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There is beauty in simplicity: Zealandia/South America rendezvous on the expanding Earth
Preprints and early-stage research may not have been peer reviewed yet.
Abstract
Recent sharp high resolution images and 2D/3D map of the oceanic floor based on VGG published in The Guardian online made by the University of California San Diego reveal a perfect fit between the northern edge of Zealandia and the western rigid coastline of South America, which is considered as a geometrical proof that we live on an expanding planet.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
1] We present four companion digital models of the age, age uncertainty, spreading rates, and spreading asymmetries of the world's ocean basins as geographic and Mercator grids with 2 arc min resolution. The grids include data from all the major ocean basins as well as detailed reconstructions of back-arc basins. The age, spreading rate, and asymmetry at each grid node are determined by linear interpolation between adjacent seafloor isochrons in the direction of spreading. Ages for ocean floor between the oldest identified magnetic anomalies and continental crust are interpolated by geological estimates of the ages of passive continental margin segments. The age uncertainties for grid cells coinciding with marine magnetic anomaly identifications, observed or rotated to their conjugate ridge flanks, are based on the difference between gridded age and observed age. The uncertainties are also a function of the distance of a given grid cell to the nearest age observation and the proximity to fracture zones or other age discontinuities. Asymmetries in crustal accretion appear to be frequently related to asthenospheric flow from mantle plumes to spreading ridges, resulting in ridge jumps toward hot spots. We also use the new age grid to compute global residual basement depth grids from the difference between observed oceanic basement depth and predicted depth using three alternative age-depth relationships. The new set of grids helps to investigate prominent negative depth anomalies, which may be alternatively related to subducted slab material descending in the mantle or to asthenospheric flow. A combination of our digital grids and the associated relative and absolute plate motion model with seismic tomography and mantle convection model outputs represents a valuable set of tools to investigate geodynamic problems. Components: 10,219 words, 12 figures.
The Wegener bombshell of gross continental separation promptly triggered the concept of earth expansion as an alternative to drift, but books in German by Lindemann (1927), Bogolepow (1930), Hilgenberg (1933), and Keindl (1940) got little attention in the English literature. A second wave by Egyed (1956), Carey (1958), Heezen (1959), Barnett (1962), Brösske (1962), Neyman (1962), Creer (1965), Dearnley (1965), Jordan (1966), Steiner (1967), and Meservey (1969) ran against the orthodox tide, which, in geology, is lethal.
- O C Hilgenberg
Hilgenberg, O. C. Vom wachsenden Erdball. (O. Hilgenberg, Charlottenburg 2, Carmerstr. 2,
Berlin, 1933).