Expanding earth theory

1. Evan
   February 21st, 2008 at 2:31 pm

   The forefront proponent of theory is a comic book artist, with NO science background.

2. praenomenal
   February 21st, 2008 at 2:49 pm

   Hu. interesting that the voice over is remarkably like hypnosis. The tone of the voice, the way he counts back the years etc.

3. özi
   February 21st, 2008 at 2:58 pm

   but... it's a rock!?

4. CheeseDuck
   February 21st, 2008 at 3:44 pm

   Ok.. Ok.. Just... What the fuck? This is just as plausible as the "Inner Earth Theory."

5. CheeseDuck
   February 21st, 2008 at 3:48 pm

   And where did all that water come from?

6. StuckeyJ
   February 21st, 2008 at 3:53 pm

   To play devils advocate, I believe that maybe the water was still there, but the land masses we know today could have been under the water.

7. bob
   February 21st, 2008 at 3:55 pm

   I think its possible, very posible that we know fuck all.

8. Franz Kafka
   February 21st, 2008 at 3:57 pm

   i beleive this, as well as the timecube theory, the denver airport masonic concentration camp plot (although it is kind've shaped like a swastika), and that Reptilians control the earth. hahahahhaha

9. Franz Kafka
   February 21st, 2008 at 4:03 pm

   nice animation, too, but the fossill record doesn't support the antarctica fact. Pangea without a doubt existed, but not expanding

10. MoniA
    February 21st, 2008 at 4:07 pm

    no post about the lunar eclypse? it was awsome!!

11. Jacques
    February 21st, 2008 at 4:09 pm

    This guy is an idiot. He's actually slagging people off on youtube who disagree with him. Nice animation sure, but zero bloody science.

    Remember that plate tectonics, as an accepted theory, has only been around since the 1960s.

    Where is Immanuel Velikovsky when you need him?

12. bean
    February 21st, 2008 at 4:11 pm

    MoniA-
    The "lunar eclypse", as you so delightfully misspell it, is just a byproduct of the expanding Earth temporarily blotting out the sun.

13. VonSkippy
    February 21st, 2008 at 4:26 pm

    I'm guessing the guy that started this Nonsense went to a public school in Kansas.

14. dehilster
    February 21st, 2008 at 4:30 pm

    Would you call all the continents fitting together a coincidence? How you explain that?

15. oakling
    February 21st, 2008 at 4:30 pm

    The crazy thing is that I swear I read a reference to this theory just this morning in some kids' book - The Game, by Diana Wynne Jones. Is it more common than I knew? At least it could be true in her book, because it's sci/fantasy.

16. Andrea Short
    February 21st, 2008 at 4:42 pm

    Expanding earth theory is too easy.
    I think nature and cosmos are very sophisticated and complex systems.

    The theory of an expanding earth is very simple-minded, like the idea that the earth is flat and not round.

17. amberae
    February 21st, 2008 at 4:44 pm

    I think on that massive a scale, it's outrageous. Although, I'm always open to new theories. To answer where the water came from, a lot of our water came from volcanic eruptions that combined hydrogen and oxygen. There was no water on the earth when it formed, just rock and magma. I'm not so sure about the stretching of the planet.

    In another way, it could make sense. The core of our earth is energy, and energy is always looking for a calm state, a form of release. Physicists talk about it a lot. All matter is trying for absolute zero, because it's hard to constantly move.

    I can see his point, it's just a step up from pangea (is that the correct name for the mass of one land that rode in the oceans?)... but something is missing, so I can't quite believe it.

18. NiteWhite
    February 21st, 2008 at 4:47 pm

    Um, the Bible said the Earth is around 6k years old!

19. SB3
    February 21st, 2008 at 5:12 pm

    Yeah, what NiteWhite said.

20. emptyminded
    February 21st, 2008 at 5:17 pm

    What a bunch of poo. Everybody knows that the Earth is flat.

21. Wegener
    February 21st, 2008 at 5:44 pm

    What bicycle pump to add so much material ?
    Il faut arrêter de fumer! La géométrie ne suffit pas, il faut le gonfler ce globe. Comment négliger des subductions du paléozoïque ?

22. Tom
    February 21st, 2008 at 5:44 pm

    Wait, so, no one has a one sentence way to disprove this? I love letting myself get wrapped up in crackpot theories as long as there's a cool science infusion afterwards that disproves the idea. Now that no one can pry the expanding earth theory from my mind ... I guess I'll have to go convert.

23. Pudifoot
    February 21st, 2008 at 5:45 pm

    NiteWhite: dangit! thats what i came here to say! Anyone who listens to Kent Hovind knows that the Earth is only 6000 years old or so, and 4000 years ago there was a great flood (that created the grand canyon).

24. Athon
    February 21st, 2008 at 6:18 pm

    Tom:

    Try this for one sentence - the author himself concedes that to adopt this hypothesis over the current continentual drift theory (which today is well supported by a number of observations) a shit-load of science, also all well supported by observations would have to be abandoned. So, is it easier to believe that this theory is correct AND we've made a massive number of mistakes on a whole lot of other distinct fields, or that this guy doesn't understand geology as well as he thinks?

    Considering the silly things he says (subduction can't happen due to the density of the mantle? Bollocks! The density has nothing to do with it - the mantle is liquid and hot, which means the subduced rock is heated to liquid, allowing gradual mixing) I think we're safe in science.

25. Aaron
    February 21st, 2008 at 6:49 pm

    If plates don't move how do you explain subduction faults and mountain ranges? There's a lot of counter-evidence that cannot be explained by this hypothesis.

26. CheeseDuck
    February 21st, 2008 at 7:17 pm

    I just have to put this out there again.
    WHAT THE FUCK!?

27. Nicholas Dollak
    February 21st, 2008 at 7:21 pm

    #17 (amberae) points out the most likely origin of water (or at least most of it; some could have been in the form of ice from early comet crashes). As anyone who's explored the problem of obtaining straight hydrogen for a fuel source knows, H loves to bond to certain other atoms. Helium doesn't bond too well to anything, but oxygen is always open to some hydrogen action under the right conditions.

    This "expanding Earth" thing hardly qualifies as a theory. It begs the obvious questions of what drives this expansion, and what prevents ocean-swallowing cracks from forming. His generalizations and insistent tone do not make his claims any more factual.

    Yes, the edges of many land-masses do match up like puzzle-pieces. Plate tectonics explains this very well. However, all the evidence indicates that the Atlantic is slowly expanding while the Pacific narrows. There's a subduction zone beneath the Pacific, hence the more volatile volcanic activity in the "Ring of Fire," more volatile than one gets in an expansion zone like the Atlantic's Mariana Trench. Australia and Antarctica were connected, long ago, and Australia may have been connected to China longer ago than that. Both continents have been migrating south for over 100 million years.

    As for the presence of penguins in both S. America and Antarctica, and of closely-related species of conifers and redwoods in Asia and N. America, plate tectonics has little to do with that --- ice ages are responsible. During these cold periods, a good deal of water gets locked up in polar ice, and coastlines expand as sea levels drop. Flightless birds migrated between Antarctica and S. America, while vast forests spread across the Bering Strait and became the dominant flora in both Asia and N. America.

    The building and melting of polar ice caps during cold and warm periods causes sea levels to fall and rise. Most of Europe was a shallow sea during much of the Mesozoic era, and so more marine reptiles than dinosaurs are found there --- but it dried out as the climate cooled, so many prehistoric land mammal fossils can be found there.

    This guy's animation is fairly accurate regarding the S. America / Africa connection, but he really had to distort the coastlines of the Pacific-facing land-masses to make it all fit. There are good maps showing the continental shelves that make it easy to see how things actually did fit together during the good ol' Pangaea days. (Not THAT good --- most of the inland regions were burning hot, dry desert! But that was before the dinosaurs, even.)

28. Alex
    February 21st, 2008 at 11:14 pm

    This theory explains my ever expanding waistband perfectly!

29. MightyCow
    February 22nd, 2008 at 3:53 am

    You'll notice on these animations that they always show the fit from the West Coast of Africa against the East Coast of South America side.

    They never show you the opposite side of the earth, because they don't fit together on that side.

    The reason for this is that instead of a single ball of earth, it was one giant continent. It only ever fit together on one side.

30. ted
    February 22nd, 2008 at 6:44 am

    The obvious explanation for that is that all the extra material that fit together there flew out into space and formed the moon. If you were to flatten the moon, I'm sure it would fit in as the missing piece to that puzzle.

    Of course it's fake, since the earth is exactly the same today as it was millions (or billion or trillions) of years ago, when Xenu first deposited the bodies of countless aliens into our volcanos, trapping their souls in our bodies.

31. kyboiz
    February 22nd, 2008 at 8:30 am

    Philistines!

32. the lord
    February 22nd, 2008 at 9:56 am

    IM TAKING A GEOLAGY CLASS AND ALL I CAN SAY IS WE ARE FU#KED A YEAR FROM NOW 80 BILLION WHATEVER
    THE POINT IS WE DONT KNOW AS MUCH AS WE THINK WE DO AND WHAT LITTLE WE KNOW SHOWS US HOW MUCH WE DONT

33. Art Waite
    February 22nd, 2008 at 10:27 am

    I notice that if the Earth was, in fact, a smaller diameter, then the speed of rotation would have been higher. Think of an ice-skater spinning, demonstrating conservation of rotational momentum. Thus, the driving force to cause the splits in Pangaea
    could have been centrifugal.
    No, I don't have any qualifications either.

34. sparge
    February 22nd, 2008 at 11:23 pm

    If the Earth was smaller then either

    a) it was denser, and thus gravity would be higher

    or

    b) there was less mass

    We can eliminate a) as unlikely due to the presence of large animals such as dinosaurs during that time period. So apparently it picked up a bunch of mass somewhere. Gradually. Assuming a planet with a surface area of 25% of today's (based on the current land-ocean ratio), the mass would be 1/8 of the current mass. So dividing by 70 million years, that means we're gaining 82 trillion tons of mass per year! Also, I would say, pretty unlikely.

    On a side note (I feel like I can ramble since no one is going to read this far anyway), I liked how the wikipedia article says

    However, modern physics does not support the idea of an aether which is absorbed by matter or is transformed into new matter.

    and yet concepts like dark matter, dark energy, and antimatter are widely accepted.

35. Aleksi
    February 26th, 2008 at 2:09 pm

    Neal Adams, the guy responsible for this video, was interviewed on episode 51 of the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Link: http://www.theskepticsguide.org/

36. HappyCoder
    April 21st, 2008 at 2:51 am

    There is actually quite a bit of evidence that supports this theory. In my experirence people will disregaurd this theory immediatly without actually thinking about it. I could ramble on for a while about the evidences for it that are actually pretty good evidences. But one thing I do want to say is you reject the idea that the earth is expanding yet science accepts the idea that the sun is expanding.

    http://janus.astro.umd.edu/astro/stars/SunsLife.html

    I honestly think that the earth is expanding. Once you begin to look at the evidence a more complete picture begins to come into view.

37. nick corney
    June 16th, 2008 at 11:55 am

    This theory certainly passes the beauty test.
    I reckon there is some subduction and can't see why some expanding earth theorists have such a problem with it - there's still room enough for an ocean-less globe in our past.
    There's a heap of evidence accumulated by now for an expanding earth, we still lack a truly convincing engine of expansion, however, and it should really be one that adds enough mass. Get thinking...

38. MrGamma
    July 31st, 2008 at 2:14 am

    I've been following this for a while...

    Expanding Earth...
    - Continents Fit Together Perfectly.
    - Explains that mountains form when the curve of the earth buckles and compresses into itself.
    - Fits perfectly fine with fossil records.
    - Suggests a smaller earth with less gravity hence larger dinosaurs with anatomies that can support the weight.
    - Attempts to explain the surface features of other planets in our solar system including Mars and Jupiter's Europa. ( does a pretty good job )

    Plate Tectonics
    - Suggests heat escapes the center of the earth in plumes and that predictable heat convection currents push land masses into each other yet the earths core has recently been suspected to be "chaotic" and unpredictable. ( not sure how accurate this is )
    - Has "supposed" palaeomagnetic evidence which says the earth size is fixed within 0.8% accuracy but is argued to be flawed and EE theorists say it needs more re-evaluation.
    - Does not explain why the continents fit together on all sides.
    - Superceeded Expanding Earth as the popular accepted theory before any palaeomagnetic evidence came into existence.

    I am just a layman... but I have been doing my reading... I hope this gives people something to go from. In any event... neither side has convinced me that they are 100% correct... but "popular science" has proven to me that they are really ignorant to this very plausible possibility.

39. Adam Stanhope
    July 31st, 2008 at 10:01 am

    Mr. Gamma:

    The "less gravity hence larger dinosaurs with anatomies that can support the weight" item fails in my view. The density of our planet is behind its mass. In order for there to have been a significant change in gravity between the dinosaur age and now, there would have had to have been a significant increase in mass. Where is the evidence of a significant increase in earth's mass between the dinosaur age and now? This increase can't be explained through evidence of a simple non-apocalyptic meteor or comet strike.

40. MrGamma
    July 31st, 2008 at 2:57 pm

    Adam,

    Gee... I dunno... How does dark matter create itself? What is it? Where's the proof... Wish I knew... But you don't have to prove it to me for me think it's a possibility...

    Honestly... can you even prove the age of the Earth? No... you can only guess at it...

41. Adam Stanhope
    July 31st, 2008 at 5:27 pm

    No - you're right - of course I can't.

    You've brought the concept of gravitational mass changing over a finite and presumably measurable period of time, however. If you're going to cite the dinosaurs as evidence of possible less gravity, surely you must have an idea as to how/why less gravity became more gravity over time?

42. AcesHigh
    February 2nd, 2009 at 11:09 pm

    This theory is nonsense.

    The most easily found flaws:

    1 - if Earth was expanding to this day, there wouldnt be continents collinding right now

    2 - its a false assumption of the uneducated that the first supercontinent on Earth was Pangea. It was only THE LAST supercontinent. Scientists have evidences of many other supercontinents that appeared and disappeared in the last 4 billion years (Pangea is only 200 million years old).
    The expanding Earth Theory cannot explain all the evidence for previous supercontinents and the continuous cycle of collision and separation of the tectonic plates.

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