Plate Tectonics

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II.

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The crust
a. Where we live
b. Made up of
i. Continental crust
1. Thick (10-70 km)
2. Buoyant (less dense than oceanic crust)
3. Mostly old
ii. Oceanic crust
1. Thin (~7 km)
2. Dense (sinks under continental crust)
3. Young
Continental drift
a. 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)
b. He proposed that Pangea had split apart and the
continents had moved gradually to their present
positions a process that became known as the
continental drift
c. Evidence for continental drift
i. Continents fit together like a puzzle
1. Ex: The Atlantic coastlines of Africa
ii. Fossils of plants and animals of the same
species found on different continents
d. Rock sequences (meaning he looked at the order
of rock layers) in South America, Africa,
Antarctica, and Australia
Types of plate boundaries
a. Divergent
i. Spreading ridges
a. Ex: mid-Atlantic ridge

2. As plates move apart, new material is

erupted to fill the gap
a. Ex: Iceland
i. Iceland has a divergent plate
boundary running through its
middle
1. Called a rift when occurs
on land and a ridge when
it occurs in water
b. Convergent
i. There are three styles of convergent
boundaries
1. Continent-continent collision
a. Forms mountains
b. Ex: European Alps, Himalayas
2. Continent-oceanic crust collision
a.Called subduction
i. Oceanic lithosphere subducts
underneath the continental
lithosphere
ii. Oceanic lithosphere heats and
dehydrates as it subdues
iii. The melt rises forming
volcanism
1. Ex: The Andes
3. Ocean-ocean collision
a. When two oceanic plates collide,
one runs over the other which
cause it to sink into the mantle
forming a subduction zone
b. The subducting plate is bent
downward to form a very deep
depression in the ocean

i. Ex: marinas trench

c. Transform
i. Where plates slide past each other
1. Ex: San Andreas Fault
ii.
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