Plate Tectonics

Presenting the basics of plate tectonics.

Thirty plates and microplates are listed in order of size.

Teachers want one right answer to this question, but there isn't one.

See if you can answer these 12 questions on plate tectonics. Caution: this has been known to stump professors.

This part of the planet is exceptionally important for plate tectonics.

What you need to know about the lithosphere.

Even geologists are prone to these misbeliefs: plate rigidity, ridge compression, ridge fixity, forcible subduction, and mantle convection.

The five ways we track the motion of the lithospheric plates.

What happens when lithospheric plates come together.

Where the lithospheric plates move apart from each other.

What happens when lithospheric plates move past each other.

What happens when a lithospheric plate must go down.

How subducting plates create most of the world's volcanoes.

Not a rock type, ophiolite is a whole assemblage of rocks representing oceanic crust.

part of a typical ophiolite.

What happens to a lithospheric plate after it has been subducted.

Waste disposal by subduction won't work.

A new theory about hotspots is based directly on plate tectonics.

Lost City, on the Atlantic seafloor, is the product of a major geochemical process.

Microscopic grains show the strain on a whole continent.

A crazy idea resurfaces to knock Earth--and geology--upside the head.

The familiar expanding-Earth animation is an optical illusion based on a conceptual illusion.

The rise and fruition of a new kind of volcano.

The U.S. Geological Survey's 1996 pamphlet on plate tectonics is widely cited, but it is no longer accurate in several respects. For the history of the theory, though, it's the best source on the Web.

A comprehensive introduction to current research on continental margins, a leading-edge problem in plate tectonics.

Charles De Mets and his team have the latest model to account for the motions of Earth's 25 largest plates.

UCSB's Tanya Atwater, a pioneer in applying plate tectonics to the continents, is also a pioneer in visualizing how the process works. Get her animations at the Educational Multimedia Visualization Center.

A paper by graduate student Arlo Weil (now teaching at Bryn Mawr) is an excellent treatment of what drives the plates.