For what reason do continents move and has this always happened? Is it true that continents move? Why do continents move using additional sources of information?

Continents are large areas of land that dominate the background of nearby archipelagos and islands. Of course it is general definition. If we consider the continents from the point of view of science, then these are not only land areas, but also the sea shelf, which is one with the mainland, but has long been hidden under water as a result of flooding. Children often have questions, for example, why do continents move? Let's see if this is actually true.

Liquid magma and solid land

To understand why continents move, you should study the structure of the planet. So what is solid land? First of all, it is part of the earth's crust. Solid land is only a thin layer of various rocks that hide hot magma underneath. The thickness of the earth's crust can vary greatly. For example, beneath the ocean, the depth of solid rock can range from 13 to 350 kilometers, and the depth of liquid magma can be almost 5,000 kilometers. The difference, of course, is significant.

Why is magma liquid? The main reason is the high temperature that is released as a result of thermonuclear reactions occurring in the core of the planet. The substance becomes very hot. In this case, the movement of magma from the center to the earth’s crust is observed, where its cooling processes take place. Convections are constantly observed in the liquid layer, which are recorded by satellite magnetometers. This phenomenon allows us to answer the question of why continents move. A brief description of such processes allows you to fully imagine the picture of what is happening.

The main reason for the movement of continents

So why do continents move? The answer to this question is quite simple. Convections occurring inside magma are chaotic. Very often, certain areas show less activity than others. It is worth noting that the rise of magma occurs under high pressure and very slowly. However, when such phenomena occur, a large number of kinetic energy. All this has a certain effect on solid land.

Magma carries out cyclic movements. It pushes fragments of the surface exactly in the direction where the impulse is present. This is why continents move. In other words, the surface displacement of solid land is associated with processes that occur inside our planet right down to its very core.

How continents move

The reason why continents move has been established for a long time. Experts note that the displacement of solid land is insignificant. Continents can move just one centimeter per year. However, the energy that is released during such processes is much more than a network of power plants is capable of producing.

It has been established that glaciers also influence the movement of continents. In some places, the ice shell of Antarctica is capable of pushing the surface of the earth's crust up to two and a half kilometers deep. As a result, the displacement of continents slows down significantly.

Have continents always moved

The movement of the earth's crust did not begin immediately, because at first our planet was a liquid molten ball. Gradually the Earth cooled, its surface became covered with a hard crust, and only after 500 million years continents were formed. The resulting land cracked under the pressure of hot magma. This is how future surface elements were formed. Those that were located higher began to form land. Due to their rather large weight, some of the plates sank deep into the planet and became oceanic. Under the influence of magma, the earth's crust moved. These processes lasted about 3 and a half billion years. The plates collided, lifted and were pushed through. As a result, oceans, seas and continents were formed, which exist on this moment.

Simple questions. A book similar to an encyclopedia Antonets Vladimir Aleksandrovich

Is it true that continents move?

As soon as relatively accurate maps of the Northern and South America, many immediately noticed the similarities coastlines New and Old World. The thought involuntarily crept in: weren’t these continents once a single whole? But it was only in the mid-19th century that scientists began searching for evidence of this by studying traces of prehistoric life.

At the beginning of the 20th century, German meteorologist, geologist and astronomer Alfred Wegener, who studied changes global climate, tried to find logic in the fact that fossil remains of tropical plants were discovered in ice-covered Greenland, and geological samples clearly confirm that in ancient times the African Sahara and South America were covered with a thick layer of ice.

In 1915, Wegener published a book in which he argued that when tropical plants grew in Greenland, it was located near the equator, and when Africa and South America were covered with ice, their place was near the Earth's South Pole. Thus, Wegener concluded that continents drift slowly, but could not explain why.

It took the scientific community approximately 40 years to accept this theory. By the 60s of the 20th century, the ocean floor was explored in great detail. It turned out that the transitional shallow zone between land and the deep ocean - the coastal shelf - ends abruptly with a downward almost vertical wall, and this wall reaches several kilometers in depth. If we draw the border of the continents precisely along the line of the shelf break, then America and Africa fit together almost perfectly. But most importantly, mid-ocean underwater ridges 1.5–2 km high were discovered, which are formed as a result of the backing of the ocean floor by rising currents of the Earth's mantle - a hot liquid substance occupying a layer from 30 to 2800 km below the surface. The convection movement of the mantle, similar to the convection movement of water in a boiling pan, becomes the engine that moves huge tectonic plates with the continents located on them. Thus was born a new science about the structure of the earth’s crust - tectonics, which substantiates the movement of continents at a speed of 1–10 cm per year. Over tens of millions of years, this amounts to thousands of kilometers separating the once united continents.

The life of the mantle is complex, and periodically, as has happened more than once in the history of the Earth, continents come closer and collide, forming mountains, for example the Urals, the Himalayas, and the Alps. If sudden changes do not occur in the future, then as a result of the convergence of the continents in 200–300 million years, a single continent Pangea Ultima (the last Pangea), almost entirely located in the Northern Hemisphere, will arise. Scientists are already predicting what animals will be like then. For example, there is an assumption, based on an analysis of the succession of species at previous stages of history, that in 150–200 million years octopuses and squids will reach land and flying fish will appear.

We live on an amazing planet, but one cannot help but be amazed by the inquisitiveness of the human mind, which, starting with the obvious coincidence of the contours of the coasts, managed to achieve a deep understanding of the structure of the entire planet.

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Continents are large areas of land that dominate the background of nearby archipelagos and islands. Of course, this is a general definition. If we consider the continents from the point of view of science, then these are not only land areas, but also the sea shelf, which is one with the mainland, but has long been hidden under water as a result of flooding. Children often have questions, for example, why do continents move? Let's see if this is actually true.

Liquid magma and solid land

Why is magma liquid? The main reason is the high temperature that is released as a result of leaks in the planet's core. The substance becomes very hot. In this case, the movement of magma from the center to the earth’s crust is observed, where its cooling processes take place. Convections are constantly observed in the liquid layer, which are recorded by satellite magnetometers. This phenomenon allows us to answer the question of why continents move. A brief description of such processes allows you to fully imagine the picture of what is happening.

The main reason for the movement of continents

So why do continents move? The answer to this question is quite simple. Convections occurring inside magma are chaotic. Very often, certain areas show less activity than others. It is worth noting that the rise of magma occurs under high pressure and very slowly. However, when such phenomena occur, a large amount of kinetic energy is released. All this has a certain effect on solid land.

How continents move

Have continents always moved

It didn’t start right away, because at first our planet was a liquid molten ball. Gradually the Earth cooled, its surface became covered with a hard crust, and only after 500 million years continents were formed. The resulting land cracked under the pressure of hot magma. This is how future surface elements were formed. Those that were located higher began to form land. Some of the plates, due to their rather large weight, sank deep into the planet and became oceanic. Under the influence of magma, the earth's crust moved. These processes lasted about 3 and a half billion years. The plates collided, lifted and were pushed through. As a result, the oceans, seas and continents that exist today were formed.

In geography, continents are large areas of land that dominate the background of neighboring islands and archipelagos. IN scientifically The continental part of the land also includes the sea...

In geography, continents are large areas of land that dominate the background of neighboring islands and archipelagos. In the scientific sense, the sea shelf, which disappeared under water due to flooding, but is a single whole with the surface part, is also classified as the continental part of the land.

Solid land - the earth's crust - is just a thin layer of solid matter resting on a huge ocean of hot magma. In many places on Earth, for example, under the ocean, the depth of the earth's crust is only 13 kilometers (and up to 350 km), while the liquid part - magma - reaches 5000 kilometers.

The reason for the liquid state of the planet's interior is the high temperature generated thermonuclear reaction in the core. Magma heated to enormous temperatures moves from the very center of the Earth to the earth's crust, where cooling processes occur. Thus, constant convection is observed in the liquid layer, recorded by satellite magnetometers.

Convection is chaotic, often more active in some areas than in others. The rise of magma, which is under enormous pressure, occurs very slowly, but with great kinetic energy, which has an impact on the surface of the planet.

Magma, performing cyclic movements, pushes individual fragments of the surface in the direction in which the impulse is directed, thus, the surface movement of the continents is associated with deep processes, right down to the core.

Continents move at a very slow speed - a few centimeters per year, but the energy released during their movement is much more powerful than all power plants or human atomic weapons.

The presence of a glacier gives the movement unique properties. The enormous weight of Antarctica's ice shell is pushing once-surface areas up to 2.5 kilometers deep. The movement also appears to be slowing down, so once “stuck” at the south pole, previously hot and tropical Antarctica will not soon lose its icy burden.

Have the continents always moved?

Since the planet was originally a molten liquid ball, the movement of the continents did not begin immediately. First, the planet cooled and became covered with a hard crust, then continents appeared.

Their origin began only 500 million years after the formation of the planet, when the solid surface layer cracked under the pressure of magma. Having split, the giant plates formed future surface elements. Those that were higher became land, and those that went deeper under the influence of weight became oceanic plates.

From the moment of the splitting of the earth's crust it is customary to count geological eras, the first of which was Archaea. For 3.5 billion years, the plates moved under the influence of magma, repeatedly colliding, pushing through or rising, forming the continents, seas and oceans that exist today.

How is the movement of continents reflected on the Earth's surface?

The most obvious example of continental movement is an earthquake. Earthquakes are formed when two plates touch each other at fault points. The prerequisites for this are always long periods of uplift of magmatic material, so today most earthquakes can be predicted by studying satellite magnetograms.

Less obvious is volcanism, which was probably the first manifestation of geological activity on the planet. The once strong earth's crust received its first impulse precisely thanks to the explosions of supervolcanoes (today they no longer exist on the planet in an active phase). The volcano is a point outlet of that very rising magma in the place of the greatest increase in pressure.

The third manifestation is the mountains - all of them were formed in the process of collisions of two plates, as a result of which one of them crawled onto the other, forming a sharp uplift of rock. Depressions manifest themselves in a similar way - the main difference is that one of the plates does not creep, but, on the contrary, falls under the other.

All existing large mountain systems, including the Himalayas, are formed precisely at the places where two plates interact. The height of these mountains is explained precisely by the high speed of movement of the Indian continental plate.

Why do continents move? Using additional sources of information, prove that the movement of continents is still happening.

Answers:

Continents drift because they rest on giant plates that form earth's crust. These plates are constantly moving, very, very slowly: they are carried along by convection currents that arise in the mantle deep below them. Over millions of years, the continents circled the entire globe, overcoming various climatic zones. Some plates, as new rocks form, grow by creeping over neighboring plates or crawling under them. These processes, along with the action of erosional forces, constantly transform the outlines of the continents. Sometimes continents collide with each other, forming giant supercontinents. Subsequently, they split, again breaking up into separate continents. On modern stage new evidence has emerged of the possible horizontal drift of continents. It is assumed that the forces that can lead them to movement lie in subcrustal currents. According to modern concept plate tectonics lithospheric plates move in a horizontal direction behind the asthenosphere for a distance of up to a thousand kilometers at a speed of up to several centimeters per year Along with horizontal important role play by the vertical movements of the lithosphere. The movements of lithospheric plates and blocks, their mechanisms and consequences are now being studied by a new branch of science - geodynamics.