Secular Increase in the Earth's LOD Strongly Implies that the Earth Might Be Expanding Radially on a Global Scale
Exactly 101 years ago, German scientist—Alfred Lothar Wegener, sailed against the prevailing wisdom of his day when he posited that not only have the Earth’s continental plates receded from each other over the course of the Earth’s history, but that they are currently in a state of motion relative to one another. To explain this, Wegener set forth the hypothesis that the Earth must be expanding as a whole. Wegener’s inability to provide an adequate explanation of the forces and energy source responsible for continental drift and the prevailing belief that the Earth was a rigid solid body resulted in the acrimonious dismissal of his theories. Today, that the continents are receding from each other is no longer a point of debate but a sacrosanct pillar of modern geology and geophysics. What is debatable is the energy source driving this phenomenon. An expanding Earth hypothesis is currently an idea that is not accepted on a general consensus level. Antiproponent of the expanding Earth mercilessly dismiss it as a pseudo or fringe science with their main point of rejection being the energy source to power this supposed expansion. Be that asit may, we show herein that from the well accepted law of conversation of spin angular momentum, Stephenson [1]’s result that over the last 2700 years or so, the length of the Earth’s day has undergone a change of about +17.00 μs/yr, this result invariably leads to the plausibility the Earth may very be expanding radially at a paltry rate of about +0.60 mm/yr. If correct, this simple fact, automatically move the expanding Earth hypothesis from the realm of pseudo or fringe science, to that of plausible science.
Faint Young Sun Paradox and the Expanding Earth Hypothesis
We present a plausible solution to the so-called Faint Young Sun Paradox (FYS-Paradox) within the context of the Expanding Earth Hypothesis (EEH). We show that if — as the current state of the art ITRF observations seem to indicate — the Earth is expanding steadily at a paltry rate of ∼ +0.36(6)mm/yr (Shen et al. 2015) and the Earth’s atmosphere is to have a radial vertical height of about one and a half times the Earth’s radius (∼ 9860 km) from the the Earth’s surface, then, one can (might) explain the presence of liquid water on the Earth’s surface some 3.80 − to− 2.50 billion years ago during the Archaean eon when the Sun’s luminosity was about 75% of its current luminosity. Our suggested (proposed) solution makes use of the veritable fact that the albedo of an atmosphere endowed planet will vary in proportion and in response to the expansion (or contraction) of the planet. The Earth system is herein cast as an automatic self-regulating incubator where the auto-self-regulating mechanism is as a result of the solid Earth’s radial expansion. Our findings have significant and serious implications for the conditions obtaining in the early Earth. These conditions obtaining in the early Earth can be used as general sine-qua-non conditions for probing the possibility of life elsewhere in the Universe.
Struggles for Visibility
This article addresses the ways in which terrorists are rendered visible in the news media. By studying images used in coverage of terrorists, the article focuses on the visual construction of this figure, which symbolizes the public’s notion of the “enemy”, in terms of specific attacks and the general threat thereof as well as terrorist actors, networks, and ideologies. The article takes its point of departure in the assumption that two visual forms are prevalent for representing terrorists in the news media, “surveillance representations” and “self-representations”. Based on this assumption, the article is guided by a principal research question, namely: How are terrorists made visible in the news media through surveillance representations and self-representations and what are the prevalent genres for visually representing terrorist actors? The article draws on a theoretical framework concerning the news media’s propensity to personalize the terrorist and the mediated visibility of terrorists. Empirically, the article is based on a quantitative content analysis of coverage of terrorism by Danish public service broadcasters DR and TV2 in 2016 to provide an overview of the proportions between surveillance representations and self-representations and develop a typology of the most widespread genres: ID photography, surveillance footage, selfies and similar, and private snapshots.