Danny, the continental plates may only cover 80% of the earth's area
(which I doubt), but the rest is taken up by the pacific and indian
ocean plates which are subducting under the North American, SOuth
American, Australian, and Asian plates. If what you suggest is true,
then we would have a much greater meteoric impact record than we do and
be living under much greater greenhouse conditions. Thus only the
continental plates have grown as divergence continued, but those growing
plates rode over older plates that subducted under them.
20% of the earth's surface covers a volumebelow it in a cone shape to
the core of approximately 25 billion cubic miles. Given that Pangea was
in existence as late as a couple hundred million years ago, we would
have to be seeing around 100 cubic miles of meteoric accretion to our
planet EVERY YEAR to equate to a 20% increase in earth's surface area.
As this is obviously not true, then the idea that our earth's surface is
20% greater than in the time of Pangea is ludicrous. We would have to
experience the equivalent of 10 Yucatan extinction asteroids every year.
This obviously would have exterminated life...a long, long time ago.
-- TANSTAAFL!!! Michael Lorrey ------------------------------------------------------------ mailto:retroman@tpk.net Inventor of the Lorrey Drive Agent Lorrey@ThePentagon.com Silo_1013@ThePentagon.com http://www.tpk.net/~retroman/Mikey's Animatronic Factory My Own Nuclear Espionage Agency (MONEA) MIKEYMAS(tm): The New Internet Holiday Transhumans of New Hampshire (>HNH) ------------------------------------------------------------ #!/usr/local/bin/perl-0777---export-a-crypto-system-sig-RC4-3-lines-PERL @k=unpack('C*',pack('H*',shift));for(@t=@s=0..255){$y=($k[$_%@k]+$s[$x=$_ ]+$y)%256;&S}$x=$y=0;for(unpack('C*',<>)){$x++;$y=($s[$x%=256]+$y)%256; &S;print pack(C,$_^=$s[($s[$x]+$s[$y])%256])}sub S{@s[$x,$y]=@s[$y,$x]}