Taken from a plane with a Nikon D200 camera and …
Plate Tectonics The main force that shapes our planet's surface over long amounts of time is the movement of Earth's outer layer by the process of plate tectonics. The tectonic plates comprise the bottom of the crust and the top of the Earth's mantle. Tectonic plates look like this: The San Andreas Fault bifurcates this Google Earth view of the San Francisco peninsula. It has currents and it flows just like any other liquid. Tectonic plates differ in depth but think of a massive single sheet of rock spanning millions of square miles ranging from 3 miles deep (deep ocean floor) to 15 miles deep (below sea level, on land including mountains). The Earth's plates jostle about in fits and starts that are punctuated with earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. WHAT PLATE TECTONICS LOOKS LIKE Photograph by The Akhenaten Photographer's Description: Plate Tectonics at Thingvellir in Iceland, where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates move apart. Its surface would look like that of the Moon, Mars or Mercury all of which do not have tectonic plates and a fixed crust.

The tectonic plates are floating on top of the molten rock and moving around the planet. Think of it as ice floating at the top of your soda.

Recall that both continental landmasses and the ocean floor are part of the earth’s crust, and that the crust is broken into individual pieces called tectonic plates (Fig. There are ten major plates on Earth and many more minor ones. At convergent zones, one tectonic plate is sliding underneath another one. Think of the molten rock in the asthenosphere, not as rock, but as a liquid.

Usually, one of the converging plates will move beneath the other, a process known as subduction. Picture of the Day: What Plate Tectonics Looks Like Iceland is situated on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the seam of the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates. Tectonic plates look like mountains and plains and plateaus and deserts and seacoasts and sea bottoms.
What do tectonic plates look like? How Do Plates Move? Without plate tectonics, there would be no mountains, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis or continental drift. Continents that fit together like puzzles display how far tectonic plates have moved. An easy way to define tectonic plates for kids is to think of giant slabs of land floating over the Earth's mantle. When two continental slabs collide, they buckle, and mountain ranges like the Alps or the Himalaya form.

"In the plate tectonic world, plates do evolve slow and steady until we have one of these plate tectonic catastrophes like continental collisions," he says. What Did Earth Look Like 3.2 Billion Years Ago? The new parts of the plates constitute the warm and the thin sections, while the old parts constitute the cold and dense part. When the continents and plates move it's called continental drift. 7.14). ... Just like convection cells, plates have warmer, thinner parts that are more likely to rise, and colder, denser parts that are more likely to sink.