Professional Documents
Culture Documents
• Insides
• Plate Tectonics
• How the Philippines
Came to Be
Parts
The Earth’s Surface
Geologic histories of
regions in separate
continents best explained
by their being once
adjacent to each other
Continental
Drift
• Theory was initially
dismissed due to the
lack of a mechanism
to cause massive
continents to move
Plate Tectonics: Main premises
• Earth’s crust made up of plates (~20)
– Two kinds: oceanic plates (denser and thinner),
continental plates
• Plates move as if on a conveyor belt (the mantle),
– Speed: 10 cm/yr (10,000 kms in 100 million years)
• Mantle flows like a viscous liquid
– Energy comes from radioactive decay
– Unequal heating leads to convection currents
– Plates float on and move with flowing mantle
• Many geologic processes take place near plate
edges
– Volcanoes, sea-floor spreading, earthquakes, mountain
ranges
Mechanism for Continental Drift:
Convection Currents in the Mantle
• Parts of the Mantle
are hotter than
others
• Hot spots expand
decrease density
become buoyant
rise like a
O T
H balloon
• Adjacent areas
move in to fill
COOL
Types of Plate
Boundaries
Divergent: Ocean
ridges; creates
new crustal Conservative: Near faults;
material translational, no loss nor
creation of crustal material
Volcanoes
• Form along a line (arc) near
subduction zones
• Water in subducted oceanic
plate helps form magma
• Associated with trenches,
deepest parts of the ocean
• May also form over hot spots in the mantle, or where two
oceanic plates converge
Sea Floor Spreading