From the deepest ocean trench to the tallest mountain, plate tectonics explains the options and motion of Earth’s floor within the current and the previous.

Plate tectonics is the speculation that Earth’s outer shell is split into a number of plates that glide over the mantle, the rocky inside layer above the core. The plates act like a tough and inflexible shell in comparison with Earth’s mantle. This robust outer layer is known as the lithosphere, which is 100 km (60 miles) thick, based on Encyclopedia Britannica. The lithosphere consists of the crust and outer a part of the mantle. Under the lithosphere is the asthenosphere, which is malleable or partially malleable, permitting the lithosphere to maneuver round. The way it strikes round is an evolving concept.

Historical past

Developed from the 1950s by means of the 1970s, plate tectonics is the trendy model of continental drift, a principle first proposed by scientist Alfred Wegener in 1912. Wegener did not have an evidence for the way continents might transfer across the planet, however researchers do now. Plate tectonics is the unifying principle of geology, mentioned Nicholas van der Elst, a seismologist at Columbia College’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York.

“Earlier than plate tectonics, individuals needed to give you explanations of the geologic options of their area that had been distinctive to that specific area,” Van der Elst mentioned. “Plate tectonics unified all these descriptions and mentioned that you must be capable of describe all geologic options as if pushed by the relative movement of those tectonic plates.”

What number of plates are there?

There are 9 main plates, based on World Atlas. These plates are named after the landforms discovered on them. The 9 main plates are North American, Pacific, Eurasian, African, Indo-Australian, Australian, Indian, South American and Antarctic.

The biggest plate is the Pacific Plate at 39,768,522 sq. miles (103,000,000 sq. kilometers). Most of it’s positioned underneath the ocean. It’s transferring northwest at a velocity of round 2.75 inches (7 cm) per year.

There are additionally many smaller plates all through the world.

How plate tectonics works

The driving power behind plate tectonics is convection within the mantle. Sizzling materials close to the Earth’s core rises, and colder mantle rock sinks. “It is sort of like a pot boiling on a range,” Van der Elst mentioned. The convection drive plates tectonics by means of a mix of pushing and spreading aside at mid-ocean ridges and pulling and sinking downward at subduction zones, researchers suppose. Scientists proceed to check and debate the mechanisms that transfer the plates.

Mid-ocean ridges are gaps between tectonic plates that mantle the Earth like seams on a baseball. Sizzling magma wells up on the ridges, forming new ocean crust and shoving the plates aside. At subduction zones, two tectonic plates meet and one slides beneath the opposite again into the mantle, the layer beneath the crust. The chilly, sinking plate pulls the crust behind it downward.

Plate boundaries

Subduction zones, or convergent margins, are one of many three sorts of plate boundaries. The others are divergent and rework margins.

At a divergent margin, two plates are spreading aside, as at seafloor-spreading ridges or continental rift zones such because the East Africa Rift.

Remodel margins mark slip-sliding plates, resembling California’s San Andreas Fault, the place the North America and Pacific plates grind previous one another with a largely horizontal movement.

Reconstructing the previous

Whereas the Earth is 4.54 billion years outdated, as a result of oceanic crust is consistently recycled at subduction zones, the oldest seafloor is barely about 200 million years outdated. The oldest ocean rocks are discovered within the northwestern Pacific Ocean and the jap Mediterranean Sea. Fragments of continental crust are a lot older, with massive chunks not less than 3.eight billion years present in Greenland.

With clues left behind in rocks and fossils, geoscientists can reconstruct the previous historical past of Earth’s continents. Most researchers suppose fashionable plate tectonics began about 3 billion years ago, based mostly on historic magmas and minerals preserved in rocks from that interval. Some imagine it might have began a billion years after Earth’s birth, at around 3.5 billion years.

“We do not actually know when plate tectonics because it appears as we speak received began, however we do know that we have now continental crust that was probably scraped off a down-going slab [a tectonic plate in a subduction zone] that’s 3.eight billion years outdated,” Van der Elst mentioned. “We might guess which means plate tectonics was working, however it may need looked very different from today.”

Because the continents jostle across the Earth, they often come collectively to kind big supercontinents, a single landmass. One of many earliest massive supercontinents, known as Rodinia, assembled about 1 billion years in the past. Its breakup is linked to a worldwide glaciation known as Snowball Earth.

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A newer supercontinent known as Pangaea fashioned about 300 million years in the past. Africa, South America, North America and Europe nestled intently collectively, leaving a attribute sample of fossils and rocks for geologists to decipher as soon as Pangaea broke aside. The puzzle items left behind by Pangaea, from fossils to the matching shorelines alongside the Atlantic Ocean, supplied the primary hints that the Earth’s continents transfer.

Plates bumping into one another may trigger mountain ranges. For instance, India and Asia got here collectively about 55 million years in the past, which created the Himalaya Mountains, based on National Geograph.

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