The Earth is Expanding

Surely you're familiar with the term "wormhole." This is an internet time-burrow that one enters into when a topic crosses one's mind. If you google a single word like "Chee-tos", the search engine returns a thousand tangential keywords, videos, images, items available for purchase, and soon you've made a bad decision: a) Slouched for 3 hours over a laptop watching war archive films; b) Purchased a box of a thousand discontinued keychains; or c) Applied for a falconry apprenticeship in Brazil.

The one I entered into this afternoon is one that I don't regret. I think I've just been converted to believe that the Earth is expanding, rather than believing what I've been taught all my life: that the seafloor is spreading, and parts of the crust are burying back into the mantle simultaneously.

Here's how I got there.

I recently ordered a book off Amazon for an amazingly low price. (I don't recall what got me on the internet that day, but it wasn't specifically to buy this book!) I first saw it in a bookstore last Christmas and was tempted to pick one up for one of the frequent-flying members of Catey's family. America from the Air, co-authored in 2007 by  Daniel Mathews, a natural history writer, and James S. Jackson, a geology professor at Portland State. It's written for commercial jet passengers (and employees) who share my habit of gazing at landforms and civilization-caused shapes, and guessing what they are as I fly. I have photographed only a few because of the low quality that usually ensues through those plastic double windows. Here's one near Las Vegas showing a solar farm that I've tried unsuccessfully to find on Google Earth. 

Update: see http://americanature.blogspot.com/2014/09/different-views-of-ivanpah-solar-energy.html

Where the Sun is Grown, near Las Vegas, April 21, 2014.

Accompanying the book is a CD-ROM with a nationwide flight map and USGS Map #i2781: The North American Tapestry of Time and Terrain (downloadable PDF file). Zooming in on the Great Lakes, after some study, I thought to myself that it looks like the Great Lakes sort of exploded from the center of Michigan. Can see what I was imagining? Different colors reflect different ages of underground geology -- click on the link above to see the entire map and its legend.

Geologic Bubble Centered in Michigan - Source: USGS i2781

So I googled: "is the earth's volume increasing". The common secod way of digging further into our wormholes is the Wikipedia page. And, I was in.

It turns out there's a comedian and graphic artist Neal Adams who has promoted the concept of the earth expanding. If you want to save yourself from the risk of wormholing, skip Wikipedia and watch this 10-minute video. I think you'll be convinced too. (Forgive the odd soundtrack that spans from 2001: A Space Odyssey to the Nutcracker Suite.)