Plate Tectonics: History

Essay by ghettobox617High School, 11th gradeA+, April 2006

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The most carefully researched topic is the history of the plate tectonic revolution throughout the centuries. Plate tectonic theories have been researched since 1920 by Alfred Wegener. Alfred Wegener let out the details of how today's continents were once one large landmass that slowly drifted to today's world. Studies show that through the years, the sides of the plates are either being created or destroyed in its size and shapes. At the at hand time, the mechanism moving the plates is unknown, but is most likely applied by the transfer of heat energy or convection in the earth's mantle. Ice ages are also due to the plate tectonics. Geological forces include continental drift, volcanoes, earthquakes, mountain building, and tsunamis, which all of them start from plate tectonics.

Since the 1960s, plate tectonics has effectively explained a broad variety of current and ancient geologic observable fact and has been approved as one of the most basic theories of geosciences.

As more research was being made, the rising costs ended the effort, but in the 1980s, and agency supported other new research centers in engineering, science, and technology, and supercomputing. Plate motions explain the tectonic forces that affect the lithosphere and the earth's surface. More recent examinations suggest that bombardment may play a central role in plate tectonics.

The theory of plate tectonics is of the continental drift and seafloor spreading. In time, modernized geologists have a coherent model to understand the continents, ocean basins, mountains, and earth history. Another theory of plate tectonics is that the earth's outer shell is made up of several interdependent plates and includes principles for understanding the mechanisms that move these plates.

In later years, plate tectonics has become the unifying theory for research in all of the earth sciences. It is now...