5: Plate Tectonics
Identify and compare common rock forming minerals, mineral structures and mineral properties.
- Describe the basic chemistry involved in mineral formation and structures.
- Identify and classify common rock forming minerals.
- Identify the most common elements in the Earth’s crust and their order of abundance.
Plate tectonics is often seen as the missing piece of the puzzle for geologists. Plate tectonics explains, either directly or indirectly, just about every topic discussed in geology. It is the glue that binds everything together.
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- 5.3: Basics of Plate Tectonics
- The theory of plate tectonics revolutionized geology in the 1960s. By 1970, college geology majors were taught a set of ideas that were unheard of by most geology students prior to 1960. The foundation for the new way of comprehending earth processes is the understanding that the outer layer of the earth is the lithosphere rather than simply the crust.
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- 5.7: Theory of Plate Tectonics
- lates of lithosphere move because of convection currents in the mantle. One type of motion is produced by seafloor spreading. Plate boundaries can be located by outlining earthquake epicenters. Plates interact at three types of plate boundaries: divergent, convergent and transform. Most of the Earth’s geologic activity takes place at plate boundaries. At a divergent boundary, volcanic activity produces a mid ocean ridge and small earthquakes.
Thumbnail: Convergent boundary . (CC BY 4.0; ).
Contributors and Attributions
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Original content from Kimberly Schulte (Columbia Basin College) and supplemented by Lumen Learning . The content on this page is copyrighted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.