Trigger: Pacific-side uplift and antipodal

Trigger: Pacific-side uplift and antipodal tensile rupture — Because Earth is a closed sphere, a rapid expansion/uplift on one side forces tension on the opposite side. An everyday analogy is a rubber ball: if you inflate one side abruptly, the opposite surface may tear first.

Because Earth is a closed sphere, a rapid expansion/uplift on one side forces tension on the opposite side. An everyday analogy is a rubber ball: if you inflate one side abruptly, the opposite surface may tear first.

Intuition

Because Earth is a closed sphere, a rapid expansion/uplift on one side forces tension on the opposite side. An everyday analogy is a rubber ball: if you inflate one side abruptly, the opposite surface may tear first. Instead of assuming “the Atlantic must be slow spreading,” this white paper elevates antipodal rupture as a falsifiable hypothesis.

Order-of-magnitude: hoop strain and a failure condition

Assume a Pacific-side uplift/expansion tries to increase the effective radius by Δ R. The corresponding hoop strain is

ε_θ = Δ L/L = 2π(R+Δ R)-2π R/2π R = Δ R/R.
With an effective elastic modulus E, the antipodal tensile stress scale is
σₜₑₙₛᵢₒₙ ≈ E ε_θ ≈ EΔ R/R.
A tensile failure condition is
σₜₑₙₛᵢₒₙ ≳ σ_fail ⇒ Δ R ≳ R σ_failE.

Interpretation. This expression makes “how large must Δ R be to allow Atlantic opening?” a pre-registrable threshold relation. If Δ R must be unrealistically large, the model must STOP under Ω-NoGo.