Just a thought. Seems to me that plate movement can be observed, just not on the regular human timescale.
Exactly.
You could also mention the physical scale. Subduction in particular doesn't happen at a location that could be "filmed". It happens over massive distances and at quite some depth.
Also, if I can recall correctly, on top of the subduction boundary will be a pileup of material that essentially gets scraped off the top of the plate as it gets subducted called an accretionary wedge (forgive my spelling). So even if you wanted to "watch" the subduction it is in fact buried beneath a vast amount of tons of ... well ... stuff.
Again IIRC, Indonesia itself is an accretionary wedge so these things can be quite big.
I think plate tectonics is on topic in the sense that it is the reason for the mountain building, so I guess demonstrating that it does happen by talking about subduction is okay, but we may be slightly stepping into different territory.
The take home point is, crazy Batman guy aside, plate tectonics does happen AND is sufficient to account for mountain building. That is a fact that needs to be accomodated by any model claiming to accuratly describe the history of the earth.
Even if someone wants to argue about forces and equations and such, which seems pretty easy to debunk, although I am not sure it has been done yet comprehensivly enough, which I will leave to the physics minded folks; mountains building regions correspond directly with convergent plate boundaries. Either that is a coincidence or someone's math is wrong.
Edited by Jazzns, : No reason given.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. --Thomas Jefferson