Pangae The Evolution Of Plate Tectonics

The theory that today's continents were once part of a more complex and large super-continent, also referred to as “Pangaea”, was first introduced by Alfred Wegener. Wegener, the German meteorologist and geophysicist, formally initiated the detailed hypothesis that the once intact, large, continent had slowly drifted to their present positions. Although others brought fourth evidence, plate tectonics processes and continental drift was not of interest until the late 1950s, when scientists discovered the alignment of magnetic particles and traced them to the earth's magnetic field of that time. According to studies of paleomagnestism, once the paleomagnetic polar changes were plotted, it brought up conspiracy that all continents had shifted …show more content…
Plate Tectonics is an example that attempts to explain the beginning of patterns of deformation in the crust, continental drift, earthquakes, and mid-ocean ridges. Two major properties of plate tectonics are the lithosphere, and how it's broken into numerous segments in constant motion and evolution. The prime theory of plate tectonics, seafloor spreading, states that the new lithosphere crust is formed at ocean ridges and moves away from ridge axes with a motion like that of a conveyor belt as the newly formed lithosphere crust fills in the cracks or rifts. To assist the process of the newly-created lithosphere, oceanic plates return to the mantle at subduction zones, in which one plate bends and slides underneath the other, curving down into the mantle so the surface area of the Earth remains constant. In other words, seafloor spreading is a process that occurs at mid-ocean ridges, where new oceanic crust is formed through volcanic activity to help and explain continental drift in the theory of plate tectonics (Condie, …show more content…
Energy, in the process which is determined as heat or heat flows, is constantly flowing into and out of all objects, in this case, Earth. Heat flows simply transfer energy from a higher temperature to a lower temperature, where the movement of the heat from the interior of Earth moves to the surface. Calculated by geologists, the source of most of this heat comes from the cooling of Earth's core and the radioactive heat generation in the upper 20-40 km of the Earth's crust. Crustal rocks containing high concentrations of the naturally occurring radioactive elements, (thorium, potassium, and/or uranium), produces radioactive heat generation. Where there is high radioactivity or where the Earth's crust is thinner, heat flow is higher, such as the mid-ocean ridges. According to Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences, this thermal conductivity is determined using rock cores or cutting on a devise that measures the amount of energy the rock sample can transfer. Once the temperature is collected, the temperature gradient of Earth at the measurement site is determined (What is Heat