Origin of the Continents (Paperback) | Released: 01 Jul 1996

The ocean is, on the average, nearly three miles deep. The continents barely stick out above sea level. The rocks that make up the continents are lighter than the rocks of the sea floor. But those lighter rocks are still much heavier than the water of the sea. If there were nothing keeping those continental rocks gathered up into piles three miles high, they would be spread all over the sea floor. The planet earth would be completely covered with water with no land sticking out above water. What keeps those rocks piled up into continents? Origin of the Continents proposes an answer to that long standing puzzle. There is a cycle, a phenomenon that gathers one kind of rocks into continents and spread another kind of rocks out over the sea floor. This phenomenon is called the "Lithologic Cycle."
About the Author: For thirty years Frederick, disappeared into the Military-Industrial complex where no publication is released to the public. There he made significant advances in the technology of information recognition and information extraction. He became known as "one who could see information where others see only data." During those years Frederick studied geology at San Jose State. There he had a hard time with an essay question that Dr. Steven Skapinsky ask on one of the exams. That exam asked to choose and defend the choice of which mechanism was responsible for the building of the continents: The choices were, Continental Accretion or Continental Drift. (The term "Plate Tectonics" was not yet popularized.) Frederick answered, neither of the then current theories was adequate alone, and got marked down on his answer. This was quite traumatic as he had been a 4.0 student. Later Frederick went to a talk by J. Tuzo Wilson, an early pioneer in the popularization of plate tectonics and talked to him personally. He was still bothered by the lack of satisfactory explanation of the mechanism for driving the plates. This puzzle festered for over twenty years until Frederick realized the answer was in the density inversion as described in his new Theory of the Lithologic Cycle. Frederick's first public presentation of the Theory of the Lithologic Cycle was to a class of students in Hamilton, Montana in 1994. In 1996, Frederick published his proposed answer to that long standing mystery of geology. Origin of the Continents, an Introduction to the Theory of The Lithologic Cycle, furnished a mechanism explaining the origin of the continents and the continued maintenance of their standing over three miles above the sea floor, allowing them to remain above sea level, surrounded by an ocean that is an overage of three miles deep.