Plate Tectonics
"The earth spread before me like the cloths of heaven and I dream in geological
time. I see a single, great land mass on the planet, a flat, bland, featureless
desert. The globe of the earth is transparent. through seas that shine like
clear blue ice, I see the huge plates the landmass rides upon, and below
even that, the molten red rock that floats them. As I watch, the plates break
apart and come together again. sometimes there is one great continent, sometimes
many small ones. Sometimes most of the land lies beneath the sea. Huge mountain
ranges rise where plates fold into one another; volcanic chains spill out
of the sea where the plates pull apart. Heaving waves of land flow like water
in a great, monstrous dance, each figure taking millions of years."
The Secret Under My Skin, p.149.
The continents of the earth are always rearranging themselves. This happens
in geological time, over hundreds of thousands of years, so people hardly
notice. Earthquakes are one indication that the plates of the earth are moving
which we do notice. To learn more about how this happens, you can visit the
US Geological Survey's
Plate Tectonics Home Page
.
To understand how the continents have moved from 620 million
years ago to the present visit the
PALEOMAP Project's Earth
History Page
.
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