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.
Long-term fluctuations in the Earth’s rotation: 700 BC to AD 1990
Records of solar and lunar eclipses in the period 700 BC to AD 1600, originating from the ancient and medieval civilizations of Babylon, China, Europe and the Arab world, are amassed and critically appraised for their usefulness in answering questions about the long-term variability of the Earth’s rate of rotation. Results from previous analyses of lunar occupations in the period AD 1600-1955.5, and from high-precision data in AD 1955.5-1990, are included in the dataset considered in this paper.
Palæomagnetic Evidence relevant to a Change in the Earth's Radius
Cox and Doell1, applying a suggestion of Egyed2 to test the reality of the expansion of the Earth through geological time, have calculated the radius of the Earth implied by comparison of Permian palseomagnetic measurements in the Maymecha–Kotuy region of Siberia and localities in western Europe, and find that although the standard deviation of the individual results is very wide indeed, the average of the computed radii of the Earth is close to the present radius. From this they conclude that the substantial post-Palæozoic expansion of the globe deduced by me on tectonic grounds is unlikely.