Plate Tectonics

What is the structure of the Earth?

The Earth is made up of 3 main layers:

Core
Mantle
Crust

What is the crust?

This is where we live!

The Earths crust is made of:

Continental Crust
o Thick (10-70km)
o Buoyant (less dense than oceanic crust)
o Mostly old
Oceanic Crust
o Thin (7 Km)
o Dense (sinks under continental crust)
o Young
What is Plate Tectonics?

Continental Drift
Alfred Wegener in the early 1900s proposed the hypothesis that continents were
once joined together in a single large land mass he called Pangea (meaning all
land in Greek) (continents fit together like a puzzle)
He proposed that Pangea had split apart and the continents had moved gradually
to their present positions
Fossils of plants and animals of the same species found on different continents.
Rock sequences in South America, Africa, India, Antarctica, and Australia show
remarkable similarities.
Wegener showed that the same three layers occur at each of these places.

Henry Hess

In the 1960s, a scientist named Henry Hess made a discovery that would vindicate
Wegner.
Using new technology, radar, he discovered that the seafloor has both trenches and midocean ridges.
Henry Hess proposed the sea-floor spreading theory.

Convection is the mechanism for currents.

12 plates total
Either collide or move apart
Scrape across each other

What is a divergent boundary?

Spreading ridges
As plates move apart new material is erupted to fill the gap
Ridges are made underneath oceans in divergent boundaries
Iceland is an example of a divergent boundary (rifts are made)

What are convergent boundaries?

Plates that are coming at each other

There are three styles of convergent plate boundaries
Continent-continent Collison
Continent- oceanic crust collision
Ocean- ocean collision

Ex. Himalayas

Called subduction in which continent oceanic crust collide

Ocean- Ocean collision

When two oceanic plates collide, one runs over the other which causes it to sink into the
mantle forming a subduction zone.
The subduction plate is bent downward to form a very deep depression in the ocean floor
called a trench
The worlds deepest parts of the ocean are found along trenches
Ex. The Mariana Trench

Transform boundaries

Where plates slide past each other

Earthquakes are the #1 caused