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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. |