Plate tectonics is the means through which mountains are formed. The Baird Mountains in Alaska’s Kobuk Valley National Park formed when two tectonic plates along a convergent boundary collided, causing solid rock to buckle and fold.

Tectonicplates
From the deepest ocean trench to the tallest mountain, plate tectonics explains the aspects and motion of Earth's surface in the present and the past. Developed from the Fifties to the 1970s, the principle of plate tectonics is the modern replace to continental drift, a notion first proposed via scientist Alfred Wegener in 1912 which cited that Earth’s continents had "drifted" across the planet over time. Wegener didn't have a rationalization for how continents could move round the planet, but researchers do now: Plate tectonics.
Plate tectonics is the concept that Earth's outer shell is divided into giant slabs of stable rock, known as “plates,” that float over Earth's mantle, the rocky internal layer above Earth’s core. Earth’s strong outer layer, which includes the crust and the uppermost mantle, is known as the lithosphere. It is 100 km (60 miles) thick, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. Below the lithosphere is the asthenosphere — a viscous layer stored malleable by using heat deep inside the Earth. It lubricates the undersides of Earth's tectonic plates, allowing the lithosphere to go around.
Nicholas van der Elst, a seismologist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, considers plate tectonics to be the “unifying concept of geology.” "Before plate tectonics, human beings had to come up with explanations of the geologic features in their place that had been special to that particular region," said Van der Elst. "Plate tectonics unified all these descriptions and stated that you be able to describe all geologic points as though pushed with the aid of the relative action of these tectonic plates."
The driving force behind plate tectonics is convection in the mantle. Hot material near the Earth's core rises, and less warm mantle rock sinks. "It's sort of like a pot boiling on a stove," Van der Elst said.
Meanwhile, geologists think about the plates above this roiling mantle as bumper cars; they persistently collide, stick together, then rip apart. Geologists refer to the locations where segments meet and divide as plate boundaries. They're concept to wrap around the Earth like seams on a baseball.
There are three methods in which plate boundaries meet, and every one triggers a unique geological feature.
Convergent boundaries manifest where plates collide into one another. Where those plates meet, Earth's crust crumbles and buckles into mountain ranges. For example, India and Asia got here collectively about 55 million years in the past to create the Himalaya Mountains. As the mash-up continues, those mountains grow higher and higher. Geologists have located the Swiss Alps are being lifted faster than they are being decreased via erosion—and are for this reason growing each year, in accordance to a 2020 find out about in the journal Earth-Science Reviews. However, when a mountain’s mass becomes too large to withstand gravity, it will cease to grow. Erosion also hinders increase by carrying mountains down, but because mountains can grow at a fantastically speedy rate, erosion typically doesn’t win out, in accordance to the University of Hawaii’i at Manoa.
But converging plates don't constantly collide upward. Sometimes, an ocean plate (which is made of denser rock than landmasses) collides with a continental plate, in which case it "subducts" or dives below the different plate. It then descends into the Earth's mantle, the layer underneath the crust, melts in the mantle's hot magma, and is spewed out in a volcanic eruption. Many magnificent volcanoes are observed along subduction zones, such as the "Ring of Fire" that surrounds the Pacific Ocean.
When two oceanic plates converge, a deep trench forms, such as the Mariana Trench in the North Pacific Ocean which is believed to be the deepest factor on Earth. These kinds of collisions can also lead to underwater volcanoes.

HOW MANY PLATES ARE THERE?

Because Earth is spherical, its tectonic or lithospheric plates are fractured into dozens of curved sections. (Imagine it like a cracked eggshell.) Each plate levels from a few hundred to lots of kilometers in size, according to the U.S. Geological Service (USGS), and depending on its size, is categorized as "major," "minor" or "micro."
According to World Atlas, seven important plates exist: the North American, Pacific, Eurasian, African, Indo-Australian, South American and Antarctic tectonic plates. However, in accordance to a 2012 article in Nature, earthquakes over the last few many years are proof that the Indo-Australian plate has cracked over the last 10 million years, growing a separate Indian Plate and Australian Plate which will extend the variety of predominant plates to eight.

Conclusion

Plate tectonics is the grand, unifying theory of Earth sciences, combining the concepts of continental drift and sea-floor spreading into one holistic theory that explains many of the major structural features of the Earth's surface. It explains why the oceanic lithosphere is never older than about 180 Ma and why only the continents have preserved the Earth's geological record for the past 4000 Ma. It provides the framework to explain the distribution of earthquakes and volcanoes and a mechanism for the slow drift of the continents across the Earth's surface. The theory has now reached such a level of scientific acceptance that the movement of plates, both relative to one another and to the hot-spot reference frame, are being used to infer movement of the hot-spot reference frame with respect to the Earth's rotational axis.

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