Wobbly Universe

There are a number of people that claim that the Earth is expanding, some at a modest rate, and some at a faster rate. By modest, I mean at about the same rate as the Universe is supposed to be expanding, while the faster rate would mean that the Earth was very much smaller even when there were living things on it.

This idea is not totally crazy as some scientists would want people to believe. There are some reasons to support it. The main reason is that in continental drift theory, which itself changed from being regarded as crazy 50 years ago to being accepted now, does show that the continents fit together better on a smaller Earth than on the present sized one. The only real argument against it, is that standard physics doesn't expect it. But standard physics really wouldn't expect it, even if it was right, because physics is based almost totally on measurements and experiments done in a very short period of time.

Anyway, we do not need to speculate on whether the Earth is expanding or not, because we can measure it, and we do not need a 40,000 km long tape measure to do it. The GPS (Global Positioning System) can measure locations very accurately. For fixed places that take many measurements every day for years on end, even movements by mm (millimeters) can be detected. These measurements have been used for some time to measure continental drift and show quite clearly that the Earth's surface is divided into a set of fairly solid "plates" that move about relative to each other at speeds of generally a few cm per year (about an inch per year).

Several decades ago there was criticism that the analysis of the laboratories that took measurements was only done in 2D, assuming no vertical component to the movement. However the accuracy is sufficient to measure the vertical movement, and for some time this data has been available. It is quite staggering to think that satellite orbits are known well enough to allow measurement of things on earth to 1 mm accuracy.

The thing with the measurements is that they show that some places are moving up and some down. No doubt this is because of local conditions, as some tectonic plates push up onto others, pushing them down, or a mountain range is being formed by a collision. However average statistics are very useful because they should remove all these random factors and show a clear trend.

The conclusion: On the average the Earth's radius is expanding at about 1.7 mm per year. This fits in with the proposal by some people that the Earth is expanding slowly.

Many scientists and others will not accept this as definitive for a variety of reasons, and leaving aside prejudice (which cannot be logically dealt with) it is worth looking at some of these.

Some people get confused by some of this, so we need to address those questions first. It is known that ancient sites are located below a lot of dust and stuff. Hadrian's wall in Britain is 2,000 years old and its 6 m (20 feet) height is almost totally hidden - incidentally this corresponds to 3 mm per year, quite near the rate that I found. However this falling of dust would not be measured by a station that does GPS measurements, because the dust would land on the roof, not under the building and pushing it upwards. It would probably wash off the roof onto the ground and might eventually bury the building but would have zero effect on the measurements.

So even if the Earth is expanding from new material which might be falling to the Earth from space as meteorites, dust, water and whatever, this will not really affect the GPS measurements. It will of course expand the Earth over time, so that the faster expansion theories could be right if this is their source. The estimates of matter falling into the Earth are not very consistent, some estimating many times what others determine, so no faith can be placed in this.

Matter falling into the Earth will not directly lift a GPS station, but by washing down in rivers to the sea and settling on the floor, it will raise water levels and push down on the sea floor and so push up the continents. This is a realistic possibility. It would be a possible explanation for Earth expansion that didn't require physicists to abandon some of their preconceived ideas. However the estimates of material falling to Earth are not nearly high enough. We have to assume that Hadrian's wall is being buried by dust from elsewhere on the earth.

One criticism is that all the GPS stations are on land. This is true, but many are on islands located in the oceans. The trend is very clearly upwards. Actually the sea level can also be measured equally accurately but I do not know of anyone looking at this data for an expanding Earth. The argument is that the Earth's continents could be going upwards as a slow rebound since the last ice age saw the large ice sheets weight removed from the continents. If this were the case, then somewhere else would have to be going down, and that somewhere would be the oceans. In that case, the extra water in the oceans should be causing islands in the ocean to also be getting pushed down. I don't think that there is any evidence for that.

This is not to say that the weight of water cannot push continents up and down. My analysis does show that Auckland, where I live, moves up and down several mm each year with the seasons. This is presumably because of seasonal temperature changes of the sea and its resulting change in density.

I can see no good reason not to take the idea of an expanding Earth much more seriously than it has been.

It is my opinion that ultimately this will lead to new ideas in physics.

Below is a graphic showing plot of daily measurements of solar irradiance (effectively brightness) from 1979 to 1993 as measured by Nimbus 7 (upper graph). It is noticeable that as well as the broad sweep of the 11 year solar cycle, the irradiance of the Sun shows very sudden drops of up to 0.25% that last just a few days.

I have marked in red two regions where these drops are quite regular, and the periods found are ~150 and ~75 days. These periods are near commonly reported solar cycles of 154 and 77 days reported in a variety of solar measurements. The shape of the cycle is very far from sinosoidal, being very lopsided so that the dips are very short compared to the peaks. Such shape is characteristic of behaviour that flips between two quite different forces such as a bouncing ball where gravity controls one part of the motion and compression the other.

Interestingly the longer period occurs near solar minimum and the shorter one near solar maximum. This is an indication of an underlying process that has switched to twice the frequency (harmonic) under more intense conditions, a quite common physical response.

A search for cycles of about 155 days in Solar irradiance does show a number of articles:
http://www.google.co/search?q=140..170+day+cycle+solar+irradiance
as does about 77 days http://www.google.co/search?num=100&hl=en&q=70..85+day+cycle+solar+irradiance

I just came across a graph of real estate prices in the USA for the last 116 years after removing inflation. People often say that house prices go up faster than inflation, but for the 50 years from 1947 to 1997 house price increase exactly matched inflation on the average, with swings of some 10% either side. However there have been a few occasions when something much more spectacular happened, and the period 1997 to 2006 saw an 82% climb in 9 years!

This graph is interesting because it also clearly shows a fairly regular swing above and below the trend line. Here is my modified graph showing the trend and peaks and troughs. Because of the limited width of graphs in my blog you will get a clearer picture if you save and display the file separately.

The green pluses and the red minuses show the dates of the of peaks and troughs. They are fairly regular, averaging 11.2 years for the peaks and 10.6 years for the troughs for an over all average of 10.9 years. That period is rather close to Sunspot cycle period of 11.1 years average, so we might consider it possible that there is a link.