Comment on “Estimates of heat flow from Cenozoic seafloor using global depth and age data” by M. Wei and D. Sandwell

To obtain the desired answer in support of a popular, previous cooling model for the sea floor, Wei and Sandwell provide a construct that is contrary to the simple physics governing subsidence of cooling oceanic crust and is also fraught with mathematical errors. Seven of their eight equations are either misused or incorrect or both. Errors made by Wei and Sandwell include not conserving rock-mass, incorrect differentiation, dividing by zero, moving variable parameters freely in and out of integrals, and neglecting variations in density that embody the essence of the phenomenon being modeled. We demonstrate all the above, show that their construct is closely related to the half-space cooling model, and that the linear, not volumetric thermal expansivity should have been used.