3: Plate Tectonics
- Page ID
- 33712
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In the late 1960s and early 1970s, geoscientific consensus gelled around an intriguing idea: that many different observations about our planet could be explained with a single model of Earth dynamics. The idea of “plate tectonics” put together old ideas about continental drift (continents move around on top of the ocean floor) with new data showing seafloor spreading (seafloor is created at "cracks" in the ocean floor as the two sides separate). The new theory was a revolutionary idea that made the distribution of volcanoes, earthquakes, continents, and oceans make sense in a way that no idea had achieved before. Fifty years of additional data and testing have confirmed plate tectonics as the key idea in modern geology.