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Evidences of the expanding Earth from

space-geodetic data over solid land and sea level
rise in recent two decades
Shen Wenbina,b,*, Shen Ziyua,**, Sun Rongc, Barkin Yurid
a

Department of Geophysics, School of Geodesy and Geomatics, Key Laboratory of Geospace Environment and
Geodesy of Ministry of Education, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China
b
State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University,
Wuhan 430079, China
c
School of Physics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China
d
Sternberg Astronomical Institute, Moscow State University, Moscow 119992, Russia

article info

abstract

Article history:

According to the space-geodetic data recorded at globally distributed stations over solid

Received 7 April 2015

land spanning a period of more than 20-years under the International Terrestrial Reference

Accepted 13 May 2015

Frame 2008, our previous estimate of the average-weighted vertical variation of the Earth's

Available online 30 June 2015

solid surface suggests that the Earth's solid part is expanding at a rate of 0.24 0.05 mm/a
in recent two decades. In another aspect, the satellite altimetry observations spanning

Keywords:

recent two decades demonstrate the sea level rise (SLR) rate 3.2 0.4 mm/a, of which

ITRF2008 coordinates

1.8 0.5 mm/a is contributed by the ice melting over land. This study shows that the

Ice melting

oceanic thermal expansion is 1.0 0.1 mm/a due to the temperature increase in recent half

Thermal expansion

century, which coincides with the estimate provided by previous authors. The SLR

Earth expansion

observation by altimetry is not balanced by the ice melting and thermal expansion, which

Sea level rise (SLR)

is an open problem before this study. However, in this study we infer that the oceanic part

Space-geodetic data

of the Earth is expanding at a rate about 0.4 mm/a. Combining the expansion rates of land

Velocities altimetry

part and oceanic part, we conclude that the Earth is expanding at a rate of 0.35 0.47 mm/a

Earth's solid surface

in recent two decades. If the Earth expands at this rate, then the altimetry-observed SLR
can be well explained.
2015, Institute of Seismology, China Earthquake Administration, etc. Production and
hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi Communications Co., Ltd. This is an open access
article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

* Corresponding author. Department of Geophysics, School of Geodesy and Geomatics/Key Laboratory of Geospace Environment and
Geodesy of Ministry of Education, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China.
** Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: wbshen@sgg.whu.edu.cn (Shen W.), theorhythm@foxmail.com (Shen Z.).
Peer review under responsibility of Institute of Seismology, China Earthquake Administration.

Production and Hosting by Elsevier on behalf of KeAi

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geog.2015.05.006
1674-9847/ 2015, Institute of Seismology, China Earthquake Administration, etc. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi
Communications Co., Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

g e o d e s y a n d g e o d y n a m i c s 2 0 1 5 , v o l 6 n o 4 , 2 4 8 e2 5 2

1.

Introduction

Whether the Earth is expanding is a controversial problem

in science. Although many scientists hold the opinion that
during the geological time the Earth remains stable without
obvious expanding or contracting [1,2], many paleontological,
paleomagnetic, paleoclimatological, geological and geodetic
evidences support the expanding Earth hypothesis [3e9].
Wilson [10] declared that the Earth is expanding based on
geological evidences and Wegener's continental drift
hypothesis. Creer [11] concluded that the Earth's radius RE
was 0.55R at the early Precambrian (ca. 3800 million years
(Ma) ago) and increasing ever since. Carey [4,12] suggested
that the Earth was expanding within the ocean-floor
expansion framework. Scalera [13,14] believed the Earth was
expanding at a rate of few millimeters or fraction of
millimeter per year from a series study of three
palcogeographical reconstructions for the Paleocene.
Gerasimenko [15] obtained a possible radius increase of
0.2 mm/a based on the analyses of LAGEOS and Very Long
Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) data for stable nonorogenic
continental regions. Our previous study [16] suggests that
the Earth is expanding at a rate about 0.2 mm/a in recent
decades based on space-geodetic data and temporal gravity
data. In that study we did not use the sea level rise evidences.
In the present study, we use two kinds of evidences to
further estimate the Earth expansion rate. First, based on the
space-geodetic data of 629 space-geodetic stations under the
International Terrestrial Reference Frame (ITRF) 2008
(including stations of GPS, SLR, VLBI, Doppler Orbitography
and Radiopositioning Integrated by Satellite (DORIS)) covering
a period about 20 years [17e19] (All of the ITRF2008 files and
results are available at the ITRF web site: http://itrf.ign.fr/
ITRF_solutions/2008/), we found that the Earth's radius was
increasing at a rate of about 0.24 mm/a [16]. However, this
evidence only suggests that the solid part of the Earth is
expanding.
The second evidence is the observation of sea level rise
(SLR). Current observations show that the global mean SLR is
at a rate of about 3.3 0.4 mm/a from 1993 to 2009 [20] or
3.2 0.4 mm/a from 1993 to 2013 [21]. It is mainly attributed
to ice cap melting and temperature change of the sea.
However, the Earth expansion may also contribute to the
SLR, for the ice cap melting and temperature increase could
not close the observed amount of SLR, namely, the SLR
caused by the ice cap melting plus the thermal expansion is
not balanced to the observed SLR by altimetry. In this study,
to improve our previous study [16], we use SLR evidence to
further estimate the Earth expansion rate.

2.

up by all of the geodetic stations. The average vertical velocity

of the Earth's surface could then be calculated as [16].
PN
Pi vi
vG Pi1
;
N
i1 Pi

Pi

Si
s2vi

(1)

where vG is the expanding rate of the Earth, vi the representative vertical velocity of the ith triangle, N the number of
triangles, Si the spherical area of the ith triangle, s2vi the variance of the ith triangle, Pi the weight of vi. Here Pi is proportional to the area Si of the ith triangle, and inversely
proportional to the variance s2vi of vi.
The velocity of each triangle vtr is calculated by [16]
1
vtr vD vE vF
3

(2)

where vD, vE and vF are vertical velocity of three nodes of this

spherical triangle.
The data used are from ITRF2008, including coordinates
and velocities of 1572 stations distributed over solid land (see
Fig. 1). Of these sites, some sets of records actually refer to the
same stations but in different time periods. In our
calculations, the velocity and position of any one of such
kinds of stations are determined by continuation of the
corresponding data set over the whole time periods. Besides,
many stations from different techniques locate in a very
small area. These stations are merged to one station. The
velocity and position of this new station is the average value
of all the stations locating in this small area. After above
handling, we have 845 stations left [16].
Absolute values of vertical velocities of some stations are
relatively large. We consider that a too large vertical velocity
should be related to local events rather than global expansion.
Such stations are removed from our calculations. Stations
locating in orogen belts are also removed since these vertical
velocities of these stations are more likely related to local
deformations but expansion. The information of orogen belts
is provided by Bird [24]. After removing the above mentioned
stations, 629 stations are used in our calculations based on
DTIN. Details are referred to Shen et al. [16].
Post glacial rebound (PGR) is a possible reason for the vertical movement of the station. Based on the data released
from website (http://grace.jpl.nasa.gov/data/pgr/) [25], the
estimated average uplift rate vu of the whole surface of the

Earth
caused
by
the
PGR
is
only
vu
(5.69  106 1.09  104) mm/a. To obtain a more
reasonable result of the influence of PGR on the uplift of the
surface of the Earth, it is necessary to calculate the uplift
rate for each space-geodetic station. In our study [16], we
expand the grid data of uplift rate of the lithosphere into
spherical harmonic coefficients, and then the uplift rate
resulted from PGR could be calculated by the following
equation

Evidence from space-geodetic data

vPGR

The Earth's volume will increase if the Earth is expanding.

Since the topography variation on the Earth's surface cannot
be well modeled by the current distribution of space-geodetic
stations, we consider the average vertical velocity of the
Earth's surface rather than the actual volume of the Earth.
First, a Delaunay triangulation Irregular Network [22,23] is set

249

Cn0 Pn0 q


X X P
P
Cnm cos ml Snm sin ml Pnm q
n

(3)
P
Cn0 ,

P
Cnm

P
Snm

and
are spherical harmonic coefficients
where
obtained from grid values of uplift rate from PGR model [25],
Pn0 q and Pnm q are normalized Legendre functions defined
in geophysical convention.

250

g e o d e s y a n d g e o d y n a m i c s 2 0 1 5 , v o l 6 n o 4 , 2 4 8 e2 5 2

Fig. 1 e Distribution of 1572 stations under International Terrestrial Reference Frame (ITRF) 2008. Plate boundaries are
denoted by green lines. Orogen belts are denoted in yellow. Information of both Plate boundaries and orogen belts are from
Bird (2003). 306 geodetic stations located in orogen belts are denoted in red (* Oro), while other 629 stations are denoted in
blue (* Used). GPS, DORIS, SLR and VLBI stations are denoted by dots, circus, squares and pentagons, respectively, and green
ones are used in estimating the expansion rate in this paper (cited from reference [16]).

The expansion rate aland over land using 629 stations and
that with PGR effect being considered are listed in Table 1.

3.
Sea level rise and estimate of oceanic
thermal expansion
According to current satellite altimetry observation, the
SLR is at the rate of about 3.2 0.4 mm with PGR effect
considered in recent two decades [21]. It is considered that the
observed SLR is mainly due to two causes [26]. The first is the
ice cap melting, which makes the water originally stored on
land flow into the sea. The second is the thermal expansion
due to the fact that the global temperature increases [27]
and the water becomes warmer [28]. The ice cap melting
over land in recent two decades generates 1.8 0.5 mm/a of
SLR [29].
In this section, we estimate the oceanic thermal expansion
based on the temperature change of the sea water. The temperature varies among various oceans and various depths.
However, the sea water has following properties: first, the upsurface water layer of 200 m is uniform; second, water layer
between 200 m and 1000 m decrease linearly; third, at the
depth of 1000 m, the temperature achieves 4  C, and below that
depth the water is little influenced by the temperature
increase/decrease of the upper water. The current temperature

Table 1 e Expansion rate of the Earth based on

International Terrestrial Reference Frame (ITRF) 2008
(spanning two decades).
Number
of stations
used
629

Expansion rate
aland over land
(103 m/a)

Expansion rate aland

over land (with PGR effect
considered) (103 m/a)

0.54 0.05

0.24 0.05

of global average up-surface layer water is 17.4  C (http://www.

windows2universe.org/earth/Water/temp.html).
And
the
global climate temperature increases 0.13  C per decade in the
last half century [26].
The sea water is divided into ten layers from surface to
1000 m depth, with each layer being 100 m thickness. The
temperature of each layer is uniform all over the world. The
temperature of water below 1000 m is considered to be hardly
invariant among last century. Thus the influence of deeper
water could be neglected. Since the temperature in first two
layers (until 200 m depth) is uniform and it decreases linearly
from the 200 m to 1000 m depth (see http://www.
windows2universe.org/earth/Water/temp.html), we set the
temperature of the first layer and second layer T1 T2 17.4  C,
the temperature of water below the last layer is 4.0  C, then we
have
17:4  4:0
i  2i 3; 4;; 10
(4)
Ti 17:4 
5
The value of each Ti is listed in Table 2. The SLR contributed
by thermal expansion can be expressed as
10
X
gi dTi h
(5)
athermal
i1

where gi is the water expansion coefficient of the ith layer,

which is listed in Table 2 (http://physchem.kfunigraz.ac.at/
sm/Service/Water/H2Othermexp.htm). dTi is the temperature
increase of the ith layer in the last century, h is the
thickness of each layer (see Table 2). To make an optimistic
estimate, we set the temperature increase of the first and
second layer dT1 as 0.13  C/d, the temperature increase
below the last layer is 0  C/d. Then based on linear
interpolation we have
dTi 0:13 

0:13
i  1i 2; 3;; 10
5

(6)

251

g e o d e s y a n d g e o d y n a m i c s 2 0 1 5 , v o l 6 n o 4 , 2 4 8 e2 5 2

Table 2 e Water expansion coefficients correspond to

different temperature and temperature increase of
different layers.

ith layer

i
i
i
i
i
i
i
i
i
i

1, 2 (0e100 m)
2 (100e200 m)
3 (200e300 m)
4 (300e400 m)
5 (400e500 m)
6 (500e600 m)
7 (600e700 m)
8 (700e800 m)
9 (800e900 m)
10 (900e1000 m)

0.130
0.117
0.104
0.091
0.078
0.065
0.052
0.039
0.026
0.013

ma


1=2
P2ocean m2aocean P2land m2aland

(10)

Pocean Pland

where Pocean 70% and Pocean 30%.

179
179
161
143
124
106
88
66
45
24

5.

Substituting equation (6) into equation (5), and using the

relevant values, we have
athermal 100  179  0:13 179  0:117 161  0:104
143  0:091 124  0:078 106  0:065 88

(7)

 0:052 66  0:039 45  0:026 24  0:013

 106 0:99 mm=a

and the corresponding accuracy is estimated as 0.2 mm/a.

Hence, the SLR contributed by thermal expansion is estimated
as 1.0 0.2 mm/a.

4.

(9)

and the corresponding accuracy is estimated as

Water
Temperature
Average
expansion
increase
temperature
coefficient
dTi ( C/da)
( C)
gi (106/ C)
17.4
17.4
15.9
14.4
12.9
11.4
10.0
8.47
6.98
5.49

Pocean aocean Pland aland

Pocean Pland

Estimate of the Earth's expansion

Based on the altimetry-observed result (3.2 0.4 mm/a)

and ice melting estimate (1.8 0.5 mm/a) in recent two decades (see Table 3), the Earth expansion rate over ocean region
in recent two decades is estimated as
p
aocean 3:2  1:8  1:0 0:42 0:52 0:22 0:40:67mm=a
(8)
According to equation (8), though the accuracy is very low,
the expansion rate over ocean region is comparable with the
expansion rate over land. Combining the expansion rates
over land and ocean, the whole Earth expansion rate is
estimated as 0.35 0.47 mm/a, as listed in Table 3. This
estimate is a weighted result with taking the area as weight,
namely

Discussions and conclusions

Based on space-geodetic data (ITRF2008) and temporal

gravity data, our previous study [16] suggests that the Earth
expands at a rate about 0.2 mm/a. In this study, using spacegeodetic data under ITRF2008 over land and sea level rise
evidence over ocean, we suggest that the Earth expands at
a rate about 0.35 0.47 mm/a in recent two decades. The
accuracy is low because the SLR evidence has low
accuracy. Inversely, if the Earth expands at a rate about
0.35 0.47 mm/a, the present observations and estimates
over ocean could be well balanced: altimetry result
3.2 mm/a (with PGR effect considered) is almost equal to
3.15 mm/a (3.15 mm/a ice melting contribution 1.8 mm/a
thermal expansion effect 1.0 mm/a Earth expansion
rate 0.35 mm/a).
In this study, the salinity variation effect is not considered, which contribute less than 0.1 mm/a. The thermal
expansion effect below 1000 m depth is neither considered,
which contribute also less than 0.1 mm/a. We note that
below 2000 m depth, with the temperature increase, the
thermal expansion is negative (i.e., the thermal expansion
effect is in fact a contraction effect below 2000 m depth
[30]). Since the accuracies of the ice melting estimate and
the thermal expansion estimate are quite low, it is not
necessary to consider the salinity variation effect and deep
ocean water thermal expansion (contraction) effect. This
study is a further improvement of our previous study.
Deliberate and thorough study about the SLR balance and
estimate of the Earth expansion rate will be investigated in
a separated paper. Finally, we note that using spacegeodetic data (GPS sites over the globe) Wu and his
colleagues [31] suggested that space-geodetic observation
does not support the Earth expansion hypothesis. A
relevant comment about this suggestion is addressed
elsewhere [32].

Table 3 e Sea level rise observations, unbalanced SLR, Earth expansion and balanced SLR in recent two decades.
Entities
Altimetry of SLR
Ice melting contribution to SLR
Thermal expansion contribution to SLR
Unbalanced SLR amount
Radial average variation in land part (aland)
Radial average variation in ocean part (aocean)
Radial average variation in whole Earth (a)
Balanced SLR amount

Variation rate (mm/a)

3.2
1.8
1.0
0.4
0.24
0.4
0.35
0.05

0.4
0.5
0.2
0.67
0.05
0.67
0.47
0.82

Authors
CU/CSIRO/NASAGSFC/NOAA (2014)
Meier 2007 [29]
This study
This study
Shen et al. [16]
This study
This study
This study

252

g e o d e s y a n d g e o d y n a m i c s 2 0 1 5 , v o l 6 n o 4 , 2 4 8 e2 5 2

Acknowledgments
We thank two anonymous reviewers' comments and suggestions, which improved this manuscript. This study is
supported by National 973 Project China (2013CB733305,
2013CB733301), National Natural Science Foundation of China
(41174011, 41429401, 41210006, 41128003, 41021061).

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Shen Wenbin, Professor, Department of

Geophysics, School of Geodesy and Geomatics, Wuhan University. His interests
include gravity theory and application,
Earth rotation, Earth's free oscillation,
relativistic geodesy.