Transform Faults Help
10 messages in this thread
The ocean basins tell a story but has the story been misinterpreted?
The mid ocean rise's are balanced in between most of the continents. Oddly not
the case in the pacific.
The Rise feature appears like it was initially started in a linear formation
then later broken and shifted at the transform faults.
The transform faults that shear the rise at different intervals must run
extremely deep, cutting completley through the Lithosphere to allow the
shifting yet they mysteriously disappear hundreds or thousands of miles out
from the rise.
The fact that the rise is cleanly sheared by the transform faults makes their
formation by convection currents in the asthenosphere very unlikely.
Why would the currents be in linear planes instead of cells like we see in the
air and sun.
Why wouldn't the convection currents even out the sheared appearance as it
forms new ocean basin.
I also seams like that if there were convection currents in the asthenosphere
they would flow up the sides of the continent and be sinking in the middle
area between the continents.
Kamron
Hi, Kamron–
>> The mid ocean rise's are balanced in between most of the continents. Oddly
not the case in the pacific.
The Pacific is the ocean that surrounded the supercontinent Pangaea. To break
apart the pieces of Pangaea, spreading had to occur between continents, and
assuming both sides spread at the same speed, the ridges would be expected to
be about halfway between separated continents – but the Pacific was not created
by separating continents.
>> The Rise feature appears like it was initially started in a linear formation
then later broken and shifted at the transform faults.
>> The transform faults that shear the rise at different intervals must run
extremely deep, cutting completley through the Lithosphere to allow the
shifting yet they mysteriously disappear hundreds or thousands of miles out
from the rise.
I imagine the faults cut through the lithosphere, but the lithosphere is very
thin at a spreading ridge; it is still being created there. I am fuzzy on why
they do not extend farther than they do, but it may have to do with the
thickening of the crust as it moves away from its birth site.
>> The fact that the rise is cleanly sheared by the transform faults makes
their formation by convection currents in the asthenosphere very unlikely.
I do not follow your reasoning.
>> Why would the currents be in linear planes instead of cells like we see in
the air and sun.
I believe the atmosphere convection has an overall pattern where air rises at
the equator (a linear boundary), and drops again at a certain latitude (again a
linear boundary), with another rise at another latitude and so on. I dimly
recall some such pattern with linear boundaries for the Sun also.
>> Why wouldn't the convection currents even out the sheared appearance as it
forms new ocean basin.
>> I also seams like that if there were convection currents in the
asthenosphere they would flow up the sides of the continent and be sinking in
the middle area between the continents.
The theoretical convection currents in the mantle are likely "unaware" of the
continents, which are trivial floating rafts of scum as far as they are
concerned. They appear often at mid-ocean because their appearance created the
ocean in question. But they do not always – the Red Sea and the Rift Valley of
East Africa are an example of a spreading basin that is cracking apart a
continent. In time, it may split off the Middle East (which was part of Africa
before they collided with Eurasia) and East Africa and create a new ocean
between them and West Africa, which (surprise!) will have the spreading zone
roughly in its middle.
–Doug
Doug
Try an alternative view for a moment….
Get an ocean basin map that shows the faults and rises and follow this
sequence…
Assume for a moment the Earth is totally covered with a continental geological
crust without deep ocean basins only shallow seas…
A star pulls off the crust(my favorite) or a very large meteor plunges into
the earth(an almost direct hit) and gets through but almost comes to a stop but
not quite…. it exits where the pacific is now…..
and the mass with 2/3 of old earths crust……..
becomes the moon.
The the remaining crust breaks into the continents..
and they all flow towards the hole were the crust was removed. The hot plastic
magma flowed outward from under each continent piece. When these planet wide
flows met roughly in the middle of the continent masses the hot masses mounded
up. The firming center already becoming more rigid adjusted back and forth in
sections.
Open the map and visualise the event… look how all the features make sense
this way….
Oh well back to the problems at had….
The rise is cleanly sheared.
If the rise was caused by a convection currents
a linear convection current that was in place for thousands of years….
then why when the rise is sheared with a three hundred mile offset… why
would the linear convection current now shift precisely with the rise segment?
Why would the clean shear maintain its profile?
Why wouldn't the rise activity resume in the linear plane and start building a
new rise in the flank of the old rise section?
It doesn't, not only that the sheared section remains cleanly sheared.
Linear convection would need an almost permanent linear heat source. What
would cause that?
If there is …
Why would the current shift when there was a shift in the rise?
The rise and the associated heat and magma flow is following a crack up
through the basin crust. When forces shifted the ridge it stayed clean still
flowing heat and magma up the weak and tormented ridge area.
>> continents, are trivial floating rafts of scum <<
I agree
Do you agree that the clean breaks in the rise… the shift faults and
transform faults are parallel with the motion of the crustal sections?
Kamron
Hi, Kamron–
That the continents have shapes that can generally be fit together like a
jigsaw puzzle named Pangaea fits the standard theory and yours equally well.
But your theory does not seem explain deep quakes at subduction zones, the
"tape recording" of magnetic flipflops in the sea floor on either side of
spreading ridges, radioactive datings of sea floor rocks, _consistent_ relative
movements of hot spots (consider Hawaii), and how these lines of evidence hang
together as well as they do (Hawaii indicates the same motions as spreading and
subduction zones indicate, or paleomagnetism, etc.). Besides, there is no
evidence specific to a star passage such as one would expect (_massively_
disarranged orbits, etc.), nor an impact of _that_ magnitude specifically at
the end of the Cretaceous as you have proposed. Lead me to a limestone on the
Moon and I will revise my thinking, but until you do, I will believe the
aforementioned observations.
I am fuzzy on why spreading ridges retain their integrity when staggered by
transform faults (and why those transform faults are there in the first place);
perhaps it has to do with the fact that the crust is already thin there from
past spreading. If pull from subduction is the main driver, this is
straightforward – the plates are already separated there, and pulling them
apart still draws new material up where the break is. If push from upwelling
currents at the spreading site is the main driver, I am less clear, but perhaps
the upwelling is broader than the ridge, and keeps pushing up material most
easily where the break already is.
I do not know enough about transform faults to agree or disagree on whether
they must parallel plate movements. They look that way on maps within the
limits of my knowledge of the motions.
>> Linear convection would need an almost permanent linear heat source. What
would cause that?
Why must the heat source be linear? The atmosphere rises along vertical planes
as I noted before without a linear heat source.
I did you (and onlookers) a disservice when I some time ago claimed geologists
had already arrived at dates that crudely matched radioactivity datings when
the latter became available; I recently re-read the Scientific American article
on that old age-of-the-Earth controversy. Some geologists had sided with the
physicists who calculated the Earth was 20-40 million years old, other
geologists held for 100 million, and still others figured it was far older.
What I was misremembering was a last-century consensus of geologists on the
"geological column", the sequence of things, not for specific dates. That
geological column was what was nicely confirmed by radioactive datings in this
century (and thus tends to confirm radioactive dating in turn). My apologies
for any confusion I may have caused.
Merry Christmas to you and to all.
–Doug
Doug
Thanks again for working with me on this.
>> But your theory does not seem explain deep quakes at subduction zones<<
The "subduction zone" (on both sides of the location where the crust was
removed) is where the liquids were moving out from under the continents
as they settled downward as the earth's components sought balance again. This
is the deepest longest plate interface that the earth has…the gravitational
adjustments take place deep here.
>>the "tape recording" of magnetic flipflops in the sea floor on either side
of spreading ridges,<<
I puzzled over this…it is obvious that the earths field was changing during
the formation of this area…. say the catastrophe upset the magnetic field
generator, say an iron core that lost a portion of its mass and was out of
balance for a period of time causing it to flip untill it resycronised with the
earths rotation again..the current motion of the magnetic field may be a
remnant of this destablised period.
>> radioactive dating of sea floor rocks,<<
I have not resolved this yet but …give me time.
>> _consistent_ relative movements of hot spots (consider Hawaii), and how
these lines of evidence hang together as well as they do (Hawaii indicates the
same motions as spreading and subduction zones indicate, or paleomagnetism,
etc.).<<
The hot spots could be moving under a fixed plate.
>> Lead me to a limestone on the Moon and I will revise my thinking, but until
you do, I will believe the aforementioned observations. <<
I wished I could… and one day we will revisit the moon and I believe that
there will be not only limestone but a geological table there that will prove
the moon was once part of the earth.
I know that there is a tremendous amount of work done to prove plate
tectonics. The process of proving something will discard data that doesn't work
towards the goal. When it was discovered that the Ocean Basins were "new" and
without any geological table or deep sedimentary beds the only possibility
became that they were new and all the geological history of the earth needed to
be revised or prove somehow that they were being renewed or consumed.
There still remains the mystery of how the process got started….
and what happened to the rest of the geological crust. The earth should have
formed into a smooth ball with some wrinkling due to cooling. Then the
geological table was built up over time on top of this cooled crust. Now the
continental crust is in sections with over half missing.
>> spreading ridges retain their integrity when staggered by transform faults
<<
The rise remains balanced on the flanks.. that is equalateraly.. this is very
tough for the push…if the convection zone is strong enough to push the
continents apart it would not move with the fault. If pulling is going on then
why would the rise be balanced….it would be more productive on the pulled
side showing more new crust.
By the way there is some evidence that the life forms found in the sediments
changes with the supposed age of the area… the further from the rise the
older the fossil are….this is tough one for me…but working on it.
Merry Christmas to you and all
Kamron
Hi, Kamron–
Deep quakes were supposed to be impossible because mantle material at such
depths is too plastic (not liquid – see the subduction thread) for ordinary
faulting to occur. Only solid-state phase changes offer much of an explanation
for how quakes could occur so deep (remember, olivine under pressures
approaching these, where it ceases to be olivine, has been observed in the lab;
this is not just theory). Given the plastic nature of the mantle, more or less
all stresses dating back to Tertiary age events should have long since been
erased at these depths.
Even if the Earth's magnetic field was flipflopping madly over a span of days
instead of centuries, the stripes of magnetization on the seafloor still record
the order in which the seafloor rocks solidified (dropped below the Curie
temperature if you want to be precise). Why would they freeze in zones
parallel to the ridge? Your explanation makes a prediction: since the sea
floors would have cooled from the surface down, there should also be _frequent_
magnetic inversions as one drills deeper into them. I think we would have
heard by now if such a thing were there.
Movements of a single hot spot might be explained by movements of the source
rather than movements of the crust, but what about many hot spots all "moving"
in directions consistent with plate movements proposed for other reasons, and
few or none "moving" in "wrong" directions?
In originally forming plate tectonics theory, some data were surely "set aside"
(_not_ discarded) because a spot could not be found for them. But the theory
would have remained merely one among rival theories unless almost all of these
data eventually found a home in the theory – and more are being snapped into
place each day.
When it became clear that the ocean floors were relatively young, past theories
had indeed to be revised to fit this fact, but not necessarily by proving
renewal and consumption of the seafloors. I have a notion that was still in
the time when "continental drift" was a maverick idea, when many scientists had
as much or more stake in proving an all-at-once resurfacing as in proving a
conveyor-belt renewal. Radioactive datings, paleomagnetic stripes, and so on
must have forced them to cave in when they could not come up with answering
evidence of comparable strength.
Consider how bubbles group together atop boiling water, and then tell me again
why Earth's surface must have been uniform when it first solidified. I don't
know that it wasn't, so tell me also why various geological processes could not
have made it non-uniform later. Where was all the water before oceans were
opened up?
–Doug
>>
Your explanation makes a prediction: since the sea floors would have cooled
from the surface down, there should also be _frequent_ magnetic inversions as
one drills deeper into them. I think we would have heard by now if such a
thing were there.<<
There has been very little drilling into the mantle….I wonder if the
cores that were taken were checked for this…?
>> but what about many hot spots all "moving" in directions consistent with
plate movements proposed for other reasons, and few or none "moving" in "wrong"
directions?<<
But how is the situation wrong for moving hot spots? You have likened the air
to the thermal properties of the earths interior. The air is heated more at the
equator than at the poles and some variations due to the wobble. This sets up
an equator to pole flow that is altered by other forces into the patterns we
have. What could cause the interior of the earth to have variations in the heat
source other than a gradient change from inside to outside? I don't see how a
linear hot spot could be formed under the Atlantic rise that would have a North
South orientation? the rotation of the earth would surly organize it into an
equatorial alignment of some sort. While there are some east west rise
conditions there is still the large NS situation. How do you account for this
alignment?
>>Consider how bubbles group together atop boiling water, and then tell me
again why Earth's surface must have been uniform when it first solidified.<<
As the earth cooled the activity reduced and the surfaces became calm as they
solidified. For example boil lead and then slowly reduce the heat. It will cool
into a very consistent mass.
>>so tell me also why various geological processes could not have made it
non-uniform later. Where was all the water before oceans were opened up? <<
The earth definitely shows different ocean levels or total amount of water. My
glib explanation at this point is that the earth received water from other
sources. The rings of some of the planets I believe also arrived from other
sources. It is obvious that Mars lost some major water quickly based on the
water formed ravines and flow patterns, this ocean could have been added to
earth during a flyby. The Bible as well as many other sources talk about a
major flood that occurred. This may be a description of the event that added
water to the earth.
Kamron,
>> The earth definitely shows different ocean levels or total amount of water.
My glib explanation at this point is that the earth received water from other
sources. The rings of some of the planets I believe also arrived from other
sources. It is obvious that Mars lost some major water quickly based on the
water formed ravines and flow patterns, this ocean could have been added to
earth during a flyby. The Bible as well as many other sources talk about a
major flood that occurred. This may be a description of the event that added
water to the earth. <<
Be careful here, you're getting close to Velikovskian "worlds in collision"
nonsense. The further afield you rove in search of non-orthodox answers to
your questions, the more different fields of science you'll have to deal with
in order to make your answers into a coherent theory. For example, the above
paragraph founders on the rocks of planetary dynamics — it's nearly impossible
that such a complex event involving several planetary bodies could conclude
with all the bodies involved in widely separated, nearly circular orbits all in
the same plane as the more distant planets that were not involved.
Jon W.
Jon
We have seen dramatic evidence for massive water flows on Mars.
There is obvious evidence of water flows on the moon. The ring System Mare
Orientale appears to me to have been a slow wet one..
The solar system has retrograde rotations & erratics that can only be
explained with flyby's.
>>it's nearly impossible that such a complex event involving several planetary
bodies could conclude with all the bodies involved in widely separated, nearly
circular orbits all in the same plane as the more distant planets that were not
involved.<<
Indeed …..this needs to be dealt with by all theories. Take Uranus for
example(Doug and I have been round and round with this)<g>
The planet is rotating with an axis that is more than 90 degrees out of plane.
It got knocked off its keester and yet…..its moons are orbiting in nearly
perfect circles…… in the equatorial plane……tell me that isn't a
complicated event ….
and how possibly could the moons hold that condition without there being an
underlying orbital mechanism that tunes orbits into circular condition. Think
about that and talk about complex events.
The sun spews out a tremendous amount of material some piled up on the earth
forming the geologic crust…other materials arrive dramatically and range from
metals to gases with a bit of water. There is lots of ice in the solar system
and some ends up back on planets.
So its not too far fetched to think that earth received a displaced ocean in
the form of an icy comet or cloud.
Kamron
Hi, Kamron–
>> There has been very little drilling into the mantle….I wonder if the
cores that were taken were checked for this…?
There is no need to reach the mantle, I am talking about seafloor crust here.
As long as they have drilled a few hundred feet there, I would expect
unexpected magnetic reversals within each core if your theory were correct
(from when the crust formed during a time of super-fast reversals).
>>But how is the situation wrong for moving hot spots?
The fact that hot spots move (relative to crust) favors neither theory, yours
or the standard plate tectonics. But in your theory, those motions should not
correlate with postulated plate motions (since plate motions are imaginary in
your theory). There should be more hotspots "moving" contrary to theoretical
plate movements than with them. Can you name even one?
>>the rotation of the earth would surly organize it into an equatorial
alignment of some sort
We are talking about mantle currents moving in millimeters per day (rotation)
here; it is not obvious to me that Coriolis (rotation) effect would dominate
such slow motions.
>>For example boil lead and then slowly reduce the heat. It will cool into a
very consistent mass.
But what about the oxide (I assume) scum on top of the lead? Does it always
spread out evenly over the surface, for all different surface area to volume
ratios, all cooling rates, and all different atmospheres? Even if you check
all the possibilities, it still could easily be different for granite scum on
basalt. I see no reason to expect either clumping or non-clumping until
someone actually starts melting and refreezing planet-sized rocks – it seems to
me to be an adjustable parameter that may be taken to fit either theory equally
well.
>> the earth received water from other sources
I believe the ices found throughout the solar system contain ammonia and
cyanide as minor constituents. The arrival of such things would very likely
have killed off all life.
What about all the marine fossils from before your K-T catastrophe? I suspect
many of them show adaptations to true oceans, not just shallow-sea features. I
would need help from paleontologists to know how secure such interpretations
are.
–Doug