Science Q1 Reviewer

PLATES
What are Plates?
Plates are those rigid sections of the lithosphere that move as a unit.
What are the Types of Materials of Tectonic Plates?
Continental Crust
 Also called sial from silicon and aluminum
 Consisting primarily of granitic rocks
 Thicker crust
Oceanic Crust
 Formerly known as sima from silicon and magnesium.
 Mostly made up of basaltic rocks
 Thinner crust

Tectonic plates are sometimes subdivided into three categories:

major or primary plates, minor or secondary plates, and microplates or tertiary plates.

What are the Major Plates?

 Major plates are those types of plates that comprise the bulk of the continents and the
Pacific Ocean.
 They are major because they are the plates with an area greater than 20 million square
kilometers.

Pacific Plate
 This is the largest tectonic plate covering more than 103 million square kilometers area
and is underneath the Pacific Ocean.
African Plate
 This plate covers 61.3 million square kilometers of the African continent, some parts of
the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea.
Eurasian Plate
 This plate is covering most of the area in Europe and Russia of about 67.8 million square
kilometers.
South American Plate
 This plate covers some regions of the Atlantic Ocean and the entire South American
continent of about 43.6 million square kilometers.
Indo-Australian Plate
 This contains a huge part of the Australian continent, Indian subcontinent, and the
surrounding ocean of the Australian continents of about 58.9 million square
kilometers.
North American Plate
 This plate extends 75.9 million square kilometers from the North Pole to Siberia. This
plate covers North America, some portions of the Atlantic Ocean and the Arctic Ocean,
Greenland and the Bering Sea.
Antarctic Plate
  This covers the continents in Antarctica and the Southern Ocean of about 60.9 million
square kilometers.

What are the Minor Plates?

 Also called as secondary plates
 They are plates with an area of less than 20 million square kilometers but not greater
than 1 million square kilometers.

The Philippine Sea Plate or the Philippine Plate

 It is a 5.5 million square kilometers tectonic plate comprising of oceanic lithosphere that
lies beneath the Philippine Sea, in the eastern part of the Philippines.
Nazca Plate
 An oceanic tectonic plate located in the eastern part of the Pacific Ocean.
Caribbean Plate
 An oceanic tectonic plate underlying Central America and the Caribbean Sea.
Arabian Plate
 A 5 million square kilometers tectonic plate in the eastern and northern hemisphere
and one of the continental plates that have been moving northward in recent geological
history colliding with the Eurasian Plate.
Scotia Plate
 A 1.6 million square kilometers tectonic plate on the edge of the South Atlantic and the
Southern Ocean.
Cocos Plate
 A 2.9 million square kilometers young oceanic plate beneath the Pacific Ocean.
Juan de Fuca Plate
 It is a 250, 000 square kilometers tectonic plate generated from the Juan de Fuca Ridge
that is subducting under the northerly portion of the western side of the North
American Plate.

Diastrophism refers to all movements in the lithosphere.

Earthquake is the trembling of the Earth’s surface that occurs when the energy stored within
the earth in the form of strain in rock layers is released.
As rock layers break and move, the stored energy in the rock is released in the form of seismic
waves.
Body waves are elastic waves that propagate through the Earth’s interior.
P waves are also called primary waves because they propagate through the medium faster than
the other wave types.
S waves are also called secondary waves because they propagate through the medium slower
than p waves.
Surface waves are waves that propagate along the Earth’ surface.
Love wave, named after A. E. H. Love, a British mathematician who worked out the
mathematical model for this kind of wave in 1911.
Named after John William Strutt, Lord Rayleigh, who mathematically predicted the existence of
this kind of wave in 1885.
PLATE TECTONIC THEORY
According to this theory, the Earth has an outer shell made up of rigid pieces called tectonic
plates. These are made up of the Earth’s crust and parts of the mantle. These move about a
hot layer of rock, moving slowly at about 10 cm per year.

What are the different types of plate boundaries?

PLATE BOUNDARIES
There are three distinct types of plate boundaries which are differentiated by the type of
movement they exhibit. These are the convergent plate boundary, divergent plate boundary
and transform fault plate boundary. Studying plate boundaries is important because along
these boundaries, deformation of the lithosphere is happening. These geologic events have a
great impact not only on the environment but also on us.

CONVERGENT PLATE BOUNDARIES

 This type of plate boundary results when two tectonic plates move towards each other
and collide.
 It is also known as destructive plate boundary.
 Examples of this are in the Himalayan mountains, Japan, and Philippines.
As two plates collide, a collision zone is created and one of the leading edges of a plate
will be subducted and destroyed.

Example of Geologic Features

Subduction Zones:
 In subduction zones, an oceanic plate is forced beneath another plate (either oceanic
or continental).
 This process results in the formation of deep ocean trenches and volcanic arcs.
The Andes Mountains and the Japan Trench are examples of subduction zones.
Mountain Ranges:
 When two continental plates collide, they can create large mountain ranges.
 The Himalayas are an example of mountains formed at a convergent boundary.
 (Himalayas: Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh)

Example of Geologic Processes

Subduction:
 The subducting plate sinks into the mantle, often causing volcanic activity and seismic
events.
Continental Collision:
 When two continents collide, they crumple and form high mountain ranges.
DIVERGENT PLATE BOUNDARIES
 Locations where plates are moving away from one another.
 It is also known as constructive plate boundary.
 Molten rocks called magma rise from the Earth’s mantle to the surface.
 The Earth’s surface is cool enough to solidify the magma that rose, thus, creating new
oceanic crust or seafloor.

Example of Geologic Features

Mid-Ocean Ridges:
 These are underwater mountain ranges formed by the upwelling of magma from the
mantle.
 Formed by the divergence between oceanic plates.
Rift Valleys:
 On continents, divergent boundaries can create rift valleys.
 Formed between continental plates.
 Can also be found at the bottom of the ocean where seafloor spreading occurs.
 The East African Rift is a well-known example.

Both the formation of mid-ocean ridge and rift valley had the occurrence of an earthquake

Example of Geologic Processes

Seafloor Spreading:
 As plates move apart, new crust is formed, and the ocean floor spreads wider.
Continental Rifting:
 When divergent boundaries occur within continents, they can lead to the splitting of
continents over geological time scales.

TRANSFORM FAULT PLATE BOUNDARIES

 Transform fault plate boundary is also known as conservative margins.
 Plates slide past each other so that the relative movement is horizontal.
 In this type of plate boundary, no plate margins are being destroyed or form rather it
forms mostly the shrinking of the ground known as earthquakes.
 Rocks that line the boundary split into pieces as the plates slip at each other.
 A crack is then formed creating an undersea canyon or linear fault valley.
 San Andreas Fault is an example of this.

EARTH’S MECHANISM
 In 1912, Alfred Wegener, a German meteorologist, proposed a theory that about 200
million years ago, the continents were once one large landmass.
 He called this landmass Pangaea, a Greek word which means “All Earth.”
 This Pangaea started to break into two smaller supercontinents called the northern half
Laurasia and the southern half Gondwanaland during the Jurassic Period.
PLATE TECTONIC THEORY
The theory of plate tectonics states that the Earth’s solid outer crust, the lithosphere, is
separated into plates that move over the asthenosphere, the molten upper portion of the
mantle.

What Facilitates the Movement of Plates?

Heat is produced in the core that produces convection in the mantle. This convection causes
the plate to move around.

Four Mechanisms to Explain How Tectonic Plates Move Over the Earth's Surface
Convection Currents
 A plate may either carry a continental crust, an oceanic crust, or both.
Convection currents generated by heat from the center of the earth move these plates.
Ridge Push
 Occurs when newly formed rock at the mid ocean ridge is warmer and less dense than
the older rock, the less dense rock rests on top of the older denser rock.
Slab Pull
 The process where the denser tectonic plate will sink and subduct beneath the less
dense tectonic plate at the subduction zone while, the leading edge of the subducting
plate sinks into the mantle and pulls the rest of the plate with it.
Slab Suction
 Occurs when a small-scale convection current in the mantle wedge pushes the plate
further away from the ridge and back into the mantle.

SEAFLOOR SPREADING THEORY

Mapping the Mid- Ocean Ridge
 The mid-ocean ridge is the longest chain of mountains in the world.
 In the 1950’s scientists mapped the mid-ocean ridge using sonar
 Sonar (sound navigation and ranging) is an instrument that uses sound waves to
measure distance.
 It bounces sound waves off underwater objects and records the echoes of these sound.
 The time that it takes the echo indicates the distance of the object.
 The scientists found out that the ocean floor was not flat.
 This discovery piqued their curiosity to discover what the ridge was and how it got there.

Seafloor Spreading
 Seafloor Spreading, a theory of lithospheric evolution that holds the ocean floors are
spreading outward from vast underwater ridges.
 It is a theory that oceanic crust forms along submarine mountain zones, known
collectively as the mid-ocean ridge system, and spreads out laterally away from them.
 According to this theory, the sea floors or ocean floors are the one’s moving carrying
the continents with it just like the divergent boundaries.
 In 1960, Harry Hess studied Wegener’s theory. Hess proposed the radical idea that the
seafloor moves like a conveyor belt, which in turn moves the continent.
  This movement begins at the mid- ocean ridge which forms along a crack in the oceanic
crust.
 At the mid-ocean ridge, molten materials rise from the mantle and erupt.

Three Types of Evidence for Seafloor Spreading

Evidence from Molten materials
 In the 1960s scientists used a small submarine called Alvin to explore the ocean floor.
Alvin’s crew found rocks shaped like pillows or toothpaste squeezed from a tube
These rocks showed that molten materials had erupted many different time from
cracks along the mid- ocean ridge
Evidence from Drilling Samples
 The farther from the ridge the older the rocks
The youngest rocks were at the center of the ridge.
Evidence from Magnetic Stripes
 The Earth is like a giant magnet with a north and south pole.
 The Earth’s magnetic poles reversed themselves 78,000 years ago.
If they reversed today, the needle in a compass would point south instead of north.
 Rocks on the ocean floor are in the pattern of a magnetizes stripes.
 These stripes show when the earth reversed its magnetic field.
 Molten materials contain iron.
 As it cooled, the iron bits lined up in the direction of earth’s magnetic poles.
 When the rock hardened the iron is locked in place giving the rocks a permanent
“magnetic memory”
 Scientists recorded this “magnetic memory” on both sides of the mid-ocean ridge.
 They found stripes of when the magnetic field pointed north and parallel stripes that
pointed south.
 Rocks that hardened at the same time would have the same “magnetic memory”

Harry Hess observed that the rate of formation of new seafloor at the mid-ocean ridge is not always as
fast as the destruction of the old seafloor at the subduction zone. This explains why the Pacific Ocean is
getting smaller and why the Atlantic Ocean is getting wider. If the subduction zone is faster than the
seafloor spreading, the ocean shrinks.
The Seafloor Spreading Theory contradicts a part of the Continental Drift Theory. The Seafloor
Spreading Theory strongly supports that the actual site of plate movements would be in the mid-
oceanic ridge.

MAGNETIC REVERSAL
 The magnetic reversal, also called the "magnetic flip" of the Earth, happens when the
North Pole is transformed into the South Pole, and the South Pole becomes the North
Pole. This event happens because of the changing direction of the flow of materials in
the Earth's liquid outer core.
 Magnetic reversal happened many times in the past. The occurrence of the magnetic
reversal can be explained through the magnetic patterns in the magnetic rocks. These
magnetic patterns allow our scientists to understand the ages and rate of movement
of the materials from the mid-oceanic ridge.
 Over the last 10 million years, there had been an average of 4 to 5 reversals per million
years. New rocks are added to the ocean floor at the ridge with approximately equal
amounts on both sides of the oceanic ridge.