like they just make up stories."
That sends Adams into a 15-minute tirade against plate tectonics that ends with: "Anyone who raises their head above the morass will have to say that the Earth grew."
But it goes downhill from there. Hsu cites ongoing experiments that measure movement in the Earth by tracking the distance between light beams at three different stations, at a rate of accuracy measured in angstroms. "If the Earth was expanding, that would show up," he says. Also, if the Earth and moon were growing in circumference, they'd be growing closer together. They're not.
Adams and Hsu go back and forth for two hours. It's a polite exchange that roams from Einstein's theories to the structure of a proton to the fact that when an electron and a positron emerge from a cosmic ray, all the energy they produce is accounted for in the byproduct: gamma radiation. This final assertion floors Adams, who believes that there's an extra bit of energy that incites the prime-matter-to-matter evolution process.
"I never heard that before," he says. "I don't have an explanation for that."
After hanging up, Adams claims he held his own. But when I arrive at Continuity the next morning, Marilyn tells me he was up until the wee hours, searching the Web for evidence that all the energy is indeed accounted for when a positron and electron split out of a cosmic ray.
Adams is eager to discuss the conversation. At my request, he starts sketching a picture of Batman, while bouncing back and forth between explanations of the difference between the way Asians and Westerners use their drawing instruments and the molecular makeup of iron.
I ask him why he's so concerned about whether all the energy can be accounted for in the gamma radiation, and he tells me that the extra bit of energy is necessary to incite the transformation from prime matter to matter. Without it, he says, the process doesn't seem possible.
It's strange that he's been deflated by this bit of scientific "dogma" even as he strives to disprove the accepted theory of the history of our universe.
As he puts the final swoosh at the bottom of Batman's cape, Adams sticks out his chest and says, in the sort of baritone that you might expect from Batman, "I wantyou for the Batman army."
"Hey, Neal," I say, as he turns the chair toward me and holds up the drawing, "what if you didn't need that energy?"
"What do you mean?" he asks.
"What if it's not energy as we understand it that makes it happen?" I say. "Maybe there's something called prime energy that starts the whole process."
He lifts his eyebrows a bit and smiles. "Maybe," he says softly, just before he spins his chair back toward his desk.
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Movements of the continents as the Earth expands. Left: Atlantic Ocean centered; right: Pacific Ocean centered.
The expanding Earth or growing Earth hypothesis asserts that the position and relative movement of continents is at least partially due to the volume of Earth increasing. Conversely,geophysical global cooling was the hypothesis that various features could be explained by Earth contracting.
While suggested historically, since the recognition of plate tectonics in the 1970s, scientific consensus has rejected any significant expansion or contraction of Earth.

Different forms of the hypothesis[edit]

There are 3 forms of the expanding earth hypothesis.
  1. Earth's mass has remained constant, and thus the gravitational pull at the surface has decreased over time.
  2. Earth's mass has grown with the volume in such a way that the surface gravity has remained constant.
  3. Earth's gravity at its surface has increased over time, in line with its hypothesized growing mass and volume.

Expansion with constant mass[edit]

In 1834, during the second voyage of HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin investigated stepped plains featuring raised beaches in Patagonia which indicated to him that a huge area of South America had been "uplifted to its present height by a succession of elevations which acted over the whole of this space with nearly an equal force." While his mentor Charles Lyell had suggested forces acting near the crust on smaller areas, Darwin hypothesized that uplift at this continental scale required "the gradual expansion of some central mass" [of the earth] "acting by intervals on the outer crust" with the "elevations being concentric with form of globe (or certainly nearly so)". In 1835 he extended this concept to include the Andes as part of a curved enlargement of the earth's crust due to "the action of one connected force". Not long afterwards, he moved on from this idea and proposed that as mountains rose, the ocean floor subsided, explaining the formation of coral reefs.[1]
In 1889 and 1909 Roberto Mantovani published a hypothesis of Earth expansion and continental drift. He assumed that a closed continent covered the entire surface of a smaller Earth. Thermal expansion led to volcanic activity, which broke the land mass into smaller continents. These continents drifted away from each other because of further expansion at the rip-zones, where oceans currently lie.[2][3] Although Alfred Wegener noticed some similarities to his own hypothesis of continental drift, he did not mention Earth expansion as the cause of drift in Mantovani's hypothesis.[4]
A compromise between Earth-expansion and Earth-contraction is the "theory of thermal cycles" by Irish physicist John Joly. He assumed that heat flow from radioactive decay inside Earth surpasses the cooling of Earth's exterior. Together with British geologist Arthur Holmes, Joly proposed a hypothesis in which Earth loses its heat by cyclic periods of expansion. In their hypothesis, expansion led to cracks and joints in Earth's interior, that could fill with magma. This was followed by a cooling phase, where the magma would freeze and become solid rock again, causing Earth to shrink.[5]

Mass addition[edit]

In 1888 Ivan Osipovich Yarkovsky suggested that some sort of aether is absorbed within Earth and transformed into new chemical elements, forcing the celestial bodies to expand. This was connected with his mechanical explanation of gravitation.[6] Also the theses of Ott Christoph Hilgenberg (1933, 1974)[7][8] and Nikola Tesla (1935)[9] were based on absorption and transformation of aether-energy into normal matter.
After initially supporting continental drift, the late Australian geologist S. Warren Carey advocated expansion from the 1950s (before the development of plate tectonics provided the generally accepted explanation of the movement of continents) to his death,[10] demonstrating that subduction and other events could not balance the sea-floor spreading at oceanic ridges, and piling yet unresolved paradoxes that continue to plague plate tectonics.[11] Starting in 1956, he proposed some sort of mass increase in the planets and said that a final solution to the problem is only possible in a cosmological perspective in connection with the expansion of the universe.[12]
Bruce Heezen initially interpreted his work on the mid-Atlantic ridge as supporting S. Warren Carey's Expanding Earth Theory, but later withdrew his support.[13][14] The remaining proponents after the 1970s, like the Australian geologist James Maxlow, are mainly inspired by Carey's ideas.[10]
Comic artist Neal Adams, also a proponent, has proposed a mechanism of action. Positron particles, a form of antimatter, appear continuously inside Earth's globe and combine with other particles while releasing gamma rays; Adams says that it also forms new matter, but modern scientists are very confident that no new matter is formed in any of these reactions.[15][16]
In the last few decades, no credible mechanism of action has been proposed for this addition of new mass, and there is no credible evidence for new mass having been added in the past.[16] The increased gravity of Earth would have altered the orbits of the celestial objects in the Solar System, including Moon's orbit and Earth's own orbit; proponents have no adequate explanation to address this problem.[16] This is a big obstacle for acceptance of the theory by other geologists.[16]

Decrease of the gravitational constant[edit]

Paul Dirac suggested in 1938 that the universal gravitational constant had decreased in the billions of years of its existence. This led German physicist Pascual Jordan to a modification of general relativity and to propose in 1964 that all planets slowly expand. Contrary to most of the other explanations this one was at least within the framework of physics considered as a viable hypothesis. [17]
Measurements of a possible variation of the gravitational constant showed an upper limit for a relative change of 5•10−12 per year, excluding Jordan's idea.[18]

Scientific consensus[edit]

The hypothesis had never developed a plausible and verifiable mechanism of action.[10] During the 1960s, the theory of plate tectonics — initially based on the assumption that Earth's size remains constant, and relating thesubduction zones to burying of lithosphere at a scale comparable to seafloor spreading — [10] became the accepted explanation in the Earth Sciences.
The scientific community finds that significant evidence contradicts the Expanding Earth theory, and that evidence used in support of it is better explained by plate tectonics:
  • Measurements with modern high-precision geodetic techniques and modelization of the measurements by the horizontal motions of independent rigid plates at the surface of a globe of free radius, were proposed as evidence that Earth is not currently increasing in size to within a measurement accuracy of 0.2 mm per year.[19] The lead author of the study stated "Our study provides an independent confirmation that the solid Earth is not getting larger at present, within current measurement uncertainties".[20]
  • The motions of tectonic plates and subduction zones measured by a large range of geological, geodetic and geophysical techniques supports plate tectonics.[21][22][23]
  • Imaging of lithosphere fragments within the mantle supports lithosphere consumption by subduction.[22][23]
  • Mass accretion on a scale required to change Earth's radius is contradicted by the current accretion rate of Earth, and by Earth's average internal temperature: any accretion releases a lot of energy, which would warm the planet's interior.[citation needed]
  • Expanding Earth models based on thermal expansion contradict most modern principles from rheology, and fail to provide an acceptable explanation for the proposed melting and phase transitions.[citation needed]
  • Paleomagnetic data has been used to calculate that the radius of Earth 400 million years ago was 102 ± 2.8 percent of today's radius.[24][25] However, the methodology employed has been criticised by the Russian geologist Yuriy Chudinov.[26]
  • Examinations of data from the Paleozoic and Earth's moment of inertia suggest that there has been no significant change of Earth's radius in the last 620 million years.[27]
  • Iapetus Ocean: geological, paleontological, paleomagnetic evidences that North America and Europe were separated before Pangaea.[citation needed]

Present day advocates[edit]

In 2005 J. Marvin Herndon postulated what he calls whole-Earth decompression dynamics, which he describes as a unified theory combining elements of plate tectonics and Earth expansion. He suggests that Earth formed from a Jupiter-sized gas giant by catastrophic loss of its gaseous atmosphere with subsequent decompression and expansion of the rocky remnant planet resulting in decompression cracks at continental margins which are filled in by basalts from mid-ocean ridges.[28]
Another present day advocate of an expanding Earth is comics artist Neal Adams, who suggests Earth is growing and not merely expanding, and proposes his ideas within a "Growing Earth-Growing Universe" Theory.[29] Adams has made video animations that graphically illustrate his hypothesis, in which new mass is manufactured by a hypothesized electron/positron pair production process within the core of Earth and all celestial bodies.[15]

See also[edit]

Notes[edit]

  1. Jump up^ Herbert, Sandra (1991), "Charles Darwin as a prospective geological author", British Journal for the History of Science 24 (2): 159–192 [184–188], doi:10.1017/S0007087400027060, JSTOR 4027165, retrieved 24 October2008, pp. 178, 184, 189, also Darwin, C. R. Geological diary: Elevation of Patagonia. (5.1834) CUL-DAR34.40-60 Transcribed by Kees Rookmaaker (Darwin Online), pp. 58–59.
  2. Jump up^ Mantovani, R. (1889), "Les fractures de l’écorce terrestre et la théorie de Laplace", Bull. Soc. Sc. Et Arts Réunion: 41–53
  3. Jump up^ Mantovani, R. (1909), "L’Antarctide", Je m’instruis. La science pour tous 38: 595–597
  4. Jump up^ Wegener, A. (1966), The Origin of Continents and Oceans, Courier Dover Publications, ISBN 0-486-61708-4 SeeOnline version in German.
  5. Jump up^ Hohl, R. (1970), "Geotektonische Hypothesen", Die Entwicklungsgeschichte der Erde. Brockhaus Nachschlagewerk Geologie mit einem ABC der Geologie (4. ed.), Bd. 1: 279–321
  6. Jump up^ Yarkovsky, Ivan Osipovich (1888), Hypothese cinetique de la Gravitation universelle et connexion avec la formation des elements chimiques, Moskau
  7. Jump up^ Hilgenberg, O.C. (1933), Vom wachsenden Erdball (The Expanding Earth), Berlin: Giessmann & Bartsch,Bibcode:1933QB981.H6.......
  8. Jump up^ Hilgenberg, O.C. (1974), "Geotektonik, neuartig gesehen", Geotektonische Forschungen 45: 1–194, ISBN 978-3-510-50011-6
  9. Jump up^ Tesla, N. (1935), Expanding Sun Will Explode Someday Tesla Predicts, New York: New York Herald Tribunewikisource:The New York Herald Tribune/1935/08/18/Expanding Sun Will Explode Some Day Tesla Predicts
  10. ^ Jump up to:a b c d Ogrisseg, Jeff (2009-11-22), "Dogmas may blinker mainstream scientific thinking", The Japan Times, archived from the original on 2015-03-03
  11. Jump up^ S. W. Carey, The Expanding Earth – An essay review, 1975, Earth Science Reviews, vol. 11-2, pp.105-143,doi:10.1016/0012-8252(75)90097-5
  12. Jump up^ Samuel Warren Carey (1988), Theories of the earth and universe: a history of dogma in the earth sciences(illustrated ed.), Stanford University Press, pp. 347–350, ISBN 978-0-8047-1364-1
  13. Jump up^ Oreskes, Naomi, 2003, Plate Tectonics: An Insider's History Of The Modern Theory Of The Earth, Westview Press, p. 23, ISBN 0813341329
  14. Jump up^ Frankel, Henry, The Continental Drift Debate, Ch. 7 in Scientific controversies, p. 226, 1987, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-27560-6
  15. ^ Jump up to:a b O'Brien, Jeffrey (March 2001), "Master of the Universe", Wired (9.03), retrieved 2 June 2008
  16. ^ Jump up to:a b c d Steven Novella (2009-11-03). "No Growing Earth, But a Growing Problem With Science Journalism". skepticblog.org.
  17. Jump up^ Jordan, P. (1971), The expanding earth: some consequences of Dirac's gravitation hypothesis, Oxford: Pergamon Press
  18. Jump up^ Born, M. (1964/2003), Die Relativitätstheorie Einsteins (Einstein's theory of relativity), Berlin-Heidelberg-New York: Springer-publisher, ISBN 3-540-00470-X Check date values in: |date= (help)
  19. Jump up^ Wu, X.; X. Collilieux; Z. Altamimi; B. L. A. Vermeersen; R. S. Gross; I. Fukumori (8 July 2011). "Accuracy of the International Terrestrial Reference Frame origin and Earth expansion". Geophysical Research Letters 38: 5 PP.Bibcode:2011GeoRL..3813304W. doi:10.1029/2011GL047450. Retrieved 17 July 2011.
  20. Jump up^ It's a Small World, After All: Earth Is Not Expanding, NASA Research Confirms, ScienceDaily (Aug. 17, 2011)
  21. Jump up^ Fowler (1990), pp 281 & 320–327; Duff (1993), pp 609–613; Stanley (1999), pp 223–226
  22. ^ Jump up to:a b Bucher, K. (2005), "Blueschists, eclogites, and decompression assemblages of the Zermatt-Saas ophiolite: High-pressure metamorphism of subducted Tethys lithosphere", American Mineralogist 90: 821,doi:10.2138/am.2005.1718
  23. ^ Jump up to:a b Van Der Lee, Suzan; Nolet, Guust (1997), "Seismic image of the subducted trailing fragments of the Farallon plate", Nature 386 (6622): 266, Bibcode:1997Natur.386..266V, doi:10.1038/386266a0
  24. Jump up^ McElhinney, M. W., Taylor, S. R., and Stevenson, D. J. (1978), "Limits to the expansion of Earth, Moon, Mars, and Mercury and to changes in the gravitational constant", Nature 271 (5643): 316–321, Bibcode:1978Natur.271..316M,doi:10.1038/271316a0
  25. Jump up^ Schmidt, P. W. and Clark, D. A. (1980), The response of palaeomagnetic data to Earth expansion, Geophysical Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, 61: 95–100, 1980, doi:10.1111/j.1365-246X.1980.tb04306.x
  26. Jump up^ Yu. Chudinov, Eduction concept of the earth's expansion theory: main grounds, VSP, Utrecht, 2001, ISBN 90-6764-299-1
  27. Jump up^ Williams, G.E. (2000), "Geological constraints on the Precambrian history of Earth’s rotation and the moon’s orbit"(PDF), Reviews of Geophysics 38 (1): 37–59, Bibcode:2000RvGeo..38...37W, doi:10.1029/1999RG900016
  28. Jump up^ J. Marvin Herndon, Whole-earth decompression dynamics, Current Science, V. 89, No. 11, 10 Dec. 2005
  29. Jump up^ Jeff Ogrisseg (2009), "Top artist draws growing global conclusions", The Japan Times[dead link]

Bibliography[edit]

  • Duff, D.; 1993: Holmes' principles of physical geology, Chapman & Hall (4th ed.), ISBN 0-412-40320-X.
  • Fowler, C.M.R.; 1990: The Solid Earth, an introduction to Global Geophysics, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-38590-3.
  • Stanley, S.M.; 1999: Earth System History, W.H. Freeman & Co, ISBN 0-7167-2882-6.

External links[edit]

Historical[edit]

Contemporary[edit]


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