Okay, so I'm writing a blog post for League of Reason, and in it I'm discussing the evidence against Catastrophic Plate Tectonics. One such peice I wish to use comes from Gary Hurd's website here: http://stonesnbones.blogspot.com/2011/1 ... s.html?m=1

He says:

Mantle transmits vibration just like sound through air, or water. We can use the same techniques as sonar to map the interior of the Earth. And, because vibration travels differently through cold matter (faster) than warm, we can map the interior temperature structure.;



Above is a map of cold crust sinking into the mantel, and below is one of warm mantel rock moving upwards by convection;



These maps illustrate another reason for rejecting "the catastrophic plate" nonsense; the rapid movements of the continental crust would have swirled the mantle into a homogeneous mass, and the temperature separation we can clearly measure would have disappeared.

Can somebody who knows more about how rocks at the heat and pressure in the mantle verify if Gary's assesment is correct or not? I dont know enough about how the rock works, but I do know it is solid and not liquid, yet still rock can "flow" under such conditions to some degree. Would the movment of the crust actually make this rock flow as it raced over it and destroy the clear temperature separation.

Also, in the CPT model, the mantle was hotter before it started, making it leas vicious. So that needs to be factored in.

Thanks guys.

Why do you think it is 'solid'? I mean, what is your definition? Rock flows quite nicely when it gets all lava'ed up, and the upwelling that generates Hawaii isn't 'solid'.

Plug thisinto your browswer, it'll give you a bunch of sites that use the 2nd image.

Or see Earths Interior, from The Nevada Seismological Laboratory, that page incorporates both images.

I don't get the logic of how the thin crust is going to stir up the mantle, it's thousands of miles thick and the crust is like 40 or so. And while it 'flows', it's viscosity is a little on the high side, so how it's going to get all in a roil is beyond me. But I defer to someone not talking out their ass as I am clearly doing here.

A little wiki-ing later, I wasn't horribly off, the plates that subduct aren't just the crust, but include the lithosphere, and they can range to about 250 Km thick, the mantle is about 1700 miles thick. I found this delightful descriptions: "Past episodes of melting and volcanism at the shallower levels of the mantle have produced a thin crust of crystallized melt products near the surface, upon which we live." So our continents are crystallized melt products'. I guess that's better than something like dried up turtle dung.