The space age has revealed that Plate Tectonics is a peculiarity confined to Earth and is non-existent everywhere else in the solar system. Plate Tectonics came of age in the 1950s, part of a package that included a mechanism of moving continents, explained the ice ages as roughly periods of 100,000 years, and at last embedded Milanovitch’s theory into a uniformitarian model. You may note that moving continents is not a lot different from expanding oceans. This is of course a problem as mainstream visualise the land rising out of a giant ocean on the surface. An area worth looking at again.It was all inspired by the discovery of stripes on the floor of the tropical Atlantic – which seemed to be evidence of continents on the move.
At https://phys.org/news/2024-05-modern-plate-tectonics-due-blobs.html … and in order to keep the Plate Tectonics narrative alive some researchers have come up with an explantion as to how it might have all happened. What set it in motion. Computer modelling suggests giant blobs of material near Earth’s core, created by a hypothetical cosmic collision 4.5 billion years ago, may have been the culprit. Obviously, the computer was fed with the idea of a collision, forming the moon, and the idea of blobs floating around inside the Mantle. Otherwise, how could the computer programme have regurgitated this solution. We may wonder what was excluded rather than speculate on what was included.
At https://phys.org/news/2024-05-reveals-mechanism-continents-stabilized.html … which is another study in a similar vein. How did stabilisation of the continents occur – even as landmsses shift location, mountains rise up, and oceans form. It all goes back 3 billion years ago. One question – what came first? The oceans or continental land masses. Did land emerge out of an ocean – or did the oceans grow over time.
At https://phys.org/news/2024-05-reveals-late-pleistocene-island-weathering.html … researchers from China, South Korea, France, the UK and the US, have reconstructed the weathering of the western Pacific island arc – over the last 140,000 years. Basically, from the last interglacial to the present. There are nuggets in there to mine.