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Donald Patten

2 December 2017
Geology

William suggested looking at the book below after he had read the post at www.sis-group.org.uk/news/plate-tectonics-different.htm … The book is by Donald Wesley Patten, 'The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch' (Seattle 1966) and in particular chapter V, 'Orogenesis: the Cause of Mountain Uplift' which proposed that a passing cosmic body was capable of causing the landscape of the Earth to rise up. In the news post we learnt that the central Anatolian plateau is detached from its roots in the lithosphere. This is contrary to Plate Tectonics theory that would see the highly seismic region as a plate margin – one plate elbowing its way against another plate and causing friction that in turn creates tectonic activity such as earthquakes. In this case several plates pushing up against each other, an idea derived from the amount of historical earthquakes in the region. Patten produced a map by Wilson J Tuzo, who came up with the idea of Plate Tectonics, that came from the book 'The Earth as a Planet' published in 1954 by University of Chicago Press. See below …

   … where we can see the tectonic arc passes right through Anatolia (as well as the Aegean, Iran, the Himalayas, etc. Patten thought in terms of a close encounter with a planet sized body that 'pulled up' mountain ranges, a novel idea. William asks – how can the crust as a sphere create enough horizontal force to cause uplift? Volcanoes raise hot magma from below and can provide horizontal force but a catastrophic event may have been the cause of mountain uplift (in some way). The raising of a plateau is an interesting phenomenon – as we have the Tibetan plateau and various plateaus in the Americas. Patten was a geographer by learning and was born in Montana, a land of mountains. He also studied a number of subjects which included ancient history, ancient literature, climatology, genetics, geography, geo morphology, mathematics and philosophy.

At https://phys.org/print431271610.html … we learn that a mass of hot rock is rising beneath New England …

   … slowly but inexorably an enormous mass of warm rock is rising beneath New England (another anomaly of geology). The research is ground breaking we are told, challenging text book concepts of geology. The upwelling we detected is like a hot air balloon and we infer something is raising up through the deeper parts of our planet (the Mantle) beneath this region of N America – something a couple of hundred miles across. This too does not appear to fit into Plate Tectonic s theory – although the authors are clearly onboard standard geology.

The study was published in the journal Geology and it is said to challenge mainstream views of how the continents on which we live behave. Whilst we have had no recent encounters with large planet size bodies we can never the less see that what is happening in the interior of the Earth is quite unlike current thinking, contradicting the simplicity of the Plate Tectonics model.

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