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Plate tectonics trigger Earth’s range of mountains, earthquakes and the long-lasting motion of continents, and might even have offered the best conditions for life in the worldAs far as we understand, no other bodies in the solar system display plate tectonics today. Why is our world various?
“We don’t know for sure,” Bradford Foleya geodynamicist at Penn State, informed Live Science. “I think it’s still considered one of the great unsolved problems in geophysics today.”
Earth’s lithosphere– its crust and stiff upper mantle– is divided into approximately 15 constantly-moving plates. These plates are constantly moving, clashing and pulling apart from one another. Researchers aren’t sure how the lithosphere came to be divided into plates, specific elements of Earth’s geology keep the plate tectonic engine downing along.
For a world to sustain plate tectonics, it should have a convective mantle, Foley stated. Cold, thick surface area product sinks back into the mantle at subduction zones, where one plate slips underneath another, and brand-new product rises where plates spread apart. Without the convective mantle, there would not suffice energy to move the plates.
Convection on its own isn’t sufficient to ensure that a world or moon will display plate tectonics. The lithosphere needs to be both thin adequate to get into plates in the very first location and thick enough for those plates to ultimately sink into the mantle, stated Geoffrey Collinsa geologist at Wheaton College in Massachusetts.
Related: The number of tectonic plates does Earth have?
Earth’s lithosphere is thin enough to burglarize plates and thick enough for those plates to ultimately sink into the mantle. (Image credit: Encyclopaedia Britannica/Contributor through Getty Images)
Interactions in between plate borders and liquid water may likewise contribute, stated Russell Pysklyweca geophysicist at the University of Toronto. “When we hydrate these rocks and they go down into the Earth, it actually serves to, for lack of a better explanation, lubricate the rocks a little bit more,” Pysklywec informed Live Science. “It might be that at subduction zones where the two plates are coming together, and with our liquid oceans, we’re actually adding that lubricant in that helps facilitate plate tectonics.”
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The mix of these elements might discuss why Earth is the only world understood to display plate tectonics today. In a 2022 research studyCollins and his coworkers discovered that Jupiter’s icy moon Europa had actually shown “plate-tectonic-like” activity in the past: Parts of the moon’s icy shell were gotten into plates that spread out and clashed. The warmer water underneath the ice might have buoyed those plates along, however since ice is less thick than water, the plates didn’t sink into the oceans the very same method Earth’s plates sink back into the mantle.
Europa’s plate-like habits likewise does not cover the moon’s whole surface area. “On Europa, it seems to just be patchy, like there’s a little patch happening over here, there’s a little patch happening over there, and then it doesn’t seem to be happening in between,” Collins informed Live Science. “The other patchiness is that it’s patchy in time, so it appears to turn on and off.”
Other worlds, such as Marsembrace a “stagnant lid” setup. These worlds have convective mantles, however the surface area isn’t burglarized plates. “Instead of being broken up into these separate plates that move around with that convective mantle, there’s one big plate covering the whole planet,” Foley stated. “It’s like a lid on top of its convective mantle.”
Without any other close-by worlds displaying plate tectonics to compare Earth’s system to, it’s difficult to understand specifically what triggers a world to establish plate tectonics, Foley stated. “If we had hundreds of rocky planets, and all sorts of different conditions, we could probably empirically figure out what the key factors are. But it’s hard to do with just one.”
Skyler Ware is a freelance science reporter covering chemistry, biology, paleontology and Earth science. She was a 2023 AAAS Mass Media Science and Engineering Fellow at Science News. Her work has actually likewise appeared in Science News Explores, ZME Science and Chembites, to name a few. Skyler has a Ph.D. in chemistry from Caltech.
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