Category:Expansion Tectonics: Difference between revisions

This category collects everything on this wiki relating to Expansion tectonics — the family of theories holding that the Earth has grown in radius over geological time, and that the separation of the continents is the result of that growth rather than of continental drift over a fixed-size globe.

The idea travels under several names, all of which belong in this category:

• Expansion tectonics — the term coined by James Maxlow to distinguish the position from plate tectonics
• Expanding Earth — the older and most widespread name, associated above all with Samuel Warren Carey
• Growing Earth — the usual term where mass increase, rather than expansion at constant mass, is the proposed mechanism
• Earth expansion, Erdexpansion, ekspansja Ziemi and equivalents in other languages

Scope

Include in this category:

• Researchers who advance, defend, historically survey or seriously engage the expanding or growing Earth — whether geologists, geophysicists, palaeontologists or physicists proposing a mechanism
• Papers and books arguing for Earth expansion, reconstructing palaeogeography on an expanding globe, disputing subduction, or proposing a mechanism for radius or mass increase
• Theories built on Earth expansion, such as the Chthonian Theory and Excess Mass Stress Tectonics
• Critical assessments of expansion tectonics by researchers on this wiki, which belong with the subject they examine

The category covers a genuinely varied set of positions. The proposed mechanisms are not one theory but many, and are frequently incompatible with one another — a decreasing gravitational constant after Pascual Jordan and Dirac, mass creation in the core, phase change of a dense primordial interior, cosmological expansion coupling to matter, and electrical or hydridic mechanisms among them. What the entries share is the geological claim, not the physics offered to support it.

Historical note

Earth expansion was a live scientific hypothesis through the middle of the twentieth century, argued by figures of standing including the palaeontologist Derek Ager, the geologist Samuel Warren Carey, and the physicist Pascual Jordan, one of the founders of quantum mechanics. It lost the field to plate tectonics after the confirmation of sea-floor spreading and subduction in the 1960s, and the principal objection to it since has been the absence of a mechanism capable of supplying the required increase in radius or mass — together with the geodetic measurements that constrain any present-day change in Earth's radius to a very small value. Its continuing advocates dispute both points, and much of the work catalogued here is addressed to them.

Main article

• Expansion tectonics — the main article, covering the history, the evidence advanced on both sides, and the principal researchers