What is the role of the plates?

What is the role of the plates?

The Earth’s outermost rigid shell is broken into a series of plates. These tectonic plates drift around—moving continents, causing earthquakes and volcanoes, and determining the composition of the air we breathe. The plates are a series of large blocks of rocks that make the Earth’s surface appear like a puzzle.

What effect do plates have?

Plate motions cause mountains to rise where plates push together, or converge, and continents to fracture and oceans to form where plates pull apart, or diverge. The continents are embedded in the plates and drift passively with them, which over millions of years results in significant changes in Earth’s geography.

What is the role of plate tectonics in the creation of landforms?

Volcanoes and ridges are landforms that are created by the movement of tectonic plates. Some volcanoes are formed when the plates pull apart under the ocean. Other volcanoes are created when a tectonic plate slides under another. As the bottom plate is heated up by the Earth’s hot mantle, a material called magma forms.

What is the cause and effect of plate movement?

The force that causes most of the plate movement is thermal convection, where heat from the Earth’s interior causes currents of hot rising magma and cooler sinking magma to flow, moving the plates of the crust along with them.

What happens when the plates of the earth move?

When the plates move they collide or spread apart allowing the very hot molten material called lava to escape from the mantle. When collisions occur they produce mountains, deep underwater valleys called trenches, and volcanoes. The Earth is producing “new” crust where two plates are diverging or spreading apart.

What force is responsible for the movement of plates?

gravity
Heat and gravity are fundamental to the process Lithospheric plates are part of a planetary scale thermal convection system. The energy source for plate tectonics is Earth’s internal heat while the forces moving the plates are the “ridge push” and “slab pull” gravity forces.