Expanding Earth Hypothesis, Platonic Solids, & Late Tectonics as a Symplectic Flow

Abstract

Recent findings of NASA suggesting the presence of life under the surface of Mars raised the question whether the TGD based Expanding Earth model is consistent with plate tectonics and Adams' claim that the continents fit together nicely to cover the entire surface of Earth if its radius were one half of the recent radius. The outcome was what one might call Platonic plate tectonics. The expansion would have started from or generated decomposition of the Earth's crust to an icosahedral lattice with 20 faces, which contain analogs of what is known as cratons and having a total area equal to that of Earth before expansion. The prediction for the recent land area fraction is 25 per cent is 4.1 per cent too low. The cause could be sedimentation or expansion continuing still very slowly. The craton like objects (hereafter cratons) would move like 2-D rigid bodies and would fuse to form continents. The memory about the initial state should be preserved: otherwise there would exist no simple manner to reproduce the observation of Adams by simple motions of continents combined with downwards scaling. This might be achieved if cratons are connected by flux tubes to form a network. For maximal connectivity given triangular face is connected by flux tube to to all 3 nearest neighbour faces. Minimal connectivity corresponds to an essentially unique dodecahedral Hamiltonian cycle connecting cratons to single closed string. At least for maximal connectivity this memory would allow to understand the claim of Adams stating that the reduction of radius by factor 1/2 plus simple motions for the continents allow to transform the continents to single continent covering the entire surface of the scaled down Earth. The dynamics in scales longer than that of craton would be naturally a generalization of an incompressible liquid flow to area preserving dynamics defined by symplectic flow. The assumption that Hamilton satisfies Laplace equation and is thus a real or imaginary part of analytic function implies additional symmetry: the area preserving flow has dual. The flow has vanishing divergence and curl. Sources and sinks and rotation are however possible in topological sense if the tectonic plate has holes.