Introductory and general sources.
I try to explain this subject as accurately as I can, as simply as I can, taking you as deep as you care to go.
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.
The Earth's crust is exceptionally important, and not just because we live on it.
The lithosphere is the brittle outer layer of the solid Earth. The plates of plate tectonics are segments of the lithosphere.
Even geologists are prone to these misbeliefs: plate rigidity, ridge compression, ridge fixity, forcible subduction, and mantle convection.
We can tell from several different lines of evidence that the lithospheric plates move.
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.
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 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.
Here's where to watch plate tectonics in action through the geologic past: on Chris Scotese's scientifically accurate maps.
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.
The Geological Society of London hosts a set of pages on topics related to plate tectonics and structural geology.
