Earth is not expanding

July 22, 2012

by John Vidale

There have been persistent eccentric theories that scientists have missed the boat, and earthquakes, geology, and the history of the Earth can be better explained by an expanding Earth.  Prominent among the iconoclasts are the late Australian geologist S. Warren Carey, who wrote the 1976 book The Expanding Earth (448 pp., Elsevier, Amsterdam), and his followers.

Plagiarizing Wikipedia -

There are 3 forms of the expanding earth hypothesis.


It has been hard to prove the Earth is not expanding for many reasons.  The evidence can be confusing, as many precise datasets come only from small geographic areas, the water in the ocean would slightly expand if the water temperature rises, or appear to change if the ocean currents change.  The time interval over which man has been able to make measurements is very short compared to the history of the Earth.  Individual datasets lack resolution, and scientists are notorious for sometimes underestimating uncertainty, which ascribes significance to insignificant deviations from standard theories.

Here is the latest word, from the journal Geophysical Research Letters last year.  The radius of the Earth is changing less than a mm every five years, and consistent with no change whatsoever.



Accuracy of the International Terrestrial Reference Frame origin and Earth expansion

Key Points

  • ITRF2008 origin drift from the mean CM is less than 0.5 mm/yr
  • The solid Earth is not expanding within the measurement accuracy of 0.2 mm/yr
  • These are determined using multiple data sets and a global inverse platform

X. Wu


X. Collilieux

Institut Géographique National, Champs-sur-Marne, France

and four more co-authors


So now exotic theorists will probably take expanding Earth ideas to the next level of complexity - maybe the expansion rate fluctuates, and the current lack of expansion is temporary, maybe our understanding of physics is flawed such that gravity is changing or worse, or maybe the Earth is alive and fooling us.

IMO, the battle against outlandish theories is part of progress.  Despite the lack of merit in the idea of an expanding Earth, one can always hope new ideas will appear.  Plate tectonics was once outlandish, and deterministic earthquake prediction is considered now nearly outlandish.  Time will tell which ideas are wrong, like expanding Earth, and which are not.