Were you taught that the movement of land mass of lithosphere on earth is due to moving tectonic plates? Well, the tectonic plates theory propose that there are eight major plates and many minor plates and these plates move in three basic ways: Divergent, Convergent and Transforming. Divergent boundaries is the expansion between plates, convergent boundaries is the collision between plates, and transform boundaries is the sliding between plates. The result of today’s landscape is explained by the continental drift theory with tectonic plates theory.
However, theory of expanding earth suggests that the earth is actually expanding. See video below, it’s quite self explainatory:
[youtube 7kL7qDeI05U&NR=1]Why would this theory be popular?
There are various forms of the expanding earth hypothesis including some proposals which say that the Earth’s mass has remained constant (and thus the gravitational pull at the surface has decreased over time), that Earth’s mass has grown with the volume in such a way that the surface gravity has remained constant, or that the gravitational constant of the universe has changed over time (a hypothesis used to explain how the mass and gravitational pull of the earth could remain constant during growth). Many of the remaining expanding Earth adherents are proponents of the ideas of the late Australian geologist S. Warren Carey, whose ideas were popular for a time in the 1950s and 60s.
Why is this theory discredited by many scientists?
The primary objections to expanding Earth center around the lack of an accepted process by which the Earth’s radius could increase and on the fact that the Earth’s radius is not measured to be increasing today. Expanding Earth ideas are also discredited since they rely on the proposal that the process of subduction and other destructive plate boundaries are non-existent, when in reality subduction is observed at oceanic trenches[5] and also known to have occurred in the past from geological evidence.
Alright, do you believe in the expanding earth theory or tectonic plates theory? Leave your comments and thoughts.