• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Expanding Earth: The Strange (Pre-Tectonics) Hypothesis That The Earth Is Expanding Like A Balloon

June 12, 2025 by Deborah Bloomfield

The idea of plate tectonics – which describes how Earth’s crust is arranged into slowly moving plates, with volcanic activity and earthquakes taking place along the boundaries – is so normal to us now that it might be surprising to learn it was only really accepted by geologists during the 1960s.

Before that, and the concept of continental drift, there were a number of other hypotheses for why we see the various landmasses and geological events that we do. Before continental drift, geologists were generally of the belief that the Earth’s continents and oceans were permanent features on the Earth’s surface, fixed in place and unmoving. In some ideas, the Earth was actually contracting due to heat loss, and this contraction over short geological timescales is what left the planet with mountains, sort of like how the shrinking Moon is left with scarps.

And then there’s the “expanding Earth” hypothesis. This idea, boiled down, is that the Earth is actually expanding (through various mechanisms, where they are proposed), and that is what moved the continents apart. At the time, the idea that the Earth was fixed but shrinking had some major drawbacks to it, being particularly unable to explain evidence of connections between the continents. 

“The expanding-Earth theory had the merit of explaining with a fixist model the evidence of ancient continental connections,” a paper on the topic explains, “suggesting that continents fragmented and dispersed not because of lateral displacement but because of radial expansion while the planet was inflating.”



As continental drift proponents noted, the coastlines of South America and Africa fit together pretty neatly like a jigsaw puzzle if you take the time and effort to mush them back together again. While plate tectonics provides us with the answer that they were once together before the breakup of supercontinent Pangea, expanding Earth proponents had another idea.

“The main argument for Earth expansion is the questionable claim that continental profiles have a perfect reciprocal fit on a smaller Earth, while mobilist reconstructions leave open gaps,” the paper explains, adding that they worked on models of the planet at different sizes to see how the continents fit together on a smaller and smaller Earth. 

“The experimenters apparently failed to note that the process worked like a reversal of the contraction theory. Therefore, if the modern lithosphere had to adjust to a smaller Earth this would not just decrease intercontinental distances but also increase the deformation of the continents.”

While plate tectonics fits the geological data much better than an expanding Earth, what the expanding Earth idea really lacks is a mechanism for how the Earth inflates at all. In fact, some estimates suggest that the Earth is getting around 50,000 tonnes lighter every year as it gains a little dust and rock and loses massive amounts of gas to space.

Looking into how much energy and mass the Earth would have to accumulate in order for the expanding Earth theory to be correct, it’s not a small problem.

“The gravitational potential energy of the actual Earth (at present) has been estimated as U=-2.485 × 1032 J.  Since the actual Earth’s body is relatively close to hydrostatic equilibrium, Poincaré’s virial theorem gives an estimate of the internal energy of the Earth (at present) of about – 1.24 x 1032 J,” one paper, looking at the amount of energy needed for expansion, explains.

“The internal energy of the Earth required for expansion is about ~ 7 x 1031 J. No realistic origin of such energy could be found in the Earth-Moon-Sun system dynamics in the last ~ 450 x 106 y.”

For most, the idea has roundly been put to bed by plate tectonics and all the evidence behind it. But the idea has seen a resurgence as a strange, pseudo-scientific belief. There are still proponents of the idea, though they are much further on the fringes than they were in pre-plate tectonics days.

One proponent, for example, suggests that the Earth was actually ejected from a gas giant during its early days, stripped of the outer gas by a strong solar wind. According to this idea, without that pressure, the Earth has been expanding ever since. But in this idea, Earth’s density must decrease as it expands, or mass must somehow (???) be created within the Earth in order for Earth’s density to not be changing over time.

With plate tectonics providing a much better explanation, and being better supported by the evidence, don’t expect the debunked expanding Earth hypothesis to grow into anything bigger.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Garcia jumps back into action after Ryder Cup letdown
  2. NASA’s Artemis I Will Make History This Weekend – Here’s How To Watch Live
  3. 1.2-Million-Year-Old Obsidian Axe Factory Found In Ethiopia
  4. Nuclear Football: Who Actually Has The Nuclear Launch Codes?

Source Link: Expanding Earth: The Strange (Pre-Tectonics) Hypothesis That The Earth Is Expanding Like A Balloon

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Alien Abduction Or A Trick Of The Mind? A Down To Earth Explanation Of Close Encounters
  • Six Months Into Trump’s Presidency, Americans Report Record Low Pride In Being American
  • TikToker Unknowingly Handles Extremely Venomous Cone Snail And Lives To Tell The Tale
  • Scientists Sequence Oldest Egyptian DNA To Date, From A Whopping 4,800 Years Ago
  • “Uncharted Waters”: Large Hadron Collider Begins Colliding Oxygen For The First Time
  • 125,000-Year-Old Neanderthal “Fat Factory” Shows They Gorged On Bone Grease
  • On July 3, Earth Will Reach Its Farthest Point From The Sun – 152 Million Kilometers Away
  • NASA’s Perseverance Rover May Have Recorded Evidence Of Electrified Dust Devils On Mars
  • “Hymn to Babylon”: Missing Mesopotamian Text Dating Back Nearly 3,000 Years Discovered
  • Multiple New Species Of Cute Spotty And Stripy Geckos Discovered In Remote Cambodia
  • ChatGPT May Be Surprisingly Good At Piloting Spacecraft, Taking 2nd Place In Spaceflight Competition
  • Incredible Supernova Finding Shows That “Double-Detonation Mechanism” Happens In Nature
  • Soda Cans, Asthma Inhalers, And… Water Bottles? All Things That Could Explode In Your Car This Summer
  • Video: Is There An Ideal Sleeping Position?
  • If You Look Up At The Right Time Today, You Will See A Giant “X” On The Moon
  • We May Have Our Third Interstellar Visitor And It’s Nothing Like The Previous Two
  • Orcas Filmed Kissing (With Tongues) In The Wild For The First Time
  • How Easy Is It For A Country To Change Its Time Zone?
  • Earth’s First Commercial Space Station Set To Launch In 2026
  • Black Hole Moon: Rogue Planets With Weird Signatures Could Be A Sign Of Advanced Alien Life
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version