Essay On Plate Tectonics

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Approximately 90% of Earth’s volcanic activity caused by the Earth’s plate tectonic processes. Frisch et al. (2011) defines plate tectonics as a theory formed in 1970s that explains the process of how the multiple rigid lithospheric plates on the Earth’s crust move across the molten, ductile asthenosphere. As the plates move due to convection currents, they can then form geological features such as volcanoes, mountain belts, etc. and can trigger natural disasters such as volcanism, earthquakes, etc. There are 3 focal plate boundaries formed by plate tectonics, convergent, divergent and transform. Volcanism tends to occur along convergent boundaries where it is a succession of volcanoes in an arc or underwater along the divergent plate boundary. There is also a special case were volcanism can occur intraplate where a continental mass moves over a ‘hotspot’ in the mantle. When volcanism occurs, it can have many effects on the evolution of the…show more content…
As stated by Lécuyer (2001), this type of volcanism occurs due to the hot plumes in the mantle caused by the upsurge of magma towards the surface of the plate. As lithospheric plates are constantly moving due to convection currents, sometimes move over hotspots to form a chain of volcanic island arcs. An example of an intraplate volcano would be the Hawaiian volcanoes. The volcanoes located on the northwest end of the Hawaiian chain are older and extinct. This is where the plate had first moved across the hotspot. As shown in Figure 3, the more you move down the volcanic chain, the younger and more active the volcanoes become, showing us that the plate has moved across the hotspot in a line, providing evidence of the plate tectonic theory. The volcanic activity generated here are less violent, effusive and look like ‘lava geysers’ where magma shoots up into the

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