Plate Tectonic

Introduction

Over billions of years, it has been happening, a slow but steady movement of the plates forming the Earth's crust, causing the call us "plate tectonics", and a theory which supplements and explains continental drift.

The continents, joined together or fragmented, open oceans, mountains rise, you change the climate, influencing all this, very important in the evolution and development of living beings. New crust gets emerged on the seabed. It destroys the crust and oceanic trenches collisions between continents that modify the terrain (Michael, p. 125).

The Basis of the Theory

According to the theory of plate tectonics, Earth's crust, composed of at least a dozen rigid plates that move at your leisure. These blocks rest on a layer of hot rock and flexible, called the asthenosphere, which flows slowly as a hot tar.

Geologists have not yet determined exactly how these layers interact, but the most modern theories claim that the movement of material thick molten asthenosphere forces the top plates to move sink or rise (Frank and Siever, p.71).

[Source: NASA.]

The basic concept of the theory of plate tectonics is simple: heat rises. Warm air rises above cold air, and warm water currents float above the cold water. The same principle applies to the hot rocks under the surface: the melt in the asthenosphere, or magma, rises, while cold and hardened material is sinking ever further into the background, within the mantle. The rock that sinks finally reaches the high temperatures in the lower asthenosphere, heated and begins to rise again.

This constant movement, and somewhat circular, called convection. At the edges of the divergent plate and hot areas of the solid lithosphere, the melt flows to the surface, forming fresh crust.

The theory of plate tectonics states that the lithosphere, so the outer solid shell of the Earth crust and uppermost mantle, is broken into rigid plates that are constantly on the globe on the hot, viscous-plastic asthenosphere in motion. The puzzle of the earth's surface, composed of six major and numerous smaller plates. The largest among them is wearing sums up the entire Pacific Ocean; the smallest disk includes just the territory of Turkey (Beatty and Chaikin, p. 116). The boundaries of the plates are not always identical with the boundaries of continents. A plate may be partly continental, partly oceanic be. Others are only continental or oceanic only. However, what moves the plates? Temperature variation, in the Earth's obviously compensating currents, in the viscous material of the asthenosphere, caused which the lithospheric plates move very slowly and follow suit. The lithospheric plates move by the currents in the asthenosphere as it were, around the globe, which is known as continental drift. Much the same happens when you are bigger and smaller Styrofoam plates in the middle of a vessel with almost boiling water. Among the larger Styrofoam, plates then it comes to heat buildup, because they isolate the water to the air well. The warmer water gives way to one side. The result is a lateral flow balance among the larger Styrofoam ...