Gaby Striano
705
Science
5 March, 2017 Geology There are huge slabs of rock that fit together like a puzzle underneath the surface humans walk on every day. Those rocks are called tectonic plates, and about fifty years ago, scientists came to the conclusion that they move. Tectonic plates affect the Earth’s landscape drastically. Plates can change the Earth’s landscape by creating geographical features, causing natural phenomena such as earthquakes, and causing the drifting continents. Tectonic plates are located in between the upper mantle and crust, which are layers of the Earth. “The motion of tectonic plates is the biggest force reshaping Earth’s surface” (Land, 12). Since the plates are the biggest force, the assumption that …show more content…
“ In 1912, a German scientist named Alfred Wegener came up with a radical idea: that continents move along the Earth’s surface,” (Earth’s continents, 9). This is one of the most important things to know about continental drift because it’s the theory that started it all. Wegener’s theory was originally dismissed because it seemed impossible. However, around the 1960’s scientists came back to it after they noticed a rige in the ocean that was splitting the crust. After that, scientists came up with the theory of plate tectonics. But who knew that continental drift would change so much about the Earth’s landscape. While the continents were drifting apart, “the collision of the Indian subcontinent and Asian continent created the Himalayan mountain range” (Continental Drift). The collision of the plates created one of the Earth’s biggest and most famous geographical features, meaning that the drifting continents have lots of power over the appearance of the Earth’s landscape. However, The Himalayan mountains weren’t the only thing affected by continental drift. “As these land masses separated, the Tethysse (Mediterranean Sea) grew much longer… the land masses that formed Africa, Asia, and Europe began closing in on each other” (The Mediterranean Sea: An …show more content…
They can create geographical features like volcanoes which, when they erupt, change the weather, and create new land out of ashes. They can move continents away and towards each other in a process called continental drift. They can also cause natural phenomena such as earthquakes, which can destroy things in the lithosphere and the biosphere. Plate tectonics are powerful, they are the biggest force restructuring Earth’s landscape today. In fact, they are so powerful that sometime in the future Earth might have one big landmass again, just like two-hundred fifty million years