tectonic plates is responsible for many different geological formations such as the Himalaya mountain range in Asia, the East African Rift, and the San Andreas Fault in California, United States.
Tectonics is the study of the plates, the forces acting on them, and their motion. NASA has a variety of tectonic data from an assortment of sources, such as synthetic aperture radar instruments and global positioning systems.
Explore Earth's tectonic plates with our interactive map. Learn about 52 major and minor plates, their movements, boundaries, and the countries they affect. Educational resource for geology students and enthusiasts.
Tectonic plates are massive slabs of Earth’s lithosphere that move slowly over the planet’s mantle, shaping the surface through their interactions. These plates, ranging from oceanic to continental, collide, slide past, or pull away from each other, driving geological processes such as earthquakes, volcanic activity, mountain formation, and seafloor spreading. The theory of plate tectonics ...
This includes the movements of the Earth’s tectonic plates that result in the creation, destruction and rearrangement of the Earth’s crust and lithosphere.
Earth’s crust, called the lithosphere, consists of 15 to 20 moving tectonic plates. The plates can be thought of like pieces of a cracked shell that rest on the hot, molten rock of Earth’s mantle and fit snugly against one another.
Learn about tectonic plates in geology. Get a tectonic plate map, learn the names of the major plates, and discover the types of boundaries.
Plate tectonics thus provides “the big picture” of geology; it explains how mountain ranges, earthquakes, volcanoes, shorelines, and other features tend to form where the moving plates interact along their boundaries.