Circumferential Shortening

The mountains quake before Him, The hills melt, And the earth heaves at His presence, Yes, the world and all who dwell in it.

(Nahum 1:5) NKJV

It appears from the amount of subduction and upthrust around the world that the Earth’s circumference has changed. It’s an arcane phenomenon called circumferential shortening.

We have to know the end from the beginning and the beginning from the end. We know that the crust of the Earth is made of tectonic plates. We also know that at some time in the past these plates moved so much, so fast, that the collision caused mountain ranges like the Himalayas, and deep ocean trenches to form.

Circumferential shortening is a change in the circumference of the Earth, evident from tectonic plates, deep ocean trenches and up thrust mountain ranges. Caused by Radial Shrinkage.

– Circumferential Shortening, definition

In the early days of Geology people would do arcane things like measure the amount of crustal material that was overlain, subducted or upthrust into mountain ranges and conclude that there’s too much of it. Why’s there so much extra crustal material to account for? This is known as circumferential shortening and it used to vex Geologists of yesteryear. Some proposed radial shrinkage, that the radius of the Earth must have shrunk, but no one was ever able to satisfactorily explain why the Earth underwent radial shrinkage and the issue faded out of view.

This is not something that you hear much about these days but Geologists of old used to wring their hands over calculations of circumferential shortening and how to account for it. In Matty’s Paradigm circumferential shortening is accounted for by radial shrinkage. We can make some calculations of how much circumferential shortening there was if we know the volume of the Earth’s mantle. Using the information from seismic waves, and our hypothesis about the pillars of the Earth, we have a simple calculation to deduce what the Earth’s radius was at the end of the third day of creation.

Calculating Circumferential Shortening using 2πr

Radius	Symbol	2x	πr	= (km)
Radius of 3rd Day Earth	tr	2	3.14 x 7,653	48,085
Radius of Present Day Earth	pr	2	3.14 x 6,371	40,030
	tr-pr			8,055

At the tectonic breakup of Pangaea the Earth underwent radial shrinkage and circumferential shortening. Earth lost 1,282 km of radius and 8,055 km of circumference.

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