Southeast Asia - New Zealand

This view shows the clearest evidence of turbulence in the oceanic crust.  As the block made up of India, Australia, Southeast Asia, and other islands hit Asia, it shattered, and the crustal wave divided.  Pieces of the block were thrown eastward behind the crustal waves.  The northern wave pulled the Philippines off of Borneo.  Sumatra laid a trench behind Australia.  As the waves advanced, counterclockwise turbulence in the crust behind the lower wave left a curved trench and created a downdraft.  Australia and especially New Zealand were caught in the downdraft.  Gouges trace how Eastern Australia dipped to the south.  Fluidized crust, shown in red, flowed like a river with New Zealand and then past it, spreading out like a delta.  The curved trench ended as a sort of shearing vortex that raised the islands of Fiji.  The crustal waves froze, forming the Mariana and Tonga Trench systems.

This demonstration (similar to the one on the previous page, presentation 14) shows how turbulence affected the fluidized oceanic crust.  A wooden paddle is placed in a shallow pan of water, and a drop of food coloring is added.

Moving the paddle to the right makes the water behind it rotate counterclockwise.

This is how the Tonga-New Hebrides region actually appears on the Sandwell Marine Gravity Anomaly from Satellite Altimetry map.

Below is the Plate Tectonics version of the formation of this region.  Subduction polarity (direction) reversed because 250 to 2,700 km to the west the plate hit the Ontong Java Plateau.  Various spreading ridges emerged (for no particular reason) and opened the North Fiji Basin.  The full story of the spreading ridges is even more complicated than shown, with new ones forming on old ones at various angles.  As Crawford et al wrote, "The distribution and orientation of spreading centres in the North Fiji Basin has been remarkably transient with numerous microplates, parallel spreading ridges, several unstable triple junctions, and probably leaky transform faults."¹  Which explanation is more straightforward?  Decide for yourself.
1.  Crawford, A.J., S. Meffre, P.A. Symonds. 2003. 120 to 0 Ma tectonic evolution of the southwest Pacific and analogous geological evolution of the 600 to 220 Ma Tasman Fold Belt System. Geological Society of America Special Paper 372, pp. 383-403.

East of Australia, the long Lord Howe Rise "continental ribbon" reaches down to New Zealand.  According to Plate Tectonics, it is a thin fragment of continental crust that split off of eastern Australia and sank to its current depth.  Then, over 30 million years, most of New Zealand's southern island and the section south of New Zealand (Campbell Plateau and Chatham Rise) that look like an extension of the Lord Howe Rise, rotated in from the east so that today they are all perfectly aligned in a most convenient manner.  Shock Dynamics tells a simpler and yet more remarkable story of the origin of this feature.  Shown here is the "continental ribbon" (red) being formed out of turbulent, fluidized oceanic crust by the pull of New Zealand south in the down draft.  The flow gains mass and speed as it goes.  When New Zealand stops on the frozen wave (Tonga-Kermadec Trench), the flow rushes past it, spreads out, and stops.

Note the alluvial fan-shape south of New Zealand - the Campbell plateau.

   From the digital elevation map "Surface of the                     Alluvial fan, Lawn Lake dam break 1980,
  Earth", Peter W. Sloss, NOAA/NGDC, 1994.                      Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado

  Alluvial fan, Wineglass canyon, Death Valley, California

There are substantial areas on the Earth that are not part of the 14 large "plates" of Plate Tectonics theory that one hears so much about.  A study has found 38 additional "small plates" plus a number of zones designated as "orogens" with fuzzy plate boundaries.  The largest "orogen" stretches from Korea to the Alps.  Another covers Alaska and its connection with Canada.  Most of the "small plates" are in the region where the Australia-Southeast Asia block shattered against Asia and scattered to the east.  These exceptions to the rule require special interpretation in Plate Tectonics theory, and bring to mind the attempts to salvage the Earth-centered view of the solar system by adding "epicycles" to the orbits of planets in the days before Galileo.
Bird, Peter. 14 March 2003. An updated digital model of plate boundaries. Geochemistry Geophysics Geosystems (G3), Vol. 4, No. 3, 52 pages.