New study says original Earth did not have tectonic plates, ‘there was a dramatic shift in dynamics on Earth’

June 3, 2012 – EARTH – The current theory of continental drift provides a good model for understanding terrestrial processes through history. However, while plate tectonics is able to successfully shed light on processes up to 3 billion years ago, the theory isn’t sufficient in explaining the dynamics of Earth and crust formation before that point and through to the earliest formation of planet, some 4.6 billion years ago. This is the conclusion of Tomas Naæraa of the Nordic Center for Earth Evolution at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, a part of the University of Copenhagen. His new doctoral dissertation has just been published by the journal Nature. “Using radiometric dating, one can observe that Earth’s oldest continents were created in geodynamic environments which were markedly different than current environments characterized by plate tectonics. Therefore, plate tectonics as we know it today is not a good model for understanding the processes at play during the earliest episodes of Earth’s history, those beyond 3 billion years ago. There was another crust dynamic and crust formation that occurred under other processes,” explains Tomas Næraa, who has been a PhD student at the Natural History Museum of Denmark and the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland – GEUS. A wide range of phenomena from volcanism, earthquakes and undersea earthquakes (and pursuant tsunamis) to variations in climate and species development on Earth can be explained by the plate tectonics model, globally recognized during the 1960′s. Tomas Næraa can now demonstrate that the half-century old model no longer suffices. “Plate tectonics theory can be applied to about 3 billion years of the Earth’s history. However, the Earth is older, up to 4.567 billion years old. We can now demonstrate that there has been a significant shift in the Earth’s dynamics. Thus, the Earth, under the first third of its history, developed under conditions other than what can be explained using the plate tectonics model,” explains Tomas Næraa. Tomas is currently employed as a project researcher at GEUS. –Science Daily

In my book, The 7th Protocol, I discuss the great cosmic cataclysm that changed the dynamics of the original Earth and how that process led to the fracturing of the lithosphere and the birth of the magmatic geologic dynamism which presently rules planet Earth.

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