Do you honestly think this is all I have? I’m a post graduate geologist studying the geochemistry of the early solar system. But if I started yacking on about rare earth elements in volcanoes at various distances from subduction trenches and water changing melting temperatures and causing partial melts, who would listen to me?

I’d be committing discussion suicide by beat down via terminology overload. Neal wouldn’t understand any of it, and neither would the public at large. neither party has the scientific training needed to debate this idea on the level it needs to be debated. The level it WAS debated in the late 60s. The debate Plate Tectonics won.

I try to make my retorts accessible, understandable by people with no science training, and simple to grasp. Getting to the high level science that would make Neal look like the absolute fool he is, would require an educated audience. And if the audience were there already, I wouldn’t have to produce any videos, because no one would believe Neal.

Neal does not have an interesting hypothesis, because he has no data backing him up. Nor does he have the adequate background in the required sciences to actually make any sense with what he’s trying to push on the masses.

Let me make this abundantly clear for you (Please understand I’m not putting you down here, I’m just tiring of this debate).

When you look at Neal’s videos and ideas, do the first things that jump to your mind include any of the following:

• The mm accuracy we can measure the radius of the globe to these days would surely show this, why has the size of the globe recently be decreased due to high precision satellites? (http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/1428)
• How does Neal explain Lanthanum and Platinum group elements having a cross-trench correlation between the subducting sea floor composition and resulting subduction-driven volcanoes?
• Neal claims that there’s a “plasma core” at the Earth’s centre which produces, quote “all chemicals up and down the periodic table”. yet, long lived isotopes such as 146Samarium (half life 103 million years), are nowhere to be found. That’s exactly what you’d expect if there had been no new heavy short-lived isotopes produced since the solar system’s formation. How can Neal explain something like that with his driving force of an expanding Earth producing “all chemicals up and down the periodic table”?
• Short-live isotopic systems such as 26Al/27Al dating work for high precision relative dating of really ancient meteorites (the work I did for my thesis has produced the most accurate measurement to date - look out for the paper to be printed sometime this year). Even If Neal wiggles out of heavy isotopes, what about light isotopes like 26Al?
• Why are the deepest, strongest earthquakes in the world alond areas where plates are subducting, rather than the mid-ocean-ridges, where Neal and Co say the Earth is splitting? No seismic activity exists below 30 Km at the MORs, yet earthquakes happen down to 600 Km along the South-American-Nazca plate boundary and other boundaries. Should this be the other way around if the MORs are DRIVING the expansion?
• Why haven’t the precise gravity measurements geologists have been doing over the last 60+ years shown a general upward trend?

If none of those questions, or any questions similar in complexity even slightly crossed your mind after you heard Neal’s ideas, you may not have the required scientific knowledge to be debating this issue. Again, I’m not trying to insult you here. If there was a debate on evolutionary biology, I’d never step in because I simply don’t have the knowledge to make a valid point. The same with Physics, Pure Chemistry, or vector calculus. Neal, on the other hand, with no real knowledge of ANY science, claims he has everyone out thought. He has not.

And believe me, I’ve tried. I’ve given him the problems with his theory, and even given him lists of material he absolutely requires to have a full grasp of. Yet, he refuses to even begin with something as simple as green and blue schist metamorphism, which on its own, disproves his idea, and proves plate tectonics as an active, working system.

Geology is not an easy science. It is ALL science wrapped up in a lot of time. You have to be multi-disciplined and onto it to go out and start overturning small things like how a certain rock formed (plus years of actual in-the-lab research).

The expanding earth vs plate tectonics debate is over. It was over in 1970. If you’re actually interested in why, I can point you in the right direction to get an understanding of the topic. It’s absolutely huge and there’s so much supporting evidence it is truly in parallel with the theory of gravity, the theory of heliocentric solar system and the theory of evolution. That is, a scientific theory - as close as science will get to saying something is fact.

In defence of Neil Adams - his theory is based on continental shelfs rifting therefore the area’s which need to fit together may not all be above sea level - they just need not to be deep Ocean sea floor.

I think you need to get past simplistic analysis - Neil seems to be onto something to me though his theory does not have to be 100% at this stage.

If Neil was generating “land” from Deep Ocean floor then you have a point but from what I’ve looked at he was not.

Regards

Andrew

I would like to hear an explanation of why Pangea formed as a single mass on one (relative) side of the earth. I think the most compelling idea he presents is the idea that the Earth formed in a uniform manner. Then as it expanded (see below) the water filled the gaps and we got the oceans. This is compelling for two reasons. (1) it would make a larger part of the globe a ’shallow sea’ as we were told so many times in Earth science, and (2) it is conceptually more appealing to think that as the earth formed it did so in a uniform manner.

Expanding: Yes, the least compelling part of his explanation is that the Earth expands. Many people have pointed out that it would take a colossal amount of matter to do so, but there is another explanation. There need not be more matter, just more space. There are many theories that the universe is expanding, which might support a theory that everything in the universe is expanding at the same time. I know, this sounds like the God-machine, and it is impossible to prove a negative, but there really are such theories. In any case, simply showing that it would take much more mass than could be expected to accumulate, or laughing off the idea that something could expand is unpersuasive.

Anyway, why would we have a polar land-water wold after formation instead of a more uniform world?

Thanks.

You’re perhaps right when it comes to the average person’s views of the state of our respective sciences, but I think it’s symptomatic of an overall misunderstanding of science among the general public. The people who state there’s little, or at least not conclusive evidence for plate tectonics are on parallel with those who say the same about evolution.

The real issue, in my opinion, is that a science as broad and varied as geology/geophysics, can’t be summarised into 60-180 second sound bites. The same is true for all other major natural sciences and I’m not sure this can be overcome unless the person viewing has a desire to learn.

Education through entertainment is so very difficult. Even groups like the Discovery Channel and National Geographic, who try to bring complex science to the masses, are so often guilty of soundbite science and dumbing things down to a too great extent. It’s often impossible to get difficult subject matter, like seismic tomography or back arc volcanic geochemistry, across to an audience without prior expertise.

I’ve been following the youtube comments debate between you and Mr. Adams et al., and trying to contribute here and there on a couple points. One of the things that I find most disturbing is the impression many of the posters have that there is little evidence for plate tectonics or subduction. It betrays a certain ignorance and perhaps means that we scientists (I’m a seismologist) haven’t done as good a job as we can in communicating with the general public. Anyways, I’m not sure where I’m going with this but keep up the good fight. I doubt that Mr. Adams will budge from his position but maybe some neutral viewers might be convinced by science rather than fitting shapes on spheres. Great job with your videos, by the way.

Adam (aka Adrock828)

If you’re going to go out there and tell science it’s wrong, you’re not going to get very far being that sloppy. If you’re trying to suggest that the Chatham rise and other plateaus around NZ twisted, turned and sank, you covered them up with ocean water to hide the mess that’d cause and you still broke your own rules - no sinking or rising of plates.

The map you provided (the pdf) is accurate, but I don’t see how you went from that to the terrible outline you produced on your earth expansion video. Did you even bother looking at Google Earth?

I’m moving these comments to the post I made on my replies so far, to keep the Pangea video info page clean.

Were these the upper Continental Plate areas that you were speaking of in your video that I crated out of nothing?

http://www.itslikecool.com/yorrike/TharpMap.jpg

This is the geolog history of New Zealand. Do you agree with it? I borrowed my map from a small map from the United States Geological Survey a couple of years ago. I don’t know if they were indicating New Zealand at a past geologic time, or they just were drawing crudely, and the lines came together. Perhaps being from New Zealand, you took it personally. I apologize to New Zealand in place of the United States Geological Survey.

http://www.itslikecool.com/yorrike (New Zealand pdf.)

Neal