how doo convection currents affect earths plates?

Answer 1

Think about the Earth's convection currents like those in a pot of boiling water... The hot material rises up in the center of the pot, then cools at the surface and is pushed to the sides by the hotter material coming up from below... Now imagine if you put a piece of paper in the middle of the pot -- it would be pushed to the side by the convection current. This is a lot like what's going on with the Earth's plates! The plates of the crust are VERY thin compared to the mantle below - about as thin as the paper is compared to the pot of water. The difference is that the Earth's convection currents are solid rock flowing plastically in the mantle -- so it moves MUCH slower than boiling water... that's why it takes millions of years for a continent to be pushed any significant distance.

I should have mentioned that convection currents only start the plates moving - the weight of the cool end of a plate pulling down into the asthenosphere is responsible for most plate motion. Still, without the convection current this would not happen at all.

Hot spots are a completely different thing from the large scale convection currents responsible for plate motion.

Answer 2

Althought the covection currents themselves do not affect the plates of the earth, they sometimes move over a hot spot in the rifts between the plates.. as the current moves past these rifts, they cause an eruption of lava which in turn will trigger either a small volcanic eruption, or an earthquake... because of the quakes, and volcanic eruptions... larger quakes and eruptions are triggered elsewhere, and therefore an indirect result of the covection is that these after effects will slowly push the plates into each other, and sometimes cause them to silghtly change directions.. but the difference is so minimal, it is hardly worth the time to measure the direction shifts, and speeds of the plates.

Answer 3

Convection currents are movements in (and of) the liquid part of our earth due to differences in temperature. The warm rises and the cool sinks. But the cool which has sank will be heated (the heater, the core, is at the bottom) and the warm, which has risen, will be cooled. And so the cycle contintues, just like in the wheel. Now imagine having pieces of pizza atop several wheels turning, each oblivious to one another. What you will get are pizzas moving apart, pizzas pies colliding with each other, others sliding past one another, and many other activities we observe with our own continental and oceanic plates.

Answer 4

Convection currents within the earth's mantle is the driving mechanism for plate tectonics

Answer 5

If they are strong enough, they can excite lava causing eruptions or earthquakes, or earthslides of course