Natural Events Impact on Earth Systems:
All About Plate Tectonics
By: Regina Jackson
How To Use This Book
This book is designed to be used as a study aid for reviewing class material pertaining to our class discussions on plate tectonics.
Book Characters In this book
In this book, you will see 3 coaches that ask you questions and give you pertinent information. These characters are located at the bottom of almost every page.
Each character has a unique job and will do their job when you click on that character.
When you click on the Reader, she will read the text contents of the page to you. The Reader is on every page in the book.
Navigating Through the Book
Text Help Control
The text help control is seen at the top of each page. There are four buttons on the control that manage the text reading. Hold the cursor over the button to view its function, and click on the desired button.
Response Areas
You will also notice that there is a place for you to write your responses to the prompts and questions throughout the book. Anything you type in there will be saved temporarily while you are using this book. You can click on the View My Responses button at the bottom of any page to see the work you have done today. Make sure to copy the work to a word document each day, before you leave the book.
Printing the Book
If you would like to print the book, click on the print view button on the top of any page to format the book for easy printing.
Thank you and enjoy!
TextHELP Text-to-Speech (TTS)
You may have already noticed that there is a TextHELP toolbar floating over your Book Builder story. This is a "Text-to-Speech" tool (also known as TTS). You can use TTS to have the computer read the page text aloud.
Try out the TextHELP TTS tool by having it read this page to you.
What are Plate Tectonics?
Plate Tectonics Theory
Plate tectonics is the theory that Earth's outer layer is made up of plates, which have moved throughout Earth's history. The theory explains the how and why behind mountains, volcanoes, and earthquakes. According to the theory, the earth's surface layer, or lithosphere, consists of seven large and 18 smaller plates that move and interact in various ways.
What is the driving force of plate tectonics?
in order to fully understand what drives the lithospheric plates of the Earth, we must first identify and understand the forces involved. A number of forces have been postulated since the dawn of the tectonic theory, including ridge push, slab pull, trench suction, collisional resistance, and basal drag (Forsyth et al., 1975; Richardson, 1992). In the past ten years, many scientists have begun to assume that the boundary and body forces of the plates, rather than the frictional drag produced by mantle convection, are the most dominant group of forces driving plate motions. In the following section, the basic physical properties of each of the main forces believed to be involved in the total net motion of plates will be described and defined (fig.1).
