( MHZ sooner or later you will have to abandon the idea of gravity as a discrete force.) DB
Would, 'When I'm convinced it answers all the questions' be the right time to do that. The photo below will work even though it is from Mars as the features are similar as what can be found on earth. Before I get to the parts I see as being the same but but the water is missing on Mars so that opens space for an alternate theory that would also play out on earth.
The 'ruts' have no scientific explanation at the moment but if we consider the crust is brittle rock on the top part and 'putty' below that. The Grand Banks and the shelf the UK currently sits on is where that line is. Canada and EU lack a volcano to mark the center of the down-flow but they do have shelves that is rock moving out of the way. If it was an up-flow another mountain chain would be build like at the Atlantic Rift. The UK slab also has a rift north of Russia adding magma to help push that slab out.
When this breaks were first made it could have sent a shock wave through rock that was not fractured prior to that and only the lowest cracks were filled at that time. Events like the Siberian Traps saw more fluid magma come to the surface by using those existing cracks. In the area with the 'wagon ruts' the magma would come out slow and thick and in a thin layer. Thin enough that when the cooling took place the ruts were created due to cooling and the rut is there because it was the deepest lava and it shrank the most as the material in the while crack would have replace material by pulling it from the weakest area, the new ground.
In a larger scale the expanding earth model at its smallest is when the planet would have experienced a shock that would have shatter the proto crust. Due to it being of 'limited size' it was micro cracks and very few loose pieces thanks to the thick layer of once that covered the planet its first snowball earth stage.
The places where the biggest cracks were was above where magma was rising from the core like it had been doing for the last 3B years uninterrupted. Like the lava field where the ruts are found cracks let the whole area get covered and then some shrinking tool place. In the time the up-flow and the down-flow matched shedding as much heat as the core produced gave the earth an 'average temperature'.
Even with the surface being as smooth as the ocean in the doldrums the tides still happened as did the lighter magma making it to the top most layers, hills would have been at the up-flows and dips where the down-flows were.
Wind time back to when the core was as solid and the inner core was liquid and the mantle just beginning to 'fall like snow' and it would follow the shape of the solid core and due to the interactions that had already taken place the lines that are where the rifts are today and they were glowing red while the rest of the mass showed the pattern the crust had 200M years ago. That is when the water that is our oceans began to fall as snow and it was at least 50% of the water we have and it was all ice on a crust that was magma at about 2,000F. The ice slowed down the heat exchange and the magma came to be 3500F and the pressure broke the fragile crust and the ice along the lines that were always up-flows. The 2nd time is when all the fine cracks were created and they are still being filled with something, lava, oil, gas .
The places we see and drainage basins are in places where a hot liquid under different pressures and when it cooled the pattern it established mirrored what was below and as time and earth's weathering processes began the rivers naturally started at the high points and went lower in elevation as the ice melted and the first lakes were at the mountain tops and 300M years later water could be found at the lowest parts of the continental crust, The heat would eventually evaporate all the water and that would set things up for the 2nd snowball earth.
(to be continued)
No use getting too far ahead of the horse and cart. The next part would explore sucking the moons core out when it and earth were acting like big magnets. Does a compass work on the moon?
