A paper came out just last year in a major journal supporting the Expanding Earth hypothesis, on the basis of trans-Pacific palaeobiotic similarities (i.e. implying that the land around the Pacific was once connected, similar to the ‘jigsaw fit’ of the continents on either side of the Atlantic). I think it was maybe some sort of biogeographical journal? I’ll do some poking around. Anyway, that was my first exposure to the theory, and I did some follow up reading.
In a nutshell, it looks like one Professor S. Warren Carey was the main proponent (in the English-speaking world at least) of Expanding Earth theory, and most of the literature on the theory is either written by him or inspired by his thinking on the matter (and he was quite a good communicator of ideas). He just died a couple of years ago, aged 90 or so. He was also one of the leading proponents of plate tectonic theory, waaay back when it was having a hard time being accepted. So he had been around for a while, and presumably knew his geophysical stuff.
This page, while sort of ugly and sporadically inaccessable, is a fairly Carey-centric overview of Expanding Earth theory. Carey’s view is distinguished by extreme expansion (with the palaeoEarth roughly doubling in diameter to its present size), and strong Cosmological linkages, as well as some off-the-wall physics thrown in (i.e. matter creation as the driving force of the expansion, and linking the expansion to other cosmological processes). As far as I can tell, there are a number of other Expanding Earth theories that propose much less dramatic expansion, and different mechanisms for the expansion.
For me, the strongest piece of evidence in favour of Expanding Earth is the excellent fit of the current continental plates on a much reduced globe. It really seems to be a great fit, although it’s a bit hard to visualise shrikning the diameter of the earth while the continents sort of curve and stay the same size and shape. There’s also palaeomagnetic data, and recent satellite data, in support of the theory.
On the other hand, Carey, in particular, makes some fairly outlandish claims about an Expanding Earth. For one, he seems to think that subduction does not actually occur, and was merely invented to make plate tectonic theory work properly. While the lack of subduction zones in the Atlantic seems odd, the pairing of deep trench + high mountains off the Pacific coast of South America seems to strongly indicate the some subduction is in fact taking place, at least. Also, his proposed mechanism for Earth Expansion (essentially, matter creation), is way out there, and while some of his cosmological comparisons and speculations are interesting, there’s not a lot of hard data to support them. To his credit, he seems to acknowledge these weaknesses, but he argues that the lack of a satisfactory mechanism for Earth Expansion shouldn’t negate the evidence for its having occurred. Personally, I can sympathise with this. It’s a really interesting theory to me, and it’s a pity that apparently very few people have heard of it, and so thoroughly detailed rebuttals are hard to find.
On preview: Excalibre, don’t confuse this with Velikovsky-inspired ‘pole shift’ theories, where the Earth’s crust is supposed to slip around suddenly and all at once. Those theories have been thoroughly discredited. My impression is that Expanding Earth hasn’t been engaged with sufficiently by most geoscientists to have been discredited.
