Earth's lithosphere

Earth's lithosphere includes the crust and the uppermost mantle, which constitute the hard and rigid outer layer of the Earth. The
lithosphere

is

subdivided

into tectonic

plates.

The

uppermost

part

of

the

lithosphere

that

chemically

reacts

to

the atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere through the soil forming process is called the pedosphere. The lithosphere is underlain by
the asthenosphere which is the weaker, hotter, and deeper part of the upper mantle. The boundary between the lithosphere and the
underlying asthenosphere is known as the Lithosphere-Asthenosphere boundary and is defined by a difference in response to stress:
the lithosphere remains rigid for very long periods of geologic time in which it deforms elastically and through brittle failure, while the
asthenosphere deforms viscously and accommodates strain through plastic deformation. The study of past and current formations of
landscapes is calledgeomorphology.

History
The concept of the lithosphere as Earths strong outer layer was described by A.E.H. Love in his 1911 monograph "Some problems of
Geodynamics" and further developed byJoseph Barrell, who wrote a series of papers about the concept and introduced the term
"lithosphere".[2][3][4][5] The concept was based on the presence of significant gravity anomalies over continental crust, from which he
inferred that there must exist a strong upper layer (which he called the lithosphere) above a weaker layer which could flow (which he
called the asthenosphere). These ideas were expanded by Reginald Aldworth Daly in 1940 with his seminal work "Strength and
Structure of the Earth"[6] and have been broadly accepted by geologists and geophysicists. Although these ideas about lithosphere and
asthenosphere were developed long before plate tectonic theory was articulated in the 1960s, the concepts that a strong lithosphere
exists and that this rests on a weak asthenosphere are essential to that theory.