cle called tetectonics.
Old ideas die everyone ruso embrace ting neot popular and influential geological textbooks, trenuously insisted t plate tectonics as it edition ion and seafloor spreading. And in Basin and Range, publised t even t in eigill didn’t believe in plate tectonics.
today Eart to tes (depending ony or so smaller ones, and t directionsand at different speeds. Some plates are large and comparatively inactive, otenergetic. tal relationso t sit upon te, for instance, is mucinent isassociated. It rougraces tline of tinent’s ern coast (ive, because of te boundary), butignores tern seaboard altogetead extends lantic to t do tectonically of te event is no plates.
tions bet o beinfinitely more complex tan, it turns out, taco Noraten Island, but only a corner, isEuropean. So is part of Nes beacsnearest kin tisantially American. Some of ton Range of Antarctica, it is t, may onceo tern U.S. Rocks, in s, get around.
tant turmoil keeps tes from fusing into a single immobile plate. Assumingtinue muc present, tlantic Ocean il eventually it is muc off and become a kind of Madagascar ofto Europe, squeezing terranean out ofexistence and ting up a cains of y running from Paris toCalcutta. Australia o its nort by some isto Asia. ture outcomes, but not future events. ts are inents are adrift, like leaves on a pond. to Global PositioningSystems Europe and Norting at about to long enougo San Francisco. It is only ty oflifetimes t keeps us from appreciating t a globe and inents as t one-tentof tory.
Earts in ectonics, and ery. It is not simply a matter of size or density—Venus is nearly a ts and yet ectonic activity. It is t—t is really not—t tectonics is an important part of t’s organic and er James trefil it, “It tinuousmovement of tectonic plates on t of life on eartst tectonics—ce, for instance—ant spur to t of intelligence. Otings of tinents may least some of tinction events. InNovember of 2002, tony Dickson of Cambridge