Tectonic plates are like big pieces of a jigsaw that fit together to make the Earth’s crust, together referred as the Lithosphere. The plates are around 100 km thick and consist of two main types of material: oceanic crust and continental crust.
The seven major plates are the African plate, Antarctic plate, Eurasian plate, Indo-Australian plate, North American plate, Pacific plate and South American plate.
However, there are also lots of little plates that are there to help fit the major plates together. The minor plates are the Nazca plate, the Arabian Plate, Caribbean Plate, Cocos Plate, Juan de Fuca Plate, Nazca Plate, Philippine Sea Plate, and the Scotia Plate.
If we didn’t have any tectonic plates, the Earth would be a very different place. The Tectonic plates are responsible for mountains and volcanoes. So much of the activity that pushes up new mountain ranges and creates new land from volcanic explosions would be no more.
Did you know?
- Alfred Wegner , a German scientist, is considered the father of tectonic plates.
- In some places, the plates are pulling apart, new crust is pushed up from below. These are called divergent boundaries and they create rifts or valleys,(large lakes sometimes form in rifts).
- The Red Sea formed where the African and Arabian plates pulled apart, this rift is getting larger and the Red Sea will eventually form an ocean.
- A transform boundary happens when plates slide past each other but neither collide nor rip apart, the San Andreas fault in California is a transform boundary.
Emily Henderson @ ELIS 