Plate Tectonics : -

Theory of global tectonics (geologic structural

deformations) that serves as a general framework for
understanding the structure, history, and dynamics of the
earth’s crust. The theory is based on the observation that the
earth’s crust is formed by 13 semirigid plates. The
boundaries of these plates are zones of tectonic activity,
where earthquakes and volcanic eruptions tend to occur.

Background : -
The plate-tectonics revolution in geologic thought
occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, but the roots of the theory
were established by earlier observation and deduction. In
one such discovery, James Hall, a New York geologist,
observed that sediments accumulated in mountain belts are
at least ten times thicker than those in continental interiors.
This planted the seed for the later geosynclinal theory (see
Geosyncline) that continental crust grows by progressive
additions that originate as ancient and folded geosynclines
hardened and consolidated into plates. This theory was well
established by the 20th century. Another 19th-century
discovery was a mid-ocean ridge in the Atlantic; by the
1920s scientists had concluded that this ridge was
continuous almost all the way around the world.
In the period 1908 to 1917, theories of continental
drift were proposed by the German geologist Alfred
Wegener and others, who recognized that continental plates
rupture, drift apart, and eventually collide with each other.
Such collisions crumple geosynclinal sediments, creating
future mountain belts. Geophysical work on the earth’s
density and observations by petrologists (scientists who
study the origin of rocks) had previously shown that the
earth’s crust consists of two quite different materials: sima,
a silicon-magnesium rock, (typically basalt), characteristic of
oceanic crust; and sial, a silicon-aluminum rock, (typically
granitic), characteristic of continental crust. Wegener
thought that the sialic continental plates sail across the
simatic ocean crust like icebergs in the ocean. This reasoning
was false because the melting point of sima is higher than
that of sial. Geologists subsequently discovered the so-called
asthenosphere, a layer of relatively low strength in the
earth’s mantle (the thick layer of solid material between the
earth’s crust and core) that underlies the crust at depths of
50 to 150 km (30 to 80 mi). First deduced hypothetically, it
was later seismically demonstrated to be a low-velocity,
plastic material capable of flowage (see Earth).
One of Wegener’s strongest arguments for continental
drift was the geometric matching of continental margins,
which he postulated had rifted apart. To support his theory,
he pointed out that rock formations on opposite sides of the
Atlantic—in Brazil and West Africa—match in age, type,
and structure. Furthermore, they often contain fossils of
terrestrial creatures that could not have swum from one
continent to the other. These paleontological arguments
were among the most persuasive to many specialists, but
they did not impress others (mostly geophysicists).
Wegener’s best examples of rifted continental borders
were along the two sides of the Atlantic Ocean. British
geophysicist Sir Edward Crisp Bullard tested their precise
fitting by computer-based analyses and presented his results
to the Royal Society of London: The fit was perfect. Along
many other ocean margins, however, no such match is
found—for example, along the entire circum-Pacific belt or
along the Myanmar-Indonesian sector of the Indian Ocean.
This discrepancy points out a characteristic of continental
margins that had been noted by a famous Viennese
geologist, Eduard Suess, in the 1880s. He recognized an
“Atlantic type” of margin, identified by abrupt truncation
of former mountain belts and rifting structures, and a
“Pacific type,” marked by parallel cordillera-type
mountains, lines of volcanoes, and frequent earthquakes. To
many geologists, the Pacific-type coasts appeared to be
located where geosynclines are in the process of becoming
crumpled and uplifted to create mountains.

Seafloor Spreading : -
In the 1920s, the study of seafloors was advanced
when sonar, an echo-measuring device, was modified to
measure ocean depths. With sonar, submarine topography
could be surveyed and regions of the seafloor mapped. Next,
geophysicists adapted the airborne magnetometer (an
instrument that detects metals and measures magnetic
fields) so that it would record variations in geomagnetic
intensity and orientation. Passes with shipborne
magnometers across the mid-ocean ridges showed that the
rocks on one side of the ridge produced a mirror-image
geomagnetic pattern of the rocks on the other. Age dating of
the basaltic crustal rocks of the seafloor showed that those
nearest the ridge were distinctly younger (relatively recent,
in fact) than those farther away (see Dating Methods). In
addition, no blanket of marine sediment was found at the
ridge crest, but it appeared on either side and also grew
older and thicker with increasing distance from the ridge.
These observations, added to those of the high heat flow, led
to the conviction that the ridge is where new ocean crust is
being created; it is carried up by convection currents as hot
lava, but is rapidly cooled and consolidated on contact with
the cold deep-ocean water. To make room for this continual
addition of new crust, the plates on either side of the ridge
must constantly move apart. In the North Atlantic, the rate
of movement is only about 1 cm (about 0.4 in) per year,
while in the Pacific it amounts to more than 4 cm (almost 2
in) annually. It is these relatively slow rates of movement,
driven by thermal convection currents originating deep in
the earth’s mantle, that have, over the course of millions of
years, been driving continental drift.
Detailed mapping of the ocean floor was collated in
the 1960s and incorporated into maps in which the
submarine landforms were artistically rendered by scientists
at Columbia University’s Lamont Geological Observatory.
They noticed that the crest of the midocean ridge is in the
form of a rift, or cleft, a few kilometers across, that
coincides with the ridge center. They also found that in the
Red Sea the rift enters the African continent to become an
integral part of the famous Great Rift, which runs from the
Jordan Valley and Dead Sea through the Red Sea to
Ethiopia and East Africa. Evidently, the rift marks a split
in the continental crust, as well as that of the ocean.
The new maps of the ocean floor also revealed, for the
first time, that the crest of the mid-ocean ridge is extensively
offset by deep cracks, which have been called fracture zones
(see Ocean and Oceanography: Ocean Basin Structure).
These cracks mark the course of transform (“strike-slip”)
faults that have developed to accommodate strain generated
by uneven rates of seafloor spreading. Although most of
these faults are hidden below the ocean, one of them, the
quake-prone San Andreas Fault, emerges from the Pacific
near San Francisco and crosses hundreds of miles of land.
In 1995 scientists at the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released the first
detailed map of the entire ocean floor, which they had
created from data gathered by the Geosat satellite in 1985
and 1986. This map reveals world-wide patterns of ridges
and faults from which the rate of seafloor spreading is
calculated in different areas. It also shows unexpected
patterns of undersea volcanoes not completely explained by
current plate tectonics.
Volcanic Arcs and Subduction : -
Dynamic problems unique to Pacific-type coasts were
recognized as early as the 1930s by American seismologists.
The seismologists showed that earthquakes associated with
these belts are at shallow depths near the outer (ocean) side
of volcanic island arcs, but that the depth of seismic shocks
increases until it reaches a maximum depth of about 700 km
(about 430 mi) at a distance of 700 km landward from the
front of the arc. By close analysis of a single instance, the
American seismologist Hugo Benioff concluded that this
geometry represented a fault plane extending through the
crust into the upper mantle and inclined downward, toward
land, at an angle of about 45°. A similar underthrusting, of
the Southern Alps beneath the Northern Alps, had been
proposed in 1906. In the 1950s it was theorized that one
part of the crust was sliding under the other along this fault
plane. The process of one part of the crust sliding under
another was named subduction. The existence of similar
subduction zones has now been demonstrated along almost
all Pacific-type coasts. (Those where the zone is absent
possess geologic evidence to show that a zone of this type
formerly existed, but that it is simply inactive today.) Most
of these belts have a major fault system parallel to the
general mountain system. At long intervals, the movement
on the fault changes from gradual to abrupt, and a shift of
about 1 to 5 m (about 3 to 15 ft) may be produced by just a
single earthquake. Such faults are found in Chile, Alaska,
Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, New Zealand, and
Sumatra.
However, some subduction zones produce relatively
few and relatively minor earthquakes. In 1995 geophysicists
and geologists from the United States and Chile proposed a
theory that explains the difference between the two types of
subduction zones. The scientists theorize the earthquake-
prone subduction zones form when two plates moving in
opposite directions come together. One plate slips beneath
the other at a shallow angle, rubbing against a large area of
the bottom of the other plate as it does. Quieter zones may
form when two plates that are moving in the same general
direction come together. In this case, the edge of the lower
plate slips beneath the edge of the other plate at a steep
angle, minimizing contact between the plates.
During subduction, ocean crust is constantly being
drawn down into the mantle and melted. Because it is
continually recycled, no part of the modern ocean crust is
more than 200 million years old.
An important effect of the melting of subducted ocean
crust is the production of new magma. When subducted
ocean crust melts, the magma that forms rises upward from
the plane of subduction, deep within the mantle, to erupt on
the earth’s surface. Eruption of magma melted by
subduction has created long, arc-shaped chains of volcanic
islands, such as Japan, the Philippines, and the Aleutians.
Where an oceanic tectonic plate is subducted beneath
continental crust, the magma produced by subductive
melting erupts from volcanoes situated among long, linear
mountain chains, such as the Cordillera, up to 100 km
inland from the zone of subduction. (The zone itself is
located along a submarine trench offshore of the continent.)
In addition to creating and feeding continental volcanoes,
melting of subducted ocean crust is responsible for the
formation of certain kinds of ore deposits of metallic
minerals.

Integrated Plate - Tectonics Theory: -

With this knowledge of seafloor spreading and
subduction zones, all that remained was for the ideas to be
melded into an integrated system of geodynamics. In the
1950s, the Canadian geophysicist J. Tuzo Wilson
demonstrated the global continuity of the subduction zones,
rather like the stitching on a baseball. The American
geologist Harry Hammond Hess argued that if the ocean
floor were rifted apart in one part of the globe, the
expansion that would result there had to be accommodated
by subduction in another part; otherwise the earth would
grow larger and larger. Xavier LePichon, a French student
of seismology at Lamont, worked out the geometry of the
plates from seismic evidence, and the American geophysicist
Robert Sinclair Dietz took Wegener’s evidence of
continental drift and reconstructed the positions of the
continents and oceanic plates in successive stages back in
time to about 200 million years ago. Since the 1960s, the
theory of plate tectonics has been debated, tested, and
expanded and has become a general framework for the
geological sciences. Even now, though, not everything about
plate tectonics is explained. Scientists do not agree on what
makes the plates of the earth’s crust move. Some think that
magma erupting from the mantle forces plates apart, but
others believe that magma plumes would not have enough
force to move the plates.