Earths Volcanism and Continental Drift  are computable and predictable!

With finite element analysis (FEM) you can simulate the forces that the moon (and in certain constellations the sun) act upon earth. This is a quite complicated process with feed-back effects and with many influental parameters which must get understood by and by. Whats more the gravitational data available today (by ESA or NASA) is not perfect for these computations. Instead of presenting you a downloadable program (because someone else will pretend he has written this program), I am describing here the principle so that every physicist, but perhaps even amateurs with physics knowledge may understand the principle and will be able to write a similar program by themselves.

As shown on other pages of this site celestial mechanics is not the lossless process as thought in the last century (and still in this century by many scientists!). Instead it is a lossy process, what concerns the sun-planets-constellation but even more interestingly in the system moon-earth. Earths volcanism is due to quite another fact than the solar orbit: I would like to describe it as a gravitational near-distance-effect.

Common knowledge is today, that earths gravity field is not constant. Different geological facts - the land masses, the oceans or metalurgical deposits- imply a non constant gravity force if you travel around the world. As a negative effect this is for instance known to  satelite operators. This inconstant distribution of masses on the earth is now what brings the bigger partner in the system earth-moon to sweat.

We understand the effect better by reducing the complexity: we think of the earth as a long metalic stick or rod with a small diameter. This stick will now attract the moon at its ends much more than on its sides. And since earths rotation and moons orbit around the earth is a quite slow motion, the moon will move a noticable distance  towards the earth while passing the ends of the stick. This movement towards the earth will get reversed by the now lower gravitational forces and therefore stronger centrifugal forces in the next phase, when the stick is pointing away from the moon. But since the gravitational forces are still there, only lower in strength, now we get a force which acts on the earth much like the normal tide forces, only stronger: on the side of the earth which points away from the moon by centrifugal forces and on the side which points toward the moon by gravity forces. Earth gets stretched by this action at every rotation of the earth under the moon and of the moon around the earth (compressed in the perpendicular direction). And this concerns not only the oceans and water masses, but land masses too. Not to the same extend, but in an extend that is enough to develop the heat necessary to melt rocks and stone to lava. Much like constant bending a piece of wire leads to heat in the wire and finally breaks the wire, the bending zones between the plates form breaks and volcano zones. Now this is the reason for earths volcanism and not the remnants of some initial atomic forces in central earth believed by todays geology. The continental drift at good last is produced by  the resulting bending forces and a take along effect  much like a slip clutch.

When we now reduce the simplification and transfer our model onto the real world, we will get - still simplified - sort of a stick in the axis Asia/both Americas. Elevated tide forces should then  be expected in the Australia/Pacific Region and in the European/Atlantic region. In the real world we find exactly in these regions the highest tide forces on earth. The biggest volcanic activity must be expected in the four bending zones between the compression zones and the streching zones. Exactly there we find them on our real earth: the Ring Of Fire from South Americas Andes over Alaska to Japon and Indonesia. And on the other half of the world from the African Break, Afar Triangle over Turkey to the Black Sea and  from Island to the undersea volcanos of the Atlantic Break, Fayal,Capelinhos,Lanzarote,Ascension,Tristan da Cunha. As said, this picture is still very much simplified, since Asia has on the southern hemisphere no coresponding land masses, respectively they are divided into Australia and Africa. As could be expected there is an extra bending zone between these.

At good last now there is also a plausible explanation for earths magnetic field. And the more we will understand this model, the more we will be able to calculate earths magnetic field. And since the magnetic field is very precisely measurable we will possibly gain finally in the 21th century an understanding of gravitational forces, which is one of the last white spots in physics.

Program/Algorithm

The program uses exactly the same algorithm as described in old_de.htm or old_eng.htm, with the only difference that not point masses  but extended masses are used, made up of finite elements. Since this means heavy computing loads many optimizations are necessary(a work in progress : GPU, caching,... every help appreciated..).

Earth quake prediction: problems and outlook

Finite element analysis are extremely computational intensive applications. It is absolutely necessary to chose high  resolutions in order to get valid results what concerns earth quake predictions. A typical task for mainframe computers or even computer farms. These results must then get correlated with real data (GPS-data). A big problem in this context is the much to low resolution of today's GPS-data, even in the paid version. European Galileo is projected in the paid version to deliver accuracies down to 1 Meter, which is much to low to implement any synchronisation in the near future. A viable alternative for the near future could be earth bound measuring stations which in some places already exist. On an experimental basis this could allow local predictions with (very) low acuracy.

Lately published  study(Dec 24 of 2009) by Berkeley confirms these computations