Anyone who's good in geography please come in (about continental drift and tectonic movement)?

Question

Hey guys i've just started learning tectonic plates and continental drift and all those things and i really need you guys to help! Thanks so much!!

Q1. What causes the tectonic plates to move?
Q2. Explain the process of Continental Drift.
Q3. What are the implications of Continental Drift for Australia?
Q4. Include two sourced and relevant images.

Answer 1

Answers

1)The earth's crust consists of a number of moving pieces or plates, that are always colliding or pulling apart. The force that causes the movement of the tectonic plates may be the slow churning of the mantle beneath them. Mantle rock is constantly moved upwards to the surface by the high temperatures below and then sinks by cooling. This cycle takes millions of years.

2)In 1915, the German geologist and meteorologist Alfred Wegener first proposed the theory of continental drift, which states that parts of the Earth's crust slowly drift atop a liquid core. The fossil record supports and gives credence to the theories of continental drift and plate tectonics.

Wegener hypothesized that there was a gigantic supercontinent 200 million years ago, which he named Pangaea, meaning "All-earth".

Pangaea started to break up into two smaller supercontinents, called Laurasia and Gondwanaland, during the Jurassic period. By the end of the Cretaceous period, the continents were separating into land masses that look like our modern-day continents.

Wegener published this theory in his 1915 book, On the Origin of Continents and Oceans. In it he also proposed the existence of the supercontinent , and named it (Pangaea means "all the land" in Greek).

3) There is a lot of implication for this....refer this link

http://asset2.clinicdesign.com.au/mam_asset/continentaldrift?id=5301020a6470ce62000000f9e974a321&col=/client_db/MUSA&ext=jpg&type=pdf

4) http://geology.com/pangea.htm
http://worldatlas.com/aatlas/infopage/tectonic.htm

Good luck.

Answer 2

Continental drift is the movement of the Earth's continents relative to each other. The hypothesis that continents 'drift' was first put forward by Abraham Ortelius in 1596 and was fully developed by Alfred Wegener in 1912. ------------ Plate tectonics (from the Late Latin tectonicus, from the Greek: τεκτονικός "pertaining to building") (Little, Fowler & Coulson 1990) is a scientific theory which describes the large scale motions of Earth's lithosphere. The theory builds on the older concepts of continental drift, developed during the first decades of the 20th century (one of the most famous advocates was Alfred Wegener), and was accepted by the majority of the geoscientific community when the concepts of seafloor spreading were developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s. ============================== I hope this is helpful.