When the Dylanologist took his Geology 101 back in college he was taught, just as everyone else has been since the mid-1960s, that the process of plate tectonics (or "continental drift") explains the arrangement of the continents and the obvious matching coasts of Africa and South America. The continents were at one point all stuck together as Pangaea, and then, for some reason, they split right down the middle and were pulled/pushed apart from each other, riding right over ocean crust.
Yet, what we were never shown was this map, which shows that nowhere on earth are there seafloors older than 180 million years (blue is oldest, red youngest; by contrast continental rocks date back nearly 4.3 billion years). Not only that, but the fastest rate of spreading is in the Pacific, which is presumed to be shrinking from both sides.
Geologists explain this conundrum by saying that all of the older seafloor has been "subducted" under to continents, and has vanished without a trace. Yet what is driving this activity? Are the ridges pushing the continents apart, or are the subducting seafloors pulling the ridges apart? If the push force is the driver, why is there so much spreading in the Pacific? If the pull force is stronger, how did spreading start in the first place between two connected continents? Geologists themselves don't have a good answer, admitting that they have no clear explanation, and physics suggests that neither force is anywhere near strong enough to cause entire continents to slide across the planet, or to build up huge mountain chains.
What if the answer is much simpler? What if there is no seafloor older than 180 million years because, 180 million years ago, there was no seafloor? We know that sea levels were far higher than today 100 million years ago, covering much of North America (hundreds of feet higher than they would be even if all today's ice caps were to melt). There are fossils of extinct sea creatures which lived 200 million years ago high up in the Himalayas. In the Cambrian, it is widely accepted that virtually all of North America was submerged. Before 450 million years ago, we have no evidence for any life on land, despite the fact that life had existed for over 3 billion years at that time. Did life take 3 billion years to move to land?
All of this implies that the earth may have grown in size, and that the linked lines of seafloor expansion on the map above, rather than being pressure points pushing out, are simply the places where a growing earth has cracked the outer crust and is filling it in with new material.
Ed note: In science, the truth is always a moving target. Science is all about theory du jour, not Truth. Religion is about Truth, but science is about theory-making, theory-testing, and theory-changing. Every theory is supplanted, eventually. Scientists know that. Theory-imagining is what makes science creative and fun - an art, in many ways. There never will be any such thing as "settled science."
