Breakthrough on How Continents Divided

[Lloyd]

* A discussion of magnetic stripes on seafloors led me to do a search on that, which led to an amazing website about how the continents split up and moved apart. The site is http://www.newgeology.us and some excerpts follow. The theory is called Shock Dynamics. It doesn't connect with electrical dynamics, that I know of, but I think the latter is compatible with it.
* Large-scale evidence
* 1. All continents that moved (North America, South America, Antarctica, Australia, India, Southeast Asia) went directly away from one unique central point (which was a crater). It is just north of Madagascar in the Western Somali Basin, centered on Wilkes Rise and the Aldabra Islands. (Australia was located there at the time. The circular shape of south Australia was the eastern side of the original crater. The crater was about 1,000 miles in diameter).
* experience with comparatively smaller events (though still large for humans) such as earthquakes, complex craters, and long-runout landslides suggests that a change occurs in the rheological properties of the crust at large scales of energy and mass. Continents slide smoothly as if on ice, while pressure and shear waves propagate unattenuated for thousands of miles. The apparent sudden freezing in place of these elements at the end of the event indicates a distinct threshold energy for such effects.
* What does this first-order evidence imply?
* To illustrate, if you hit a slab of ice hard enough with a big enough hammer, the ice shatters and the pieces slide away from the blow.
* That is precisely what happened to Earth.
* The meteorite impact was the hammer blow, and the continental crust was the slab of ice.
* Estimated time from start to finish:
Plate Tectonics - about 200 million years (and still ongoing)
Shock Dynamics - about 26 hours (based on a shear wave propagation speed of 150 m/s)
* a characteristic of the crust... Put simply, it temporarily acts like a fluid when enough stress is applied.
* Well known on a small scale as a Bingham Fluid, Melosh suggests that fluidization at the base of large landslides reduces friction to near zero. He calls it acoustic fluidization.
* That this turbulent feature (near the Aleutians) 'froze' in place is consistent with the apparent Bingham fluid (temporarily fluidizes under stress) nature of the crust.
* As with all accoustically fluidized crustal features in the Shock Dynamics model, once the fluidizing energy falls below a threshold level, the crust "freezes" in place.
* The fact that both Bowers Ridge and New Hebrides-Hunter Ridge (in presentation 13, next page) can be simulated with fluid turbulence is powerful support for the Shock Dynamics model, especially when compared to the flimsy Plate Tectonics explanations.
* This page http://www.newgeology.us/presentation41.html includes interesting info on radioactive dating.

[Lloyd]

* My suspicion is that the impact was electrical, although meteor impacts may be possible as well. If it was a meteor impact, my suspicion is that strong electrical activity accompanied it. Electrical forces may have a lot to do with making rock behave like ice, with low friction. The strike that hit next to east Africa I imagine was soon followed by many other electrical fireworks, like the many other large craters that formed, as well as the initial rifting of the Atlantic Ocean at what's now the mid-Atlantic ridge, the raising of mesas and massifs, and the electrical carving out of river valleys and sculpting of mountain ranges. The mountain ranges seem to have been raised up by the movements of the continents, but, when they were raised up, while still very hot, interplanetary lightning seems to have sculpted them to their present shapes, including those features and patterns that are only apparent at the larger scales, not visible except from a few hundreds miles altitude.
* I'm guessing this event is what killed off the dinosaurs a few thousand years ago.

[Total Science]

The Earth is growing and it's diameter has increased over time: http://oilismastery.blogspot.com/

[dahlenaz]

I'm glad you posted this here so we can talk this up to the max. Since mention
is made in their presentation of Meteor Crater, Arizona, the image
below from my splash experiments is added here to show the dynamics
of a fluid hitting sediments. Of course this is an impact
point of repeated hits but the key detail is that an impact force does leave
round craters when the impactor is a not a solid and better still, if an air
burst (bolide) occurs over shallow water which
gains the added forces of hydraulics to displace saturated material below
the also surface and send a wave in all directions. Case in point, meteor
crater in Arizona at the south west edge of where once stood the
In-land Hopi Lake location. Now mudstone and siltstone surround the
crater and it is upstream from major erosion and deposit sites. The age and departure
of that lake need not be that far distant in the past, how else could the
inhabitants have justified all the effort involved in the surrounding settlements?
More on this later.



As for this larger event being spoken of, it puzzles me why Iceland has not
attracted any consideration as an impact point. Among the Azores is the
Great Meteor Tablemount, I'll get back to this later. As for the Madegascar
site it might explain something that has puzzled me. The time seperating the story
of Noah and the Days of Peleg is a moderately short period and it is in these days
of Peleg that it is said that the earth was divided by water. If a rapid slide occurred, the
forces involved in raising the Ande's and Rockies would have had the mass of
everthing west of Madegascar to force that upthrust. and if that was the end of the
event the atlantic need not have formed. I wonder, however if a recoil event followed
which gently (by comparrison) splitting the continents again,
giving a delayed action of followup separation to provide the Peleg gap and possibly
the atlantis legend as well. Many consequential events might be expected in the period
following this crustal slide. The Hydroplate research offes many details which I've
not yet seen mentioned in the Shock dynamics presentation. Just
thinking out loud here and i'll bring those details in a i get further through their presentation.
Another feature that has really caught my attention is the gap between
South America and Antarctica, the way the sea floor features and deposits
bend is a real eye opener. http://www.newgeology.us/presentation1.html .
I hope you have time to go over these two presentations in detail.
On the subject of the theory of a growing earth is suspect this would be a consequence
of material unleashed from the earths interior during a major crustal rupture, as is indicated
by the planet-wide fracture oceanic rift. there are details to consider however, such as
contenental crust material 'under' the pacific floor. The basalt pacific floor now covers
this continental crust material which is proposed to have subsided as the Atlantic floor
rose following the relocation of the continental material overlaying a basalt layer which
is not the the atlantic's floor. No continental material is found below the atlantic floor
so this highlights the mystery in the pacific. The seamount material may have come up through
fracturing continental material and rose to the level of the ocean at that time, and now are tablemounts.
Most are now far below the pacific's surface and apparantly worn to a common height.
A good deal of info on them can be found here.
http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebo ... ches5.html
They cry out for further investigation. They are quit an anomoly.

d...z

[Lloyd]

* Hi Zane.
* I don't know how much time I'll have to discuss this, but I think the newgeology.us website really is a breakthrough on continental drift etc, even though it doesn't yet consider electrical forces much. I wrote to the site's author today about how EU theory is compatible with most of their findings, so maybe they'll reply. The site was put up though in 2005, so I don't know if that's likely.
* I think there's a lot wrong with the Hydroplate theory, mainly the water chambers under the continents. I don't think any such chambers have been detected. Most earth rock seems to contain water though, except for the continents, or the cratons within continents.
* I think it's unlikely that the Atlantic opened up the way Hydroplate theory suggests. The Shock Dynamics theory seems to explain that pretty thoroughly. The shock from the impact was transferred through Africa and Europe to the Americas, which split the Americas off and gave them motion, like hitting one croquet ball with another. The first ball stays in place, but the second one shoots off. Their analogy of hitting a slab of ice with a sledge hammer helps clear it up too. That ought to make a pretty simple experiment. Make a piece of ice an inch thick and a foot square and hit it with a hammer and see if we get any piece that stays put, while most parts shoot off.

[Lloyd]

* I have a bunch of links here to images of submarine canyons etc. Canyons carved by water can't form under water and I doubt if they can form electrically under water either. That means there was little, if any, water in the oceans when the canyons formed. Some of them appear to have formed electrically. Maybe they all did.
California ? shelf canyons
http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/06davidson/background/geology/media/davidsonmap_600.jpg
Hudson valley shelf canyon
http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs114-99/fig2.jpg
http://clasticdetritus.files.wordpress.com/2007/12/sss_5d.jpg
Mississippi River shelf canyon
http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/06mexico/background/geology/media/gulf_600.jpg
Farallon Islands & Cordell Bank vertical shelf cliff
http://cordellbank.noaa.gov/images/sanctuary/usgs_470.jpg
Puerto Rican trench
http://woodshole.er.usgs.gov/project-pages/caribbean/atlantic+trench_large.html
Sumatra shelf
http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/resources/oceanography-book/Images/bathymetry.jpg
Fraser Island, Australia shelf
http://clasticdetritus.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/08boyd-multibeam.jpg
Seafloor River
http://www.ifremer.fr/drogm_uk/Realisation/carto/zaire/img/zaicanyon.jpg
shelf canyon
http://elkit.blogs.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/11/23/andthatmap.jpg
http://faculty.gg.uwyo.edu/heller/Sed%20Strat%20Class/SedStrat%208/canyon800x600.jpg
http://clasticdetritus.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/08boyd-multibeam.jpg
Hawaii seamount canyons
http://www.drgeorgepc.com/tsuHawaiiPapauSeamount.gif
Lamont fulgamite seamounts
http://ocean-ridge.ldeo.columbia.edu/courses/subgeol/mid_ocean_landscape/lamont_smnts.gif

[Lloyd]

* This link should take you to the site's discussions of seamounts:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Anewgeology.us+seamount&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq=
* I hadn't heard that seamounts are the same height. I don't think they are. It seems they formed before the ocean basins filled with water. Some are apparently volcanoes, but other seamounts appear to have been formed electrically, like Olympus Mons on Mars. They even have very similar looking craters, especially some off the coast of Oregon.

[GaryN]

Total Science posted:

The Earth is growing and it's diameter has increased over time:
http://oilismastery.blogspot.com/

That is a very interesting article, TS. I just wanted to point to the pdf file URL, incase it wasn't obvious to readers.

http://www.scientificexploration.org/jo ... tassos.pdf

I'm going to have a closer look at it, but I like what I have seen so far!

[dahlenaz]

There is one big problem with the location this theory points to
as the epicenter. You can see in the map at this link the absence
of an igneous concentration at this location.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World ... vinces.jpg

If something hit the earth with the forces proposed, should it not
have also left a significant mass of igneous material at that
location? d...z

[dahlenaz]

* * I think there's a lot wrong with the Hydroplate theory, mainly the water chambers under the continents. I don't think any such chambers have been detected. Most earth rock seems to contain water though, except for the continents, or the cratons within continents.

There would not be the large chambers in the aftermath of that event but many very deep water chambers have been found even so. Two instinces were found at two of the deepest drill holes in the world, one on the Kola Peninsula in northern Russia at 7.5 miles deep and the other in Germany's northeastern Bavaria at 5.6 miles deep. In Russia's drill hole, hot salty water was flowing through crushed granite. In the German's, cracks were found through-out the lower few miles. All contained sea water in concentration about twice that of sea water. (from page 94 of hydroplate theory material). . And there is more but i'll need to find the references again for those details, but I cannot imagine there not being watered trapped. d...z

[seasmith]

dahlenaz wrote:

There is one big problem with the location this theory points to
as the epicenter. You can see in the map at this link the absence
of an igneous concentration at this location.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World%20...%20vinces.jpg

d,
I wouldn't necessarily take that Wiki entry for gospel. Notice that all their igneous provinces are surface exposed.
Working in the same industry as seismologists, i've gathered that, below certain depths or behind some intervening geologic strata, acoustics cannot reliably identify the nature of a reflected signal; ie: could be igneous, could be water, could be salt, or etc.
Overall, the Shock Dynamics impact scenario is highly intriguing, though like a number of theories around, they perhaps try to explain too much and then fall back on incongruous traditional theory, when stumped.
I like their "pivoting" ideas and their "relative 'eastward' mantle flow" conclusions, but they might could benefit their 'seafloor spreading' analysis by combining it with the fluid dynamics "focused porous flow" process detailed in the SCIAM article (cited in http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=1184&p=17013#p17013 Jan 25.



GaryN wrote:

Total Science posted:

The Earth is growing and it's diameter has increased over time:
http://oilismastery.blogspot.com/

G,

I'm beginning to warm up to this idea...


~s~

[Lloyd]

* Zane, here's a world map of Igneous formations: http://www.mantleplumes.org/Discussion/LIP_WORLD_MAP.jpg
Notice that the Yucatan crater and Hudson Bay craters etc also show no igneous material.
* On this Shock Dynamics webpage http://www.newgeology.us/presentation6.html the first image shows an arc of volcanic islands on the southern edge of the Somali Basin crater. Wouldn't those be igneous enough?
* Have you read this page on the Antipodal http://www.newgeology.us/presentation35.html effects, i.e. the Superswell in the Pacific Ocean?
* As for Iceland, why do you suspect it is an impact site?
* This webpage http://www.newgeology.us/presentation20.html says the mid Atlantic ridge is under compression, i.e. the adjoining plates are pushing toward each other, rather than pulling apart. That contradicts the Hydroplate theory and supports Shock Dynamics. Here's what it says.
In Iceland, the largest landmass astride the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the predominant stresses in the axial zone are likewise compressive rather than extensional (Keith, 1993). Earthquake data compiled by Zoback et al. (1989) provide further evidence that ocean ridges are characterized by widespread compression, whereas recorded tensional earthquake activity associated with these ridges is rarer. The rough topography and strong tectonic deformation of much of the ocean ridges, especially in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, suggest that, instead of being "spreading centers," they are a type of foldbelt (Storetvedt, 1997).
* At the bottom of the page it says: [url]The existence of deep continental roots and the absence of a continuous, global asthenosphere to "lubricate" plate motions, have rendered the classical model of plate movements untenable.[/url]
* The Hydroplate theory supposes there was a layer of horizontal chambers full of water about ten miles below the surface, as I recall. The continental roots, or cratons, are much deeper than that, as much as 150 miles or so. So the continents would not have slid on a layer ten miles deep, but much deeper. The Shock Dynamics theory says they were formed by stresses and heating from the impact, but it seems that they would make it difficult for the continents to slide. But if we compare the continents to slabs of ice that are thick in places, I suppose such ice slabs would not be greatly hampered in moving over a liquid body. Electrical forces may have helped reduce the friction and may have heated the lithosphere and made it less viscous.
* I'd be interested in hearing how large the water chambers were that were discovered by the Russian and German drillers. I forget how deep the Hydroplate theory supposes they were internally.

[dahlenaz]

Thanks All-a-ya,
I'm still working my way through the S-Dnmc sites and appreciate the fastfoward info. I got caught up in a seamount data
search and came up with some interesting figures from one area east of Australia.

http://www.southpacificrfmo.org/assets/ ... 0paper.pdf


Distribution of the number and percentages of underwater features per summit depth in the SPRFMO area. Of the 1506 underwater features, summit depth was not available for 15 of them.
0-99m 17 1.14%
100-499 41 2.75%
500-999 91 6.10%
1000-1499 114 7.65%
1500-1999 222 14.89%
2000-2999 536 35.95%
3000-3999 326 21.86%
>4000 144 9.66%

Before we get too tangled up in debating these two theories i want to suggest that we not put them in opposition to
each other but rather view them as a field of data that can provide clues to what actually happened. In fishing for data
through the various notions presented we are faced with the obsticles that involve prefered schools of thought. You all know this so avoiding getting trapped in a rut is not new to you, i just say this in the hope that we all free ourselves of data that might be skewed from bias or industrial secrets and flag it for all to see.
Lloyd, I'll get a more detailed reply to your latest post after going through what you've provided so far, may take a day or so.
Seasmith, Has the limitations of the method you mentioned been supplemented by other methods? If not, how can any results be trusted? There must be, to some degree, a level of verifiability in somthing used, or al least i would expect that if i were paying the bill for their funding. d...z

[seasmith]

I like their "pivoting" ideas and their "relative 'eastward' mantle flow" conclusions, but they might could benefit their 'seafloor spreading' analysis by combining it with the fluid dynamics "focused porous flow" process detailed in the SCIAM article (cited in http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpB ... 013#p17013 Jan 25.

CORRECTION-
Their term is "melt-transport" , not seafloor spreading. That is, the emergence of the mid-ocean ridges.
My mistake.

Lloyd,
Most agree, there is subduction going on in some areas, so it would appear that new sea floor is being added somewhere as well.
The oceans aren't getting any smaller.
s

[dahlenaz]

* Zane, here's a world map of Igneous formations: http://www.mantleplumes.org/Discussion/LIP_WORLD_MAP.jpg
* As for Iceland, why do you suspect it is an impact site?
* This webpage http://www.newgeology.us/presentation20.html says the mid Atlantic ridge is under compression, i.e. the adjoining plates are pushing toward each other, rather than pulling apart.

This link is quite informative and it highlights my suspiscion about Iceland. It just sticks out like a sore thumb, right on a crack in the earth and to top that off something from the map jumped out at me which may mean we need to consider
multiple impactors, in spite oof the absence of an outflow right at the Madagascar location. I see the arc you pointed out to the east of the coastal site off east Affrica, and then there are two features just to the east
one off india and the other the one called the 90 east trench. Now here it comes, look north to Russia, the Ural mountains are alot like the alignment of the trench and also similarly spaced from Iceland as is the 90 east trench is to Madagascar. A very curious arrangement. It may be nothing, but it sure makes me wonder. And, as i look around the globe in both hemisphere all sort of north/south reatures keep jumping out at me making me wonder about multiple impactors as a cause. Shoemaker-Levy showed that it can happen. Going through that sight exceeds my understanding of all the technical terms so i'll hope someone picks up on all their details and maybe re-applies them elsewhere. d...z