Indications from space geodesy, gravimetry and seismology for slow Earth expansion at present – comment on “The Earth expansion theory and its transition from scientific hypothesis to pseudoscientific belief” by Sudiro (2014)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. In a recent article in this journal, Paolo Sudiro (2014) considered the long history of the expanding Earth theory and its recent descent into what he termed “pseudoscientific belief”. The expanding Earth theory contends that the radius of the Earth was once one-half to two-thirds of its current value, with the Earth's continents forming a continuous sialic cover over the Earth. The theory has had two main variants: slow expansion at about 0.5 mm yr−1 radial increase since the time of Earth's formation and fast expansion at about 5 mm yr−1 since the Triassic. Focusing on Maxlow's model, Sudiro thoroughly addresses the possibly insurmountable difficulties of the fast version, such as an improbably high density and surface gravity prior to 200 Ma. He omits, however, any discussion of the slow expansion model, which has a longer history and far fewer theoretical difficulties. Moreover, recent evidence from space geodesy, gravimetry and seismology indicates that the Earth at present may be slowly expanding at 0.1–0.4 mm yr−1. It is concluded that Sudiro's obituary of the expanding Earth theory as a whole must be considered premature at this time.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.016 | 0.028 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".