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NCGT 2016 OROGENESIS + PLATES
By: Admin Date: January 29, 2017, 8:37 pm
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New Concepts in Global Tectonics Journal, V. 4, No. 4, December
2016. www.ncgt.org
The Earth as I found it, Part 3, Charles Warren Hunt.....535
Mobile plate tectonics: a confrontation, Peter M. James.....537
Counterclockwise rotation of Australia revisited, Karsten M.
Storetvedt.....540
Articles
Late Permian coal formation under Boreal conditions along the
shores of the Mongol-Tranbaikalian seaway, Per Michaelsen...615
A history of the Earth’s seawater: transgressions and
regressions, Karsten M. Storetvedt.....664
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
The Earth as I have found it, part 3
y letter to the Editor, v. 4, n. 2, discussed 1000 feet of core
that I recovered from a corehole drilled in the Palliser River
Valley, south of Banff townsite in the Canadian Rocky Mountains.
I closed stating that the core should be available for
inspection at a BC government core storage facility.
Subsequently, thinking I should give the reader a more specific
direction, I tried to find the core by enquiry; but had no
success at all. The core must therefore, be presumed lost. To
make up for its lack I provide here a field reference where a
large exposure of injectite rock can be studied.
Injectite rock is exposed on the northern plunge of the Canadian
Rocky Mountains between the Pine and Peace Rivers in British
Columbia. The oil rights to the area had been acquired by the
company of a prominent geologist and friend of mine, John Frey,
and as there was no published information on the area in 1974
when he acquired the rights, I was engaged to map the geology in
the field, using pack horses for access. That was over 40 years
ago.
The topographic apex of the mountains is expressed in Paleozoic
strata of Mississippian age, which plunge northward under
younger strata. Between the Pine River and the Carbondale
Rivers, (the latter a tributary of Peace River) bedded
Mississippian strata arch over the plunging nose of the
mountains. Beneath these bedded limestones the rock looks like
massive carbonate in texture, but with only the vaguest of
layering. Contact with Devonian strata is absent. This absence
puzzled me at the time, as did the absence of clear bedding
planes. However, with no possible alternative interpretation, I
mapped the rock as massive Mississippian carbonates, vaguely
bedded and without evidence of porosity.
I recommend this area for study in substitution for my “lost”
core. These exposures are undoubtedly injectite rock.
Petrophysical study is in order and should yield insights into
the nature of injectite petrology.
The general case for mountain building by injections of metal
hydrides from the mantle
In a letter to the editor of the NCGT Journal v. 4, n 2, I made
an initial point that metal hydrides, fluid hydrogen-impregnated
metal acting as a gas escapes from the mantle through a crack in
the crust followed by hydrogen degassing and instantaneous
deposition of rock-forming minerals. I made the point that a new
form of rock was thusly created, and I called it “injectite”
rock, a new concept in the creation of rock.
In a second letter to the editor of the NCGT Journal v. 4, n.3 I
made a point to allay skepticism as to the possible existence of
such a “crack in the crust.” Describing a well-known and much
studied example comprising reefs of Devonian age in the nearby
Alberta prairie. I made the point that such a crack and leakage
of mantle material through it actually happened in Devonian
time. The evidence is well preserved and much studied for its
relevance to oil production. This event of “injectite” rock
formation happening in Devonian time and involving only Devonian
formations provides the reader as well as this writer a clear
introduction to the injectite phenomenon.
Although the Canadian Rockies have long been considered
sedimentary in nature, their strata are dated from Cambrian to
early Tertiary ages. Now injectites of two forms must be
recognized as part of mountain and prairie makeup: 1. the
dolostone as seen in my core, and 2. the pure magnesite with
base metal oxide inclusions of the Mt. Brusellof mine (Described
in NCGT Journals v. 4, n. 2 and v. 4, n. 3 as injectites); the
dolostone of my corehole and the ores of the Mt. Brusellof
magnesite mine both were raised in Tertiary times with elevation
of the mountains, whereas the injectites under the Alberta
prairie were not involved in mountain building. Thus, injectite
rock may be installed without followup mountain building.
In prairie and mountain circumstances alike it appears logical
to me that dynamic injection of fluid metal hydrides through a
crack in the crust followed by pressure drop, degassing of
hydrogen, and instant deposition of injectite rock fully explain
such events. Instantaneously deposited rock would first take the
form of a “keel” along the length of the mountain range. A keel
would impede further upward injectite deposition. With progress
blocked or choked off, new injectite gas would be forced either
to flow laterally,
sill-like, or open a new upward channel. The lateral option
could spread the gaseous injectite as a thin layer,
“underplating” the chamber of deposition, in the process.
Repeated underplating could raise the terrain.
From this insight, unlimited additions to the upper crust may be
visualized. New fluid entering would most easily spread
laterally in successive injections, each one blocking previous
injections. Successive injective events would define a
repetitious process of injectite emplacement and consequent
mountain growth by “layered underplating.” This phenomenon may
also explain high plateaus, the Tibetan and central Andean
plateaus notably. The latter raised an entire arm of the ocean
more than two miles above sea level, creating Lake Titicaca with
its marine wildlife and vegetation. In these cases the
injections must have been very fluid and spread sill-like before
abruptly degassing and turning to solid rock, thus raising their
host terrain and leaving it centrally depressed.
Without understanding the origin and essential creation of
injectite rock and the essential contribution it makes to all
mountain and plateau building worldwide, analysis of orogenesis
has been an exercise in futility. May these insights give
welcome relief.
Charles Warren Hunt
archeanc@gmail.com
10 October 2016
Postscript: It never crossed my mind when I looked at a core of
what became "injectite rock" and its association with a base
metal mine, both of them out-of-place according to convention in
our day could lead to new fundamental geological understanding.
But so it does!
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New Concepts in Global Tectonics Journal, V. 4, No. 4, December
2016. www.ncgt.org
Mobile plate tectonics: a confrontation
Criticism of mobile plate tectonics over the past four or five
decades has had little, if any, effect on the development of and
the growing hegemony of the mobilist model. The reasons for this
are no doubt related to the fact that the mechanisms involved
are still of unknown magnitude and often acting at unknown
depths. There is also the fact that mobilism admits that its
fundamental hypotheses are often still in the process of
transmutation. It is harder to hit a moving target, particularly
when the long established observational processes of geology are
excluded. Or, as the Tarlings in their book Continental Drift
(Penguin) put it: "Future research will prove all of the mobile
plate tectonic assumptions to be correct". A brave statement
when the role of science does not to include the prediction of
the favourable outcomes for future research; that belongs to
faith.
Despite the intrinsic unknowns in what is now referred to as a
paradigm, it is still instructive to look critically at some of
the mobilist mechanisms – those, anyway, that can be reasonably
quantified - and it is also instructive to make some assessment
of assumptions/mechanisms that cannot be quantified. Here goes:-
Lithospheric Plates. These, the building blocks for the various
roles of mobile plate tectonics, are defined as part of an upper
rigid layer of the Earth, which has been broken into various
units that move relative to each other. The depth of the plates
is not yet clearly specified. More importantly, at the upper
level the presence of the Moho is typically ignored - a
surprising omission in an earth science discipline, since the
Moho represents a discontinuity separating the brittle and
heterogeneous Earth's crust from the underlying more plastic
lithosphere/asthenosphere. Different reactions to stress will
occur above and below the Moho but mobile plate tectonics avoids
this by the questionable ad hoc assumption that a lithospheric
plate has an indestructible similitude, from the Earth's surface
down to the plate's uncertain depth.
Regarding the horizontal permanency of a lithospheric plate,
reference should be made to historical seismic studies by Nick
Ambraseys, at Imperial College (1975). These revealed that, in
Biblical times, the major earthquake alignment in the Middle
East was not where it lies today. (The change in location cannot
be explained by drift. In 2,000 years, drift might account for a
shift of no more than 40 or 50 metres, obviously far too small
to be registered by historical seismic studies.) Thus, if mobile
plate tectonics had been available in Biblical times, we would
no doubt have defined at least one (indestructible) plate as
being broken in a different location from today's
(indestructible) plate.
Let us proceed to some of the functions of the lithospheric
plates.
Subduction. Subduction, an integral component of the mobile
plate tectonics model, is said to be the result of the following
forces:
• Thermally elevated ridge push, at the mid-oceanic ridge end. A
value of the order of 1 x 104 kPa has been proposed for ridge
push. This is about an order of magnitude less than the
frictional resistance to push that would be available at the
Moho. So ridge push is not going to push the Earth's crust
anywhere. As a near surface phenomenon, it is even less likely
to push a thicker unit.
• Trench pull is assumed at the forefront of the subduction
zone. A similar value to ridge push has been proposed, but here
trench pull runs into a different problem. The Earth's crust is
not a thick steel slab nor even reinforced concrete, but is
brittle and is transected by faults and major joints. Such
discontinuities would be the first things to undergo failure if
any significant suction or pull were to be applied to the
frontal lobe. Which is tantamount to saying that the trench pull
would lose its grip. There is more to it.
• Firstly, subduction glosses over the effects of uplift that
would necessarily develop when lighter crustal material becomes
immersed in a more dense lithospheric or asthenospheric
material. Simple calculation shows that it would not be long
before the uplift factor would overcome the alleged trench pull
– that is, if the crust remained intact.
• What is left, then, is only the alleged downward convection
force, although there is no solid evidence that such a
phenomenon exists. Even supposing there is convection drag,
there would most certainly be resistance to it at the location
of subduction, resistance in the form of friction acting on
upper face of the crust being subducted. After all, the super
incumbent continental crust at a point of subduction cannot be
expected to just open its mouth and swallow the approaching
oceanic crust - along with any sea mounts, abyssal sediments, et
al. This frictional resistance to subduction would have much the
same value as any downward convection force acting as a
frictional drag on the base of the crust.
What is left is a hypothetical convection drag acting along the
horizontal distance between the mid-oceanic ridge and the point
of subduction. If this drag was of sufficient force to produce
movement of the plate, it would be more likely to cause an
overthrust at any surface obstruction, but there is no evidence
of any such overthrusting.
There is still more to come. In 1972, the Meyerhoffs listed a
number of inconsistencies in the subduction model, one being
that the Kermadec-Tonga Trench virtually bisects New Zealand,
but the geosynclinal sedimentation is continuous right across
this zone. The Meyerhoffs also pointed out that India was always
part of Asia. The writer cannot comment on this but could
mention that one of the original continental drifters, Prof.
Warren Carey of Tasmania, once drew attention on the ABC to the
fact that the large reptiles had always been able to walk
(albeit intermittently) from India to Asia - an impossible task
if several thousand kilometres of ocean separated the two
continents. Kasfli (1992) refers to detailed mapping of the
Zagros Crush Zone bordering Iran, concluding "there is nothing
known from the geological record to suggest a former separation
between Arabia and Africa to the south, and central Eurasia to
the north". Finally, Lowman (1985) showed that – despite the
evidence for sea floor spreading – hot spot trails in Africa
indicate that the African continent has not moved with respect
to the Mantle for possibly 300 million years.
In the Molucca Sea, between Mindanao and north east Sulawesi,
there is an interesting pattern: a north-south line of shallow
earthquakes with, on each side of the line, a pattern of deeper
events dipping in opposite directions. That is, on mobilist
grounds, this would have to be seen as subduction in two
directions, from a point source! Such a situation does not bear
explanation, even from the most apologetic mobilist.
So how did the idea of subduction come about in the first place?
One of the original temptations that led to the concept came
from the pattern of earthquakes as found mainly in the Pacific.
Earthquake events were shallowest near to an oceanic trench and
then descended to the steepening Watadi-Benioff Zones, ending up
with a vertical orientation in the Upper Mantle, 500 – 700 km
depth. A pattern of downward progression certainly looks
convincing at first sight. But there was a fly in the ointment.
In the early 1960s Claude Blot, a French Geophysicist in the
South West Pacific, discovered that the migration of seismic
energy in the above pattern was not one of downwards progression
- as would be the case with subduction - but was an upward
progression from the Mantle to the crust. He was able to compute
consistent rates of upward seismic-energy progression, allowing
him to make some remarkable predictions for both shallow
earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The problem posed by Blot's
work, to the newly-fledged mobilism, was therefore quite
serious. However, this was soon overcome. Blot was transferred
by the French Government to an aseismic region in West Africa
and it took more than three decades before his work surfaced
again, in the publication of a large book by a small Queensland
Press, Grover (1998). Blot's initial forecasting has
subsequently been taken up and repeatedly confirmed by, among
others, the Editor of this Journal.
Seafloor Spreading. The patterns on the ocean floors have been
interpreted in an initially convincing manner as sea floor
spreading in an Earth subject to magnetic reversals. This view
overlooks a number of discordant and/or irreconcilable
phenomena.
• Evidence provided by the Deep Sea Drilling Programme reveals
that the abyssal sediment fans in the deep oceans are formed,
not by turbidity currents, but in the same manner as in fluvial
deposits on land or in shallow water: horizontal bedding and
undisturbed. Analysis indicates that, if the oceanic basement
was moving – or has moved - it would be unable to slide beneath
the abyssal fans but would produce continuous crumpling, folding
and thrust faulting of the sediments. There is none.
• In the north east Pacific, off California, there are a number
of 3,000 km long, east-west, fracture zones: the Mendocino, the
Murray and the Molokai. These fracture zones with dated magnetic
anomalies provide what has been taken to show movement of the
sea floor (the Juan de Fuca Plate) towards an alleged subduction
zone under North America, which alleged subduction zone is not
really supported by seismic activity, see Smoot et al (2001).
Intra-plate movement – not part of the mobilist cabal - is
indicated from the magnetic anomaly strips. The elongate zone
between the Murray and Molokai Fracture Zones indicate a 2 cm
per year faster rate than the rates on either side of each of
these two fracture zones. This differential is about the same
rate as measured in parts of the San Andreas Fault, yet the
Murray and Molokai Fracture Zones are aseismic over their
length. A similar situation is to be found in the Southern
Ocean, below Australia, where variable rates of spreading can be
inferred in adjacent units separated by long fracture zones.
But, again, there is no corresponding seismic activity. This has
the effect of bringing doubt into the interpretation of other
dated anomaly patterns.
Incidentally, in a recent publication James (2016), a
hypothetical but plausible proposal is given to explain the
present-day sea floor patterns in the Atlantic Ocean, based on
an ocean of the present size and on the effect of magnetic
reversals, assuming the Earth to behave as a dipole.
The Myth of Incipient Oceans. Associated with the above cameo on
sea floor spreading is the myth of this role in the formation of
incipient oceans. Some examples will illustrate this.
• Both the Sea of Japan and the Labrador Sea have been cited as
typical incipient oceans in mobilist literature. Both are deep
oceans, generally assumed to be underlain by oceanic crust
exhibiting what has been interpreted as datable magnetic
striping. Choi (1984) has identified that the alleged magnetic
anomaly patterns in the Sea of Japan are actually features
coinciding with major fault zones, traceable out from the
peripheral continents. The base, according to seismic
interpretation, contains continental crust with Palaeozoic
marine sediments.
• In the case of the Labrador Sea, the parallelism between the
Canadian and Greenland coastlines has been remarked on by
mobilists ever since Wegener. A strike-slip drift between the
two land masses of up to 400 km has been proposed. Again,
datable magnetic striping on the sea floor has been accepted.
Recent field studies in the Nares Strait region, cited by Lowman
(1985) and Grant (1980) reveal pre-Cambrian and Silurian marker
beds traceable across the Strait.
• The East African Rift system has also been cited as an ocean
in embryo. However, the base of the rift is continental crust,
not upwelling oceanic crust; and the rift system is aligned
along a pre-Cambrian fault system that has probably not widened
significantly in maybe a billion years.
• The Red Sea is dated as having commenced spreading in
Cretaceous times, at a rate well below that postulated in the
Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The problem here is that, within
the Red Sea there are pre-Cambrian islands, The Brothers. How
this can be justified in a spreading situation has never been
explained. The same applies to the equatorial regions in the
Atlantic where the age of the St Peter and Paul Rocks is some
hundreds of million years older than their age should be, based
on their distance from the mid-Atlantic Ridge
• A final example is presented by Iceland, where the
mid-Atlantic ridge emerges on land. According to Sigurdson
(1968), lava extrusions on Iceland – supposedly welling up from
the Mantle – contain fragments of sandstone and dolomite.
SUMMARY
Geology has ever been an observational discipline and this view
has been enshrined by the debate between Charles Darwin and Lord
Kelvin over the age of the Earth. Darwin, an observer without
equal, based his estimate on the sequences of sediments covering
the earth's surface, together with the likely rate of evolution.
He came to an answer quite close to today's value. Lord Kelvin
based his calculations on reputable thermodynamics principles
but also on the then hypothesis that the Earth had cooled from a
molten state. Thus, his Lordship came a poor second in the
debate.
Unfortunately, the observation preference has lost ground in the
last half century. Field evidence, when in conflict with the
tenets of mobile plate tectonics, is now typically dismissed so
that we find the sometimes questionable conclusions made from
statistically derived palaeomagnetic data taken in preference to
unequivocal palaeoclimatic indicators. We are at the mercy of
poorly known, even completely unknown, mechanisms that cannot be
studied from an observational point. It is becoming increasingly
clear that the facile ad hoc explanation for the mobilist model
has, in reality, put the earth sciences back something like a
hundred years.
Interestingly, it was one of the initial aims of the NCGT
publication to rely on observational data and the Journal is to
be congratulated for preserving this line. So why do we still
put up with rebuffs for not toeing the mobilist line and
accepting the myths of drifting continents?
REFERENCES
Ambraseys, N.N., 1975. Studies in historical seismicity and
tectonics. Geodynamics, Roy. Soc. (Lond.), p. 7-18
Choi, D.R., 1984. The Japan basin – a tectonic trough. Jnl Pet.
Geol., v. 7, no. 4, p. 437-450.
Choi, D.R., 2006. Where is the subduction under the Indonesian
arc? NCGT Newsletter, no. 39, p. 2-11
Grant, A.C., 1980. Problems with plate tectonics: the Labrador
Sea. Bull. Can. Pet. Geol.. v. 28, p. 252-278.
Grover, J.C., 1998. Volcanic Eruptions and Great Earthquakes.
Copyright Publ., Bris.
James, P.M., 2016. Deformation of the Earth's Crust – Cause &
Effects. Copyright Publ., Bris.
Kasfli, M., 1972. Zagros Crush Zone. New Concepts in Global
Tectonics. Texas Univ. Press
Lowman, P.D.Jr., 1985. Plate tectonics with fixed continents: a
testable hypothesis. Jnl Pet. Geol., v. 8, no. 4, p. 373-388 &
v. 9, no. 1, p.71-88.
Meyerhoff, H.W. Meyerhoff, A.A., 1973.
Major inconsistencies in global tectonics. Bull. Amer. Soc. Pet.
Geol., v. 56, no. 2, p. 296-336.
Sigurdson, H (1968). Petrology and acid xenoliths from Surtsey.
Geol. Mag., v. 105, p. 440-453.
Smoot, N.C., Choi, D.R. and Bhat, M.I., 2001. Active Margin
Geomorphology. Xlibris Corp. USA.
Tarling, D.H. and Tarling, M.P., 1977. Continental Drift.
Penguin.
Peter M. James
petermjames35@gmail.com
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