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Plate Tectonics
Term | Definition |
---|---|
Pangaea | Name of the landmass when all of Earth's continents were connected. Broke apart 200 million years ago, creating today's continents. |
Transform Boundary | A place where two tectonics plates slide past each other in opposite directions. |
Convergent Boundary | A place where two plates move toward each other |
Divergent Boundary | A place where two plates move away from each other |
Plate Boundary | The place where two plates (pieces of Earth's crust) meet. |
Continental Drift | The hypothesis that the continents slowly move Earth's surface |
Plate Tectonics | The theory that describes how large pieces of Earth's outermost layer, called tectonic plates, move and change shape. |
Tectonic Plate | A block of lithosphere that consists of the crust and the rigid (hard), outermost part of the mantle. |
Sea-floor spreading | the process by which new oceanic lithosphere (sea floor) forms when magma rises to Earth's surface at mid-ocean ridges and solidifies, as older, existing sea floor moves away from the ridge. |
Convection | The movement of matter due to differences in density. |