From the deepest ocean trench to the tallest

mountain, plate tectonics explains the features and

movement of Earth's surface in the present and the past.
Plate tectonics is the theory that Earth's outer shell is
divided into several plates that glide over the mantle, the
rocky inner layer above the core. The plates act like a
hard and rigid shell compared to Earth's mantle. This
strong outer layer is called the lithosphere, which is 100
km (60 miles) thick, according to Encyclopedia
Britannica. The lithosphere includes the crust and outer
part of the mantle. Below the lithosphere is the
asthenosphere, which is malleable or partially malleable,
allowing the lithosphere to move around. How it moves
around is an evolving idea.
History:-
• Developed from the 1950s through the 1970s, plate
tectonics is the modern version of continental drift, a
theory first proposed by scientist Alfred Wegener in
1912. Wegener didn't have an explanation for how
continents could move around the planet, but
researchers do now. Plate tectonics is the unifying
theory of geology, said Nicholas , a seismologist at
Columbia University.
• Before plate tectonics, people had to come up with
explanations of the geologic features in their region
that were unique to that particular region," Nicholas
said. Plate tectonics unified all these descriptions and
said that you should be able to describe all geologic
features as though driven by the relative motion of
these tectonic plates.
How many plates are there?
• There are nine major plates, according to World Atlas.
These plates are named after the landforms found on
them. The nine major plates are North American, Pacific,
Eurasian, African, Indo-Australian, Australian, Indian,
South American and Antarctic.
• The largest plate is the Pacific Plate at 39,768,522 square
miles (103,000,000 square kilometers). Most of it is
located under the ocean. It is moving northwest at a
speed of around 2.75 inches (7 cm) per year.
• There are also many smaller plates throughout the
world.
How plate tectonics works:-
• The driving force behind plate tectonics is convection in the mantle.
Hot material near the Earth's core rises, and colder mantle rock
sinks. "It's kind of like a pot boiling on a stove," Van der Elst said.
The convection drive plates tectonics through a combination of
pushing and spreading apart at mid-ocean ridges and pulling and
sinking downward at subduction zones, researchers think. Scientists
continue to study and debate the mechanisms that move the
plates.
• Mid-ocean ridges are gaps between tectonic plates that mantle the
Earth like seams on a baseball. Hot magma wells up at the ridges,
forming new ocean crust and shoving the plates apart.
At subduction zones, two tectonic plates meet and one slides
beneath the other back into the mantle, the layer underneath the
crust. The cold, sinking plate pulls the crust behind it downward.
• Many spectacular volcanoes are found along subduction zones,
such as the "Ring of Fire" that surrounds the Pacific Ocean.
Plate boundaries:-
• Subduction zones, or convergent margins, are one of the
three types of plate boundaries. The others are divergent
and transform margins.
• At a divergent margin, two plates are spreading apart, as
at seafloor-spreading ridges or continental rift zones such
as the East Africa Rift.
• Transform margins mark slip-sliding plates, such as
California's San Andreas Fault, where the North America
and Pacific plates grind past each other with a mostly
horizontal motion.
Reconstructing the past
• While the Earth is 4.54 billion years old, because oceanic crust is
constantly recycled at subduction zones, the oldest seafloor is only
about 200 million years old. The oldest ocean rocks are found in the
northwestern Pacific Ocean and the eastern Mediterranean Sea.
Fragments of continental crust are much older, with large chunks at
least 3.8 billion years found in Greenland.
• With clues left behind in rocks and fossils, geoscientists can
reconstruct the past history of Earth's continents. Most researchers
think modern plate tectonics began about 3 billion years ago, based
on ancient magmas and minerals preserved in rocks from that
period. Some believe it could have started a billion years after
Earth's birth, at around 3.5 billion years.
• We don't really know when plate tectonics as it looks today got
started, but we do know that we have continental crust that was
likely scraped off a down-going slab [a tectonic plate in a
subduction zone] that is 3.8 billion years old," Van der Elst said. "We
could guess that means plate tectonics was operating, but it might
have looked very different from today.
• As the continents jostle around the Earth, they occasionally come
together to form giant supercontinents, a single landmass. One of
the earliest big supercontinents, called Rodinia, assembled about 1
billion years ago. Its breakup is linked to a global glaciation called
Snowball Earth.

• A more recent supercontinent called Pangaea formed about 300

million years ago. Africa, South America, North America and Europe
nestled closely together, leaving a characteristic pattern of fossils
and rocks for geologists to decipher once Pangaea broke apart. The
puzzle pieces left behind by Pangaea, from fossils to the matching
shorelines along the Atlantic Ocean, provided the first hints that the
Earth's continents move.
• Plates bumping into each other can also cause mountain ranges. For
example, India and Asia came together about 55 million years ago,
which created the Himalaya Mountains, according to National
Geographic.