New Concepts in Global Tectonics

New Concepts in Global Tectonics (NCGT) is an international network of geoscientists critical of plate tectonics, together with the journal it publishes. It functions as an organised forum in which opponents and sceptics of the plate model gather anomalous data and put forward alternative theories of the Earth's structure and evolution — among them the expanding Earth, surge tectonics, Earth degassing and contraction. On this wiki it is the publication venue and community behind a large part of the expansion-tectonics material catalogued here.

History

The network grew out of a symposium, "Alternative Theories to Plate Tectonics", held at the 30th International Geological Congress in Beijing in August 1996; the name itself was taken from an earlier symposium at the 28th Congress in Washington, D.C., in 1989. Out of the Beijing meeting came the NCGT Newsletter, a quarterly that provided a standing place for material that did not fit within plate-tectonic orthodoxy.

Its chief editor for most of its existence was J. Mac Dickins, a former senior palaeontologist at the Australian Bureau of Mineral Resources, who died in June 2005. The geological consultant Dong R. Choi then became editor-in-chief, an editorial board was formed, and in 2013 the publication was renamed the NCGT Journal. It has continued as a free quarterly PDF.

The movement stands in a longer tradition of organised dissent from plate tectonics associated with figures such as the American petroleum geologist Arthur Meyerhoff (surge tectonics) and the Norwegian geophysicist Karsten Storetvedt (global wrench tectonics), and it overlaps heavily with the expanding-Earth school of Samuel Warren Carey.

What it publishes

NCGT is not a single theory but a coalition, united more by rejection of plate tectonics than by a shared alternative. The recurring themes in its pages include:

• Earth expansion — that the continents fit together on a smaller globe and have separated as the Earth grew, the position developed by Samuel Warren Carey, James Maxlow and Stephen W Hurrell;
• Surge tectonics and lineament studies — Meyerhoff's proposal that magma channels ("surge channels") in the lithosphere, rather than moving plates, organise the Earth's tectonic features;
• Anomalies of the seafloor and deep structure — reports of continental rocks and structures on the ocean floor said to be inconsistent with the seafloor-spreading model, a theme pursued by Boris Vasiliev;
• Earthquake and geophysical prediction, degassing, and geothermal work, represented here by Bruce Leybourne, Stavros T Tassos and Giancarlo Scalera.

On this wiki

NCGT is the journal in which a considerable amount of this wiki's tectonics material first appeared, and the community it represents overlaps almost entirely with the Expansion Tectonics category, which holds nearly 300 pages. The central topic articles are Expansion Tectonics and Expanding Earth, with Plate Tectonics giving the mainstream account the NCGT authors dispute. Named contributors here who have published in, or are associated with, NCGT include Samuel Warren Carey, James Maxlow, Stephen W Hurrell, Boris Vasiliev, Stavros T Tassos, Giancarlo Scalera and Bruce Leybourne.

Assessment

NCGT is a genuine scientific forum, not a fringe curiosity in the pejorative sense: its contributors are in the main trained geologists and geophysicists, its journal is edited and refereed within its community, and it performs a real service in collecting anomalies — observations that sit awkwardly with the standard model and that a healthy science ought to keep in view. Dissent of this kind has a respectable history in the earth sciences, where continental drift itself was resisted for decades before the seafloor evidence of the 1960s vindicated it, and NCGT authors frequently, and not unreasonably, invoke that episode.

The difficulty is that the case NCGT opposes is now exceptionally well established. Plate tectonics is supported by several independent and mutually consistent bodies of evidence: the symmetric magnetic-stripe pattern of the seafloor recording geomagnetic reversals; the age of the ocean floor increasing outward from the mid-ocean ridges, with no oceanic crust older than about 200 million years; the direct measurement of plate motions by GPS and satellite geodesy, at the centimetres-per-year rates the theory requires; the distribution of earthquakes and volcanoes along plate boundaries; and the matching of rock sequences, fossils and palaeomagnetic poles across now-separated continents. These lines converge on a single quantitative picture.

The specific NCGT alternatives face sharp, and in some cases decisive, obstacles. Earth expansion — the most prominent — requires the Earth's radius to have grown substantially within geological time, and space-geodetic measurement now constrains any change in the mean radius to about 0.1 ± 0.2 mm per year, far below what the theory needs, while no accepted mechanism supplies the necessary new mass or the enormous energy that dropping the surface gravity would demand. The fuller treatment of these objections is on the Expansion Tectonics and Expanding Earth pages.

The fair summary is that NCGT is best understood as an organised repository of the anomalies and the minority view — valuable to consult for the data it assembles and for keeping the mainstream honest about its loose ends, but advancing alternatives that have not met the evidential standard plate tectonics long ago cleared.

External links

• NCGT Journal — the network's own site and free quarterly archive

See also

• Plate Tectonics — the mainstream theory NCGT disputes
• Expansion Tectonics, Expanding Earth — the main alternatives in its pages
• Samuel Warren Carey, James Maxlow, Stephen W Hurrell, Giancarlo Scalera
• Category:Expansion Tectonics