What are Plate Tectonics?
What are Plate Tectonics?
In other words, Earth's lithosphere is just an external shell of Earth which has enormous slabs floating on a fluid asthenosphere beneath that contains tectonic plates. Major ones include the Pacific Plate and the Eurasian Plate besides the much smaller Philippine plate. Minor lithospheric plates are what split the Earth. These plates constantly shift owing to convective currents within the mantle, which are circulating heat from the core of the Earth, and they drift, collide, separate, or slide past one another at the edges known as the plate margin. It is this movement, known more broadly as plate tectonics, which has made the Earth's surface dynamic: mountains with it through moving plates, and deep trenches carved into the sea and volcanoes with their eruptions, the entire scope of these has proved enormously influential, alike both to natural ecosystems and the human societies.
There are three types of plate boundaries associated with certain geological activities; divergent boundaries are those in which the plates are moving apart. They generally take the form of mid-ocean ridges or rift valleys. East African Rift is one such case of divergent boundaries. In convergent boundaries, two plates collide to give a mountain range like the Himalayas. They also give a case of subduction, where one plate is shoved below the other to provide with volcanic arcs. The third type is transform boundary: it is a type of boundary where two plates move in a horizontal direction sidelining each other. Examples include San Andreas Fault in California. Such very often leads to an earthquake. Once understanding what the tectonic plates are and how they work, it is then realized just how much the earth's surface has changed over millions of years and how that impacts on the modern ecosystems and the infrastructure of human civilization.
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