Earth's Plate Tectonics May Eventually Stop

[Dover]

Earth's Plate Tectonics May Eventually Stop

The Pacific is the biggest ocean on Earth, but it’s getting smaller every day. Australasia and the Americas are inching closer together, and in about 350 million years the Pacific will effectively close.

That’s when plate tectonics — the process driving all that slow motion, and one that geologists have assumed to be continuous — may grind to a halt.

Plate tectonics is the movement of enormous sections of Earth’s crust—the plates. New crust forms where plates separate on the seafloor, and existing crust sinks into the mantle when a neighboring plate overrides it at what’s called a subduction zone.

Today, most subduction zones are in the Pacific, and they’ll vanish along with that ocean. Contrary to widespread opinion, others are unlikely to replace them elsewhere, say Paul G. Silver of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and Mark D. Behn of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

That would stop plate tectonics worldwide — at least for a geological while. ...>


http://www.livescience.com/environment/080815-plate-tectonics.html


super-continent Pangea (or Pangaea) formed 300 million years ago and broke up about 180 million years ago. Credit: University of Texas.

[MercutioATC]

1. 350 million years...isn't that roughly 27 years in "Young Earth" theory?

Woohoo! I can walk to Sydney in 2035!

[Mabus]

2. Or you can hang on for the ride with the rest of us

as we go surfing. Surfing USA!

The Beach Boys knew what was going on.

[lutherj]

4. . . . . I just tried to brush a bug off my screen

[glowing]

3. That's providing Bush doesn't blow it up first..

[Ediacara]

5. Oh nonsense

I'm sure the Mississippian alarmists said the same thing before Pangea formed....