Questions tagged [plate-tectonics]
The theory that Earth's outer shell is divided into several plates that glide over the mantle, the rocky inner layer above the core.
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Earth's rate of thermal contraction? [duplicate]
UPDATE - Many thanks to the member who connected this question with an earlier post that I had missed: How quickly is the Earth shrinking?. I will leave mine up in case it helps someone else's search. ...
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How do geologists reject the alternate explanation of submerged land straits million years ago or a global ice age or Island hopping?
Geologists who propose Pangaea as landmass supercontinent existed millions of years ago cite the evidence of similar land dinosaurs fossils found in South America & Africa.
But this finding can be ...
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Could oil deposits form where past geochemistry favored abiotic synthesis?
Doubt about an argument against abiotic petroleum.
I have been recently reading the controversial take of abiotic produced petroleum. I have read a counterargument that since major oil sources usually ...
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Was the Barents Sea formed by Glacial Erosion or by Subduction?
Basically every map of a study of the pre-glacial Barents has it as a large plain. But two studies using maps from PRISM project that I saw of recent, where pre-glacial Pliocene Europe has a barents ...
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Orientation of big islands
Looking at a world map, I noticed that most big islands are stretched in a north-south direction: Greenland, Japan, Madagascar, Great Britain and more.
Sure it has to do with plate tectonics, but in ...
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How does slab pull work?
My understanding is rocks are very weak in tension. How can a subducting slab "pull" an entire lithospheric plate behind it?
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Accuracy of continental drift maps?
I was looking up maps of continental drift through history and I noticed something that seemed off to me. Madagascar seems like it very obviously must have separated from what is now southern ...
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Will Nanga Parbat eventually become taller than Mount Everest?
It is a well-known fact that Mount Everest, a Himalayan mountain whose summit stands at an elevation of $8,848.86 \text{ m }(29,031.7\text{ ft})$ above mean sea level, is currently the tallest ...
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Is Mt Everest the highest mountain peak we know of in earth’s history?
I’m currently reading John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World, which is discussing plate tectonics. He often gives figures for uplifts at subduction zones measured in tens of thousands of feet.
This ...
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Why hasn't all the water on earth evaporated and been frozen at the poles?
It seems like over a long enough time scale, if the surface temperature of a planet varies between perennially below freezing and occasionally above freezing, that all of the water on the planet would ...
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If the Pacific Ocean is 750 million years old, Why can't oceanic crust be older than 200 million years?
Since the first rocks of the pacific Ocean plates solidified from magma coming out of a rift 750 million years ago, shouldn't they be much older than the maximum age of oceanic crust (around 200 ...
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What determines the shape of tectonic plates?
I understand plate tectonics at approximately the level of the Wikipedia entry, but I have not idea what factors determine the particular locations of the plate boundaries.
Do we have a model for the ...
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Question regarding the breakup of India from Eastern Gondwana [closed]
I wanted to ask this question as it relates to a project I am working on. In this "timeline" when India broke away from Gondwana the Indian Plate took a small piece of land from Eastern ...
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If there was no Glaciation, what would the USA great Lakes look like?
I guess, what they looked like before Glaciation could also work as an answer.
Everything I have seen on the lakes only mention their post-glacial forms even when some of them mention that they formed ...
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What would Canada's larger lakes (Bear, Great Slave, Winnipeg, and Athabasca) look like without glaciation?
Canada's larger lakes (minus the "Great Lakes" that it shares with the USA) sit on the edge of the Canadian Shield (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TmSP02zPaI). On the other side of the ...
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