If you've tuned into YouTube any time in the past few years to see what the undereducated

alternative history crowd is pitching this week, there's a good chance you've been exposed

to the expanding Earth theory, which holds that the Earth is not a constant size, but has

been continuously expanding.

Today we're going to see if that claim is really as overblown as it seems to be.

It's coming up right now, UnSkeptoid.

You're listening to Skeptoid, I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com, reigning in the

expanding Earth.

If you pick up a globe and study the way distant shorelines would seem to fit nicely if they

were somehow brought together, it might not seem all that silly to allow for the possibility

that the Earth has changed its size, significantly.

Imagine that globe shrinking in your hands, but the familiar continents staying the same

size.

Closer and closer they would get to one another as we went backwards in some hypothetical

timeline, until they all slotted neatly together.

Antarctica nestled between Africa, Australia and India, Greenland filling the space between

North America and Eurasia, until you held in your hands a solid rock ball.

Today of course the notion that the Earth got into its present configuration by expanding

from a smaller size seems silly.

It seems to belong with the flat Earthers and the hollow Earthers in all the other geophysical

crackpots.

But how would you react if I told you that expansionism was actually a mainstream theory, and not

...