Dr. Ramón Argila deTorres y Sandoval
January 2026
- The Smaller, Pressurized Pre-Flood Earth
- The NEO Impact Trigger
- Ringwoodite → Steam → Volume Explosion
- The Superheated Steam Carpet (Hovercraft with Torn Skirts)
- Fountains of the Deep and Rapid Continental Separation
- Mountain Uplift and the Flood-Year Growth Spike
- Post-Flood Cooling and the Modern GPS Drift
- Why This Looks Like Plate Tectonics (But Isn’t)
- Open Questions for the Mathmagicians
I am putting this out there as a thought experiment. Quite a bit has yet to be worked out and I don’t pretend to understand it all. My doctorate is in IT, no where near geology or understanding the process involved. Yet, the idea is jaw-dropping in its simplicity and power:
• Early Earth takes a massive NEO impact (or series of them).
• The shock wave propagates deep into the transition zone (410–660 km).
• Ringwoodite (that high-pressure magnesium silicate that can hold up to 1–3 wt% water in its crystal structure) gets compressed/deformed on a planetary scale.
• Billions of metric tons instantaneously dehydroxylate or phase-transition → olivine + water vapor.
• Released water migrates upward, hydrates the mantle, dramatically lowers viscosity and density.
• Result: rapid internal expansion → surface area increases → continents rift, ocean basins deepen, massive outgassing forms the first oceans/atmosphere in a geologically short window.
It’s a single trigger event that could explain:
• The “late veneer” water problem (why Earth has oceans if it formed dry).
• The faint young Sun paradox (early greenhouse from sudden water/CO₂ release).
• The rapid onset of plate tectonics (lubricated mantle from hydration).
• Even the Moon-forming impact as the primer (pre-loading the mantle with ringwoodite water).
Snyopsis:
What this model now looks like in sequence:
- NEO impact
- Shockwave propagates through mantle at seismic velocity
- Ringwoodite destabilizes just ahead of the pressure front
- Steam and phase expansion follow into the opening crack
- The zipper (mid oceanic ridge) runs the mid-ocean ridge globally
- No plate tectonics, explains puzzle like fit of continents.
1. The Premise – A Smaller, Pressurized Pre-Flood Earth
Imagine an Earth perhaps 50–60 % of its present radius. The transition zone (410–660 km depth) is packed with ringwoodite — a high-pressure mineral that can hold 1–3 weight-% water in its crystal lattice. That is 2–3 times the volume of all surface oceans today, locked inside the rock itself.
2. The Trigger – One Good NEO Impact
A large comet or asteroid strikes. The shockwave rings the entire planet like a bell. Pressure drops. Temperature spikes. Ringwoodite across the globe begins to break down into olivine + supercritical water/steam.
This is a self-sustaining propagation; the shockwave from the NEO impact travels faster than the released high pressure steam — it arrives at each new section of ringwoodite first, triggering the phase transition just ahead of the steam front. So the steam isn’t fighting to open new cracks cold — it’s arriving at material that has just been destabilized by the shockwave and is already mid-transition. The crack is being opened from ahead by the shockwave and pushed from behind by the expanding steam and phase-changed material simultaneously.
The mantle behaves as a dilatant non-Newtonian fluid — like cornstarch and water. Hit it fast and hard and it hardens, cracks, and fractures like a solid. Apply slow sustained pressure and it flows like thick paste.
The shockwave exploits the first property — traveling fast, it finds the mantle behaving brittlely, cracking and fracturing ahead of it. This is what propagates the zipper along the mid-ocean ridge. But behind the shockwave front, the sudden stress is gone. Now the slower sustained pressure of the steam and phase expansion takes over — and the same material flows, lubricates, and yields. The hovercraft carpet operates in this slower-pressure regime.
The shockwave and the steam are not fighting the same material. They are sequentially exploiting two different behaviors of the same non-Newtonian mantle — first brittle, then fluid. The physics hands off from one regime to the other automatically as the wave passes.
3. The Chain Reaction – Volume Explosion
The phase change expands the crystal lattice. Water flashes to steam — expanding 1,700× in volume. The mantle swells from within. No new mass from space is required; the planet simply gets bigger because the same stuff now takes up more room.
Not mass creation, not volumetric explosion — but unlocking compressed structure. The ringwoodite was already under enormous lithostatic pressure, holding its water in a compacted crystal lattice. The NEO impact propagates a shockwave that triggers the phase transition globally — ringwoodite → olivine + released water — and the sum of trillions of tiny crystal expansions across the entire transition zone adds up to a measurable planetary radius increase.
4. The Hovercraft Carpet
Super-critical steam and water form a high-pressure, low-viscosity layer beneath the lighter continental crust. The continents ride this carpet like a hovercraft with torn skirts — lubricated, lifted, and rapidly forced apart. Dense oceanic crust founders irregularly beneath them.
The zipper runs globally. Steam hits the underside of the crust simultaneously along the entire crack. The hovercraft effect lifts and laterally displaces the continental crust. But the crust isn’t uniform — it has to borrow a medical term, adhesions: Thicker sections, denser sections, places where the crust is welded more firmly to the material below. Those sections resist the lateral displacement and when the pressure releases they don’t ride cleanly — they get pushed down into the softened, steam-lubricated mantle instead of sliding laterally.
5. The Fountains of the Deep
Cracks reach the surface. Superheated water and steam erupt as the biblical “fountains of the great deep” — a year-long planet-wide hydrothermal cataclysm that also supplies the floodwaters.
The pressure doesn’t have to overcome lithostatic pressure vertically from below like a hydraulic jack. This is lateral crack propagation — the steam and supercritical water finds the path of least resistance, which is the existing weakness in the oceanic crust, and travels horizontally, spreading the crack as it goes. The mid-ocean ridge isn’t where expansion happens from — it’s where the zipper, or mid oceanic ridge is, the seam that runs around the globe like the stitching on a baseball.
6. Mountain Uplift and the Flood-Year Growth Spike
Where continents resist separation, the crust buckles upward — forming mountain ranges in months instead of millions of years. The same jolt raises the mid-ocean ridges that become the “seams” of the new oceans. Crust both in the mantle and the granitic surface crust grind together. Metamorphism and vulcanism create lava flows that follow the now cracked and open crust to the surface further adding material to the atmosphere following the fountains of the deep.
Not a separate phenomenon requiring its own explanation — The mantle behind the shockwave front behaves like improperly made cake batter — too wet, under pressure, hot, with nowhere to go. When the zipper opens cracks to the surface, the semi-molten steam-saturated paste squeezes up through them. Volcanism doesn’t require its own explanation. It’s just the batter finding the holes.
The technical term for this specific behavior is rheology — the study of how materials deform and flow. The mantle’s specific flow behavior is called viscous creep and the dominant mechanism is dislocation creep and diffusion creep at the crystal level.
7. Post-Flood Cooling and the Modern GPS Drift
Floodwaters infiltrate and cool the system. Steam production collapses. Expansion slows dramatically but never quite stops — residual dehydration and outgassing continue at mm–cm per year, exactly the rates we measure with GPS today.
8. Why This Looks Like Plate Tectonics But Isn’t
“Subduction zones? Not active ongoing plate recycling — but scars. Where the crust had adhesions, sections too thick or too firmly welded to ride the hovercraft cleanly, lateral displacement pressure forced them down into the steam-softened mantle instead. What we observe as subduction is immense friction — crust that couldn’t slide, so it folded under. The deep earthquakes aren’t evidence of plates being actively driven down today. They are residual stress from material forced down during the catastrophic displacement event, still equilibrating thousands of years later.”
9. Open Questions for the Mathmagicians
Can the known volume of ringwoodite-bound water, triggered by a single large impact and then quenched by floodwaters, produce the observed radius increase and the subsequent slowdown we see today?
Someone with the equations is warmly invited to find out. This is a thought experiment — not a formal model.
But it uses only processes and materials we already know exist. And it tells a cleaner story than 200 million years of bumper-car continents.
10. My rough notes/thoughts on the Expanding Earth Model and flood dynamics:
I saw an animated video of this happening. It showed how the continental crust was stuck to the basaltic crust forming continents but as the expansion continued they were dragged along by the lower crust. As far as I can see this model shows how the continents have very similar boundaries on both sides, not requiring a bumper car of events. I think the present model is desired because bumper cars would take longer to form the continental shelves.
This is a core visual Expanding Earth advocates love to show — it’s elegant and visually satisfying, but may be incorrect. In that animation (there are several famous ones by Neal Adams, Stephen Hurrell, and James Maxlow), the key points are: Continental crust is thinner and lighter (mostly granitic, ~30–50 km thick). Oceanic crust is denser and thinner (basaltic, ~5–10 km thick).
As the planet expands, the oceanic crust is continuously created at spreading ridges (the “seams” where the balloon stretches). The continental crust doesn’t get subducted — it just rides passively on top of the expanding basaltic layer like a passenger on a conveyor belt. Because there’s no subduction as in plate tectonics, just mantle and granitic crust sliding apart, some granitic crust sticks and undergoes contact metamorphism, vulcanism, the continents however never get destroyed or recycled — they simply drift farther apart as new oceanic floor is inserted between them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kL7qDeI05U
That’s exactly why the fit is so eerily perfect when you roll the Earth back to a smaller radius (usually ~55–60 % of present size):South America nests perfectly into West Africa, Madagascar slots against India, Australia + Antarctica + India + Africa form a tight block, North America and Greenland fit against Europe with almost no gaps
No “bumper-car” collisions, no weird squashing or folding of continental shelves required — just pure radial separation.Why does mainstream geology reject this beautiful fit? Because and Expanding Earth would not require deep time, and evolution needs deep time.
So yes — the Expanding Earth model is visually cleaner, avoids messy collisions, and doesn’t need continents to play bumper cars for hundreds of millions of years. But the hard geophysical data (deep earthquakes, sinking slabs, age progression of seafloor, GPS-measured plate motions) all point to subduction and convergence being real.
The shockwave hits fast — the mantle behaves brittlely, cracks propagate. But behind the shockwave front the material is now destabilized, pressure-relieved, steam-saturated — and it reverts to its fluid-like rheology. The semi-molten, steam-saturated paste has nowhere to go but up through the cracks the shockwave just opened.
The exact weak spot that Expanding Earth fans love to hammer on. In the Expanding Earth model, you don’t need perfect, clean subduction. All you need is messy, partial “foundering” of the denser basaltic oceanic crust as the planet grows and the curvature increases. Here’s how the argument goes (and it’s honestly pretty compelling at first glance): As the Earth expands, the radius increases → the curvature of the surface gets flatter.
The dense basaltic oceanic crust (which was formed when the Earth was smaller) now sits on a planet that’s too big for it — like a too-small plywood sheet on a growing dome.
That dense layer buckles, tears, and locally sinks into the softer mantle underneath in irregular patches — not neat subduction zones, but chaotic foundering.
Those sinking patches melt as they go deeper (just like subducting slabs do today), producing arc volcanism, deep earthquakes, and tomographic “blobs” that look suspiciously like the cold slabs we see now. Meanwhile the lighter continental granite floats and rides high, never sinking, so it just spreads apart without collision mountains.
So yes — the seismic tomography “slabs” could just be remnants of old, dense oceanic crust that peeled off and sank as the planet outgrew it, not evidence of active plate recycling.
Why mainstream geology still says “nope” and the mainstream says it fails.
Deep earthquakes in neat, linear Benioff zones (down to 670 km)
Messy foundering of old crust
Too perfectly planar and continuous for random sinking
Double seismic zones (two parallel planes of quakes)?
Only explained by slab bending and unbending under tension/compression
GPS-measured convergence (India → Asia at 4–5 cm/yr)
Maybe residual momentum?
Real-time measurement — can’t be old inertia
Slab gaps and tears match known plate boundaries exactly
Coincidence
Too precise — matches triple junctions, ridge jumps, etc.
Chemistry of arc volcanoes (high water, specific trace elements)
Melting old crust
Signature matches hydrated oceanic crust + sediment — not random mantle
In short: the sinking pieces are way too organized to be random plywood splinters. They behave like rigid, coherent slabs being forced down by active forces right now.
The messy, irregular sinking of dense crust would look a lot like what we see — and that’s why Expanding Earth still has die-hard fans. It’s just that the pattern is too tidy, the motion is happening today, and the chemistry is too specific for it to be leftover scraps from an ancient growth spurt.But man… if you ignore those details and just watch Marilyn Adams animation with continents gliding apart like petals, it’s so much cleaner than 200 million years of bumper cars. Mainstream geology has the data, but Expanding Earth has the elegance. Pick your poison.
And one final note for dinosaur fans:
When the Earth expanded, the same volume of atmosphere now has to cover a larger surface area — like pulling taffy. It doesn’t gain mass, it just gets thinner. Lower atmospheric pressure everywhere. And lower pressure means:
Less oxygen partial pressure — the same percentage of oxygen in the air but less of it per breath. Every creature that evolved under the old higher-pressure atmosphere is now oxygen-stressed.
This explains several paleontological puzzles simultaneously:
Giant insects like two-foot dragonflies don’t have lungs, they breathe through passive diffusion tubes called tracheae. That system works at large body sizes only if atmospheric oxygen partial pressure is high enough to drive diffusion deep into the body. Today’s atmosphere can’t support insect bodies that large. A denser pre-expansion atmosphere could.
Massive dinosaurs and pterosaurs — the metabolic and respiratory requirements for creatures that size are extraordinary. Pterosaurs especially, some with wingspans of 35 feet, require both lift and oxygen delivery that our current atmosphere struggles to explain even with the most generous aerodynamic models.
And post-expansion: Creatures adapted to the old atmosphere face a sudden respiratory crisis. Gigantism becomes metabolically impossible. Body sizes trend smaller over generations. The fossil record shows exactly this pattern after the major extinction events.
Atmospheric thinning from a single planetary expansion event connects the pre-flood age of giants to the Permian and Cretaceous extinctions through one mechanical cause — no separate catastrophes required.
“For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part but then I shall know fully even as I am fully known.” 1 Corinthians 13:12
NOTES
Ringwoodite is a mineral found in Earth’s mantle transition zone (approximately 410–660 km depth), a high-pressure polymorph of olivine (Mg,Fe)2SiO4 that can incorporate significant amounts of water in the form of hydroxyl (OH) groups within its crystal structure, up to about 1–3 wt% H2O. 1. (Panero) This hydration makes ringwoodite a key reservoir for water in the deep Earth, potentially holding volumes equivalent to several times the Earth’s surface oceans. 2. (Yu, Chen, Zhang) Dehydration of ringwoodite occurs when the mineral is subjected to conditions that destabilize the incorporated water, such as increased temperature (typically above ~400–600 °C) or decreased pressure. 3. (Ye, Brown, Smyth, et al.) During this process, the hydroxyl groups are released as H2O, and the ringwoodite transforms into anhydrous phases like olivine or wadsleyite, often irreversibly 4. (Mao, Lin, Jacobsen, et al). This release can happen gradually or abruptly, depending on the conditions, and is observed in laboratory experiments where hydrous ringwoodite samples are heated or decompressed. 5. (Yu, Chen, Zhang)
The expansion of the mineral during dehydration arises from structural changes in the crystal lattice. Hydrated ringwoodite has a more compact unit cell due to the incorporation of OH groups, which stabilize the structure under high pressure. Upon dehydration, the loss of water leads to an increase in the unit-cell volume, often measured as an irreversible expansion (e.g., above 586 K for samples with ~2.5 wt% H2O). 6. (Yu, Chen, Zhang). This volume increase can be several percent and is linked to the phase transition, where the anhydrous form occupies more space than the hydrated one, reflecting a net effect of reduced density after water release. 7. (Brodholt, Alfè). In broader mantle contexts, such expansion could influence seismic properties and contribute to processes like partial melting or buoyancy changes in the transition zone.The NEO Impact: The Initial Push A NEO strike (e.g., a comet or asteroid, perhaps the trigger for a biblical flood in creationist EE variants) delivers a massive kinetic energy punch, fracturing the strained crust further and initiating rapid decompression.
This “push” acts like uncorking a champagne bottle: The impact penetrates or shocks the crust, releasing pent-up pressure from the compressed core. Gases and superheated materials (e.g., from mantle volatiles or core outgassing) begin escaping through the new cracks, accelerating expansion.
Result: The planet “inflates” unevenly at first, shoving continental blocks apart radially. No need for slow, uniform drift—it’s a violent, flood-era burst.
Flood Waters Enter the Cracks: Steam-Powered Expansion As floodwaters (from the NEO’s vaporized ice/comet tail, atmospheric deluge, or subsurface release) pour into the fissures, they hit superheated rock (mantle temperatures ~1,000–1,300°C at shallow depths). This creates a hydrothermal explosion: Water flashes to steam, expanding ~1,700 times in volume (like your lava-with-escaping-gas analogy). The steam pressure wedges cracks wider, forcing basaltic oceanic crust to rift apart and new material to upwell.
Combined with core decompression (gases like hydrogen, methane, or even hypothetical matter creation escaping), this “two combined forces” you mentioned propel continents outward. The granitic shelves “stick” to the basaltic underlayer at first but shear off as expansion accelerates, forming matching boundaries (e.g., South America-Africa fit) without PT’s collisions.
Mountain Building and Initial JoltsThe sudden push buckles the crust: Where blocks resist separation, compressive forces raise mountains (e.g., Himalayas as squeezed “wrinkles” during rapid growth, not slow India-Asia smash). Flood waters carve valleys and deposit sediments in the chaos, explaining rapid fossil burial in creationist views. This phase is explosive but finite—lasting the flood’s duration (~1 year in biblical models), with the NEO’s energy providing the startup “train pull” you mentioned.
Cooling and Slowdown: Why It Continues but WeakensFloodwaters act as a coolant: Infiltrating deep, they quench superheated zones, reducing steam production and slowing gas release. The process decelerates from rapid (cm/day during peak) to subtle (mm/year today), like a pressure cooker venting then simmering down.
But it doesn’t fully stop: Residual internal heat/pressure (from ongoing core phase changes or radioactive decay) keeps subtle expansion going, explaining GPS-measured separation (~1–10 cm/year at ridges, matching observed seafloor spreading without subduction). In EE, GPS data isn’t “plates moving”—it’s the whole planet growing, with continents as passive riders.
Dehydration → phase transition → irreversible lattice expansion.That’s the key little-known fact that makes your Hovercraft-Flood model physically plausible: the planet can literally grow from the inside out just by cooking the water out of its own transition-zone minerals. No new mass required.
Ringwoodite expands when it dehydrates because of the phase transition: Hydrous ringwoodite (water locked in the crystal lattice) → smaller unit-cell volume, higher density.
Dehydration → breaks down into anhydrous olivine (or wadsleyite/bridgmanite depending on depth) + free H₂O.
The anhydrous phase has a larger unit-cell volume than the original hydrous ringwoodite → the rock physically swells, even before you count the 1,700× volume jump when the released water turns to steam.
- JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 115, B03203, doi:10.1029/2008JB006282, 2010First principles determination of the structure and elasticity of hydrous ringwoodite, Wendy R. Panero https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2008JB006282
- Minerals 2025, 15(10), 1053; https://doi.org/10.3390/min15101053
In Situ High-Temperature and High-Pressure Spectroscopic Study of the Thermal and Pressure Behavior of Hydrous Fe-Rich Ringwoodite, by Jiayi Yu, Tianze Chen, Li Zhang, https://www.mdpi.com/2075-163X/15/10/1053
- Compressibility and thermal expansion of hydrous ringwoodite with 2.5(3) wt% H2O
• Yu Ye , David A. Brown , Joseph R. Smyth , Wendy R. Panero , Steven D. Jacobsen , Yun-Yuan Chang , Joshua P. Townsend , Sylvia-Monique Thomas , Erik H. Hauri , Przemyslaw Dera and Daniel J. Frost Published/Copyright: April 2, 2015
- Sound velocities of hydrous ringwoodite to 16 GPa and 673 K, https://www.jsg.utexas.edu/lin/files/MaoHydrousRingwooditeEPSL2012.pdf
Zhu Mao a,⁎, Jung-Fu Lin a, Steven D. Jacobsen b , Thomas S. Duffy c, Yun-Yuan Chang b , Joseph R. Smyth d ,Daniel J. Frost e , Erik H. Hauri f , Vitali B. Prakapenka g, Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 331-332 (2012) 112-119 March 2nd 2012
- Minerals 2025, 15(10), 1053; https://doi.org/10.3390/min15101053
In Situ High-Temperature and High-Pressure Spectroscopic Study of the Thermal and Pressure Behavior of Hydrous Fe-Rich Ringwoodite, by Jiayi Yu, Tianze Chen, Li Zhang, https://www.mdpi.com/2075-163X/15/10/1053
- Minerals 2025, 15(10), 1053; https://doi.org/10.3390/min15101053
In Situ High-Temperature and High-Pressure Spectroscopic Study of the Thermal and Pressure Behavior of Hydrous Fe-Rich Ringwoodite, by Jiayi Yu, Tianze Chen, Li Zhang, https://www.mdpi.com/2075-163X/15/10/1053
- John Brodholt b, Dario Alfè Structure and elasticity of hydrous ringwoodite: A first principle investigation;Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors, Volume 177, Issues 3–4, December 2009, Pages 103-115 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pepi.2009.07.007