What is a plate tectonics kid definition?
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What is a plate tectonics kid definition?
The definition of tectonic plates for kids involves thinking of the Earth’s crust as large slabs that move over a liquid mantle. Mountains form and earthquakes shake at tectonic plate boundaries, where new landforms rise and fall.
What is plate tectonic in your own words?
Plate tectonics is the theory that Earth’s outer shell is divided into large slabs of solid rock, called “plates,” that glide over Earth’s mantle, the rocky inner layer above Earth’s core.
How do plate tectonics move?
Plates at our planet’s surface move because of the intense heat in the Earth’s core that causes molten rock in the mantle layer to move. It moves in a pattern called a convection cell that forms when warm material rises, cools, and eventually sink down. As the cooled material sinks down, it is warmed and rises again.
How do plate tectonics affect the earth?
Plate motions cause mountains to rise where plates push together, or converge, and continents to fracture and oceans to form where plates pull apart, or diverge. The continents are embedded in the plates and drift passively with them, which over millions of years results in significant changes in Earth’s geography.
Why do plate tectonics move?
The plates can be thought of like pieces of a cracked shell that rest on the hot, molten rock of Earth’s mantle and fit snugly against one another. The heat from radioactive processes within the planet’s interior causes the plates to move, sometimes toward and sometimes away from each other.
Why are there plate tectonics?
Without plate tectonics our planet would be a very different place. The constant recycling of the Earth’s crust provides us with a stable climate, mineral and oil deposits and oceans with a life-sustaining balance of chemicals. It even gives evolution a kick every few hundred million years.
Why do tectonic plates move?
How are plate tectonics formed?
Starting roughly 4 billion years ago, cooler parts of Earth’s crust were pulled downwards into the warmer upper mantle, damaging and weakening the surrounding crust. The process happened again and again, the authors say, until the weak areas formed plate boundaries.
