Plate Tectonic Theory: The Four Different Boundaries

The plate tectonic theory says that there are plates covering the outer layer of the Earth and that they have been moving around as time goes on. It says that the Earth was once made up of a supercontinent, called Pangea, and as time went on the plates started to shift and eventually became what they are today. Several different scientists over a course of over 20 years have used each other’s work and pushed our scientific knowledge to develop the theory and give us our four different boundaries. The four different boundaries are: the divergent boundary, the convergent boundary, the collisional boundary, and the transform boundary. These boundaries cause mountains to form, earthquake to occur, and volcanos to erupt. The divergent boundary …show more content…
In the 1930’s Holms conveyor belt theory came at a time that wasn’t very popular for continental drift theories. The scientific community was still very skeptical after shutting down Wegener’s ideas in the past and at Holm’s time just wasn’t ready to except that the land could be moved. Then during the 1960’s J. Tuzo Wilson proposed hot spots and transform boundaries at a time when we had a little bit more information and knew something was going on but it was still radical to think there could be stationary hotspots. Holms hypothesis was that the mantle would generate heat that would produce convection currents that moved the land. He had to overcome to popular belief in the scientific community that Earth was immovable. His work with the geologic time scale and his talent with radioactive dating made his evidence obtainable. While he didn’t quite have the whole thing worked out but his contribution offered a reasonable explanation to his theories. Wilson however had an explanation as to why there were volcanoes far away from plate boundaries, which was a reason the scientific community was still skeptical of the idea of plate tectonics. He suggested that the movement of a plate over a stationary hotspot in the mantle formed volcanic islands and explained the volcanoes away from boundaries . Like I said before, this idea was considered radical and initially rejected …show more content…
Tuzo Wilson, and all the ones before and in between; they were able to build on each other’s work and bring us the tectonic plate theory we know today. They have helped us to better understand our world and we don’t have to stop here. In time the plates will keep moving, technology will keep improving, and we will learn more and more about the planet and how it’s moved and maybe one day this theory will morph into a different