EESA06H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Passive Margin, Calcite, Red Sea
Document Summary
You can get earthquake activity in the middle of a plate but it is not as common; most action happens at boundaries. If we didn"t have plate tectonics, the world would be covered by water because erosion would wear everything down. In transform plate boundaries, two plates slide past one another. In divergent boundaries, magma comes up and forms new oceanic rock. The south american plate is bigger than just the continent. Some plates are almost entirely oceanic crust. Two plates come together at convergent boundaries. You cant recycle continental crust, you can only make the oceanic crust sink. Mantle plume is breaking up the crust by causing it to thin out and cracks. When blocks of crust fall down, they form faults. And ocean has a mid-oceanic ridges, and seas do not. The atlantic ocean is getting wider; keeps growing. In iceland, parts of the mid-oceanic ridge is on land right now.
