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Plate Tectonics

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Plate Tectonics
Plate Tectonics
Designed to meet South Carolina Department of Education 2005 Science Academic Standards

Table of Contents
 Plate Tectonics: The Beginning (slides 3 and 4)  Layers of the Earth (slides 5 and 6) Standard 8-3.1  What are Tectonic Plates- movement? (slides 7 and 8) Standard 8-3.6 Tectonic Plate boundaries (slides 9-21) 1. Convergent boundary Ocean-continent (slide 10) Continent-continent (slide 11) Oceanic-oceanic (slide 12) Volcanism (slide 13) 2. Divergent boundary Sea-floor spreading (slide 14) The Mid-Atlantic Ridge (slide 15) Sea-floor Exploration and Age Dating (slides 16-19) 3. Transform Boundary (San Andreas Fault, J. Tuzo Wilson) (slide 21)  Faults (slides 22-24) and Folds (slide 25)  Plate movement over Geologic Time (slides 26-29)  Creation and change of Landforms (slides 30-33) Standard 8-3.7 Volcanic eruptions (Mt. St. Helens) (slide 32) Mountain building events (Appalachian vs. Himalayas) (slide 33)  Tectonics and the Ocean Floor (slide 34) Standard 5-3.2 Continental margins (slide 35) Passive (slide 36) Active (slide 37)  South Carolina Standards (slides 39-40)

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Plate Tectonics: The Beginning
Background
 At the beginning of the 20th Century, scientists realized that that they could not explain many of the Earth‘s structures and processes with a single theory. Many scientific hypotheses were developed to try and support the conflicting observations. One hypotheses was continental drift, which was proposed by Alfred Wegener in a series of papers from 1910 to 1928.
 The principal thought of continental drift theory is that the continents are situated on slabs of rock, or plates, and they have drifted across the surface of the Earth over time; however, originally, they were all joined together as a huge super-continent at one time.

 In the 1960‘s, the theory of continental drift was combined with the theory of sea-floor spreading to create the theory of plate tectonics.

Alfred Lothar Wegener (1880-1930)
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