Earth is growing? Give me a break...

[nasher168]

I have come across this youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/nealadamsdotcom which is run by someone claiming to have discovered that the Earth is growing, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
I was wondering if anyone else had come across this hypothesis before, because I certainly hadn't up until about 10 minutes ago.

 

[Aught3]

Is it the one trying to explain gravity? 'Cause I've heard of that load of nonsense before.

 

[darthrender2010]

unfortunately yeah, I've heard of the expanding earth conjecture before, it's ridiculous

 

[Ozymandyus]

Yeah, I'd heard of it, but as an alternative to plate tectonics and continental drift, not as an explanation about gravity. The 'proof' I had seen seems to mostly consist of people making animations about how the continents all fit together.

 

[nasher168]

Okay, I'm debating with the guy who thought of it (or at least the owner of his channel) on this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdavRmR-2YE
If you go to the comments section, you will see the comments of our debate.
I am struggling to find decent, peer-reviewed work to counter his latest challenge. Here is what he said:

"1. Between 90 and 65 MYA Dinosaur trackways dwindled to 1/4 of their original types, in Canada-U.S. (Alberta Museum.
2. PROVE it was a meteorite impact, which are CIRCULAR. (Chixulub) B. WHY did ALL birds, survive?
3. Pterosaurs Laid their eggs ON THE GROUND, Prey to mammals. What was their PREY?
4. Slowly evolving Feathers were NOT ENOUGH to compensate for the DRAMATIC CHANGES, once hemispheric migration was cut off.
5.SEASONS,..SEASONAL plants,...Eggs on the ground,.. BIRDS survive!"

I would be grateful for some assistance in finding peer-reviewed evidence for the Chixulub impact thing, since all I can find is a load of unreliable websites.

 

[e2iPi]

I watched a few of his videos, out of morbid curiosity mostly, and was actually quite impressed with the quality of some of the animation.
I did a little basic math (the bane of all pseudoscience). According to this guy, the Earth has doubled in size in the last 100 million years. Okay, lets work from that assumption. Since he didn't specify if he was talking about surface area or radius, I did it both ways.
The current radius of the earth is approximately 6400km
The current surface area of the earth is approximately 510 million km^2, 149m km^2 is land, 361m km^2 is water.

If it was the surface area which doubled, then it's strait forward
A(100mya) = 510m km^2 / 2 = 255m km^2

If the RADIUS of the earth doubled, 100mya the radius of the Earth would have been approximately 3200 km
A=4*Pi*3200^2 = 129m km^2

So, this guy needs to explain one of two things:
Where 1.4 BILLION km^3 of water came from
OR
How terrestrial life developed at the bottom of an endless ocean several km deep (it is left to the reader to determine the depth of this ocean, because I'm too lazy to do the integration right now)

I didn't hear any reference to this problem in any of the videos I watched. Maybe this is something he is conveniently ignoring?

-1

 

[orpiment99]

I'm not going to touch how ridiculous the expanding Earth thing is. :roll: It can't explain way too many phenomena, such as thrust faults, accreted terrain, and orogenies.

I dug up a little bit of info on the K-T boundary and extinctions:
http://bsgf.geoscienceworld.org/cgi/content/abstract/169/4/485
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=1088628&blobtype=pdf
http://www.uoregon.edu/~gregr/Papers/end-cretaceous%20acid.pdf
http://bulletin.geoscienceworld.org/cgi/content/abstract/116/5-6/760
http://geology.geoscienceworld.org/cgi/content/abstract/30/2/99

That should be enough to get you started.

 

[Finger]

Neal Adams is a comic book cover artist who was fairly widely acclaimed in the industry during the 60s and 70s. He is most famous for his work on Green Lantern and Deadman. But a few years ago, he took an old, debunked theory about how the Earth was growing, produced some videos trying to apply it to modern knowledge, and has since earned himself a cultish collection of followers.

Yes, nasher, you are talking to the real guy, and its quite sad really. Here was a great artist (who's work I actually admire) who has nothing better to do than argue in the comments sections of videos on youtube about how all of science is wrong and he's the only one capable of understanding the truth.

A while back, I also talked with him on youtube. I asked him why he thought all the scientists in the world were wrong. He replied with something like (I am paraphrasing from memory here,) "Science is too much built around specialization. The geologists don't talk to the physicists, and so on. So they don't know when they contradict each other. You need someone who is knowledgeable in all subjects to make sense of them all."

Again, sad.

 

[Marcus]

I wish I could remember the details, but I'm reminded of some clips I saw on one of the big YT debunkers' channels with some guy trying to demonstrate this theory by sticking cutouts of the continents to a balloon and inflating it. It was hilarious.

 

[Don-Sama]

haha, that was funny.

 

[TomAnderson]

I had a long debate with the guy. I asked him where all this new material was coming from to expand the earth. He said it was condensed from energy via the formula E=mc2.

To catch you up here, he said the earth had once been half it's current size. He claims this more than once over, too. He uses the past size of the earth to explain the size of the dinosaurs, as (to him) less size = less gravity. So he's not referring to compacted matter expanding. He's talking about new matter.

I plugged in half the earth's mass to E=mc2, and in order for the earth to have doubled to its current size, it would have taken the "condensation" (for lack of a better word) of more energy than the sun ever has or will release in its entire lifetime. He did not comment again on the equation.

 

[Daealis]

Anyone want to do the space-dust fallout calculations for that kind of mass-increase? I recon it'd turn out to be around the same amount that the noah's flood rainfall(several feet of water per hour, all around the world for 40 days)

 

[orpiment99]

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/101_earth_facts_030722-1.html
6. How much space dust falls to Earth each year?

Estimates vary, but the USGS says at least 1,000 million grams, or roughly 1,000 tons of material enters the atmosphere every year and makes its way to Earths surface. One group of scientists claims microbes rain down from space, too, and that extraterrestrial organisms are responsible for flu epidemics. There's been no proof of this, and I'm not holding my breath.

The Earth is 5,973,700,000,000,000,000,000 metric tons.

I'll let someone who is more mathmatically inclined do the calculations.

 

[e2iPi]

Well, if we assume that the mass influx has remained constant throughout the earth's history and discount large impact events as having a negligible impact (no pun intended) on the rate of accretion. It would have taken 2.986x10^(18) years for the earth to reach it's present size, if we assume a starting mass of exactly half the current mass.

Since we know the age of the universe to be about 1.4x10^(10) years old, I'd say we have a problem.

As for the E=mc^2 thing, the sun does produce enough energy to accomplish this task in a few million years (it takes roughly 9*10^(16) J to create 1kg, per the equation - I'm unsure of the annual output of the sun, but I think it's in the 10^(26) J range). BUT, there is no known process by which would take place, AND the ENTIRE energy output of the sun would have to be dedicated to the task of increasing the mass of the Earth. In the words of Einstein himself "Nonsense!"*

i^2

*No actual context for this quote, but he was a physicist, he MUST have said it sometime

 

[darthrender2010]

*No actual context for this quote, but he was a physicist, he MUST have said it sometime

LMAO

 

[Witalian]

I've come accros this as well. I was more guilable back then, and I addmit that I bought into it. He had a special video to demonstrate why the pangea theory is wrong. The idea was that if all the continets were onece on the same side of the earth, their mass will move the center of gravity in that direction, and the oceans will follow, stripping the ocean floor in the center of the paciffic, leaving a large round continent there.
Some guy on youtube then make a video debunking it, but his debunking was lame, and I decided to show him he is wrong, and while doing that I found that Neal was allso wrong.
Neal claims that the continents could not float in the semi liquid magma, since the magma is twice as dense as solid granit. But haveing liquid denser than solid matter is nothing new. Liquid water is denser then water ice. That's why ice have buoyancy.
And in large enough time and size scale, even solid granit will behave like semi liquid.

So debunking of his debunking of pangea is easy.

The continents in the magma are like acebergs in water. The most of their volume is submerged. If they are all on one side of the planet they will displace an amount of magma toward the other side, that have the same volume as the submerged part of the continents. The question then is wich is heavier : the continents or the displaced magma. The answer : They are the same. A floating object is displaceing an amount of liquid with the same mass as the object. If the object is heavier it will sink further and displace additional liquid.

Athough I will addmit that the way he explanes the age of the ocean floor and the shapes of all coastlines of all continents is compelling, still makeing such an elementary mistake was a heavy blow on his credibility in my veiw.