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Geo-Phrenology 
In the 19th Century, there was a popular pseudoscience intent on explaining the personality and character of persons by 'reading' the bumps and dips on a their heads. In a sense, geologists are doing the same thing. They are trying to 'read' the secrets of the Earth based on surface features and dealing in conjecture about the inner workings. I believe we all should keep in mind that scientific 'discoveries' are actually just working theories. When we learn more, the theories usually change, and previous theories are stored away as history or psuedoscience.
I am most certainly not a geologist, but I'm dabbling in it from a broader view and interest. The bumps and dips on the Earth are indeed very interesting. I am particularly curious about the 'regular' irregularities. These are features which seem entirely too uniform to just be random formations. I am also interested in the repetition or mirroring of certain features, again, because that seems to defy randomness or coincidence. Even the science of plate tectonics is little more than phrenology. The plate boundaries are being determined primarily by volcanic and earthquake activity. Since we cannot as yet xray the Earth to see precisely how it's put together, we are theorizing about the shape and features of Earth's systems based on measurable surface effects. 
As I see it, the crust of the Earth is divided into sections much like the human skull and likely for the same reasons. A living, changing organism needs flexibility for those changes, which is best served with a segmented covering. In the case of the Earth, a one-piece solid crust for a molten core and semi-fluid mantle of a rotating and revolving sphere would simply be too restrictive. Besides a veritable sloshing motion, the Earth is subject to expansion and contraction too, by virtue of its own movement and elliptical position relative to the Sun. Whether the crust was originally solid, we may never know, but it was surely separated into several plates from very nearly the beginning, if not always.
 The curiosity is in the small plates. Even to the casual observer, there are parts of the Earth's crust which appear to be broken more than would be necessary for flexibility. This graphic shows the plates as we are seeing them now, with a few spots where the eggshell seems to be excessively cracked.
Logically, these areas could not have been broken by the usual volcanic and earthquake activity, otherwise there wouldn't be such concentration of geohazards along the main plate rims and junctions. The crust would have simply broken from every pressure event and there would be no clear pattern of activity to read as plates. Volcanoes wouldn't have to find a break or thin spot in the crust to relieve pressure if they could just punch through the crust anywhere. Although certainly volcanoes do punch through the crust of the Earth, they generally create a single point, not a giant spider-crack causing the formation of a whole new plate. And of course, earthquakes seem to be the result of plate junctures, not the cause of them. Incidentally, we should remember that earthquakes are not what the name may imply. The whole Earth is not shaking, a quake is merely a shiver across a portion of the crust. Through recent investigations, we are discovering that these shivers actually help heal or insulate part of the breakage at fault lines and such. The heat generated and released allows the substrate material to knit back together, although it may take many many such shivers to heal an entire rift or complex fault zone.  Without the 'extra' cracks, the plates make more natural sense. They would allow for movement and change without fracture or constriction. But, if the plates were not always broken in those locations, what happened?
Here too is one of the curious repetitions. While the configuration of fractures is not the same, it's very interesting that one seriously broken area (South Pacific) is on the opposite side of the planet from the other (Caribbean/Central America). It is highly unlikely that twin meteor impacts or anything of that sort might have caused these anomalies. However, it certainly does seem possible - perhaps even likely - that the same event may have caused injuries in both segments of the Earth's surface. Next in Sequence Select From Menu |
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