Tectonic Plates

The Plates
Plates are large pieces of upper hundred
kilometers of Earth that move more or less ass a
single unit.
It is easier to think of plates as
rigid "rafts" floating on the mantle,
but some plates also have some
internal deformation. However, it
is clear that the most active
deformation of the plates occurs
along their boundaries, where
they interact with other plates.
Thick: usually 100-200 km
Alfred Wegener, a German meteorologist who
proposed the Continental drift hypothesis.
Wegener proposed that at one time, all the present-
day continents actually were combined into a "super-
continent" which he called Pangaea (or Pangea).
The Geomagnetic field
The "geomagnetic" field is generated by motions
of the iron in the outer core. One property of a
moving conductor is that it produces a magnetic
field.
That same magnetic field allows us to use a
compass to navigate around Earth's surface.
The compass needle is a small magnetic that
aligns itself with Earth's magnetic "flow lines" (a
magnetic field is a vector quantity, it has a
direction and magnitude).
The magnetic flow lines are shown in the cartoon
above as gray curves, with arrows indicating the
direction of "flow". Note that the orientation of the
lines varies as a function of latitude. Near the
equator, the magnetic field is nearly horizontal, near
the poles it becomes more vertical. In fact, you could
use this fact to estimate how far north or south you
are if you could measure the "inclination" of the
magnetic field with respect to Earth's surface.
Plate Boundary Types
Divergent Plate Boundaries
The mid-ocean ridges are one of the three basic
types of plate boundaries. We call them divergent
plate boundaries because the plate material on
either side of the margin is spreading apart. The
spreading is a result of forces pulling the oceanic
lithosphere on either side of the ridge in opposite
directions. The forces are produced by mantle
convection and gravity.
As the plates are pulled apart, magma is
extracted from the mantle to fill in the void. The
magma cools and records the magnetic field
characteristics. The process is slow but
relentless.
The ridges are regions of earthquake activity
Conservative (Transform) Plate
Boundaries
Transform margins are conservative in the sense
that along these margins material is translated,
not created or destroyed. Faulting along
transform margins is strike-slip. The sense of
motion along transform margins joining two
divergent margins can be tricky. Even though the
ridge segments are offset in a left-lateral sense,
because of spreading, the direction of motion
across the fault is right-lateral.
The San Andreas fault system in California is
well-studied example of a transform plate margin
and forms the boundary between the Pacific and
North American plates. As the system evolved,
part of coastal California has been "captured" by
the Pacific plate and as a result the Los Angeles
region (which is on the Pacific plate) is moving
towards the San Francisco region (which is on
the North American plate) at about four
centimeters per year.
Convergent Plate Boundaries
Convergent margins are the boundaries formed
when two plates collide and there are three
possibilities depending on whether continental or
oceanic lithosphere is involved in the process.
The cartoon below depicts the collision of oceanic
continental lithosphere.
The oldest ocean floor is about 220 Ma, much
younger than much of the continents. We know
that the oceans have been around much longer
than 200 Ma so the implication is that the entire
sea floor is recycled in a few hundred million
years. Now if the ocean floor is growing in some
places, but the overall surface are of the planet is
constant, somewhere ocean floor must be
destroyed.
The places where the destruction takes place are
called convergent plate boundaries, or subduction
zones.
The oceanic material is forced down into the
mantle because it is more dense than the
continent.
The subduction of oceanic lithosphere explains the
locations of deep earthquakes and many volcanoes.
The earthquakes are located in the down going slab
of oceanic lithosphere, which remains cool enough to
store enough strain to allow brittle failure in the rocks
at such great depths.
The largest earthquakes occur in these regions of
plate convergence, and are usually low-angle reverse
or thrust events located near the surface.
The volcanoes are a result of "hydration-induced"
melting of the material in the mantle above the
subducting material. The rocks in the oceanic crust
are formed and spend a great deal of time in an
environment rich in water. Some of that water is
incorporated into the rocks and brought down into the
mantle by subduction.
When two oceanic plates converge, one will be
thrust under the other, and the same volcanic
processes will occur. The volcanoes often form
islands such as the Mariana, Tonga, and
Kermedec Islands in the western Pacific, which
have formed as a result of the subduction of the
Pacific plate. We call such volcanic island chains
"Island Arcs" because they often aligned along an
arcuate trend.
When two continents converge, a collision zone is
formed. Neither plate can subduct in that case
(although one plate may over thrust onto the
other). The result of collisions are dramatic
mountain ranges and plateaus such as the
Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau which have
formed as a result of the collision of India and
southern Eurasia.

Volcanoes
In the map below, each triangle represents the
location of a recently active (on a geologic time
scale) volcanoes
Implications for Earthquakes
Ninety percent of all earthquakes occur along
plate margins and by far the greater amount of
energy released as seismic waves comes from
subduction zones.
The map shows the distribution of earthquakes
with magnitudes greater than 5.0 that occurred
between 1965 and 1995. The color of the symbol
identifies the hypocentral depth and continent
coastlines are shown in blue.