Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Tectonophysics is concerned with movements in the Earth's crust and deformations over scales from meters to thousands of kilometers. [2] These govern processes on local and regional scales and at structural boundaries, such as the destruction of continental crust (e.g. gravitational instability) and oceanic crust (e.g. subduction), convection in the Earth's mantle (availability of melts), the ...
A tectonic phase or deformation phase is in structural geology and petrology a phase in which tectonic movement or metamorphism took place. Tectonic phases can be extensional or compressional in nature. When numerous subsequent compressional tectonic phases share the same geodynamic cause (usually some plate tectonic mechanism) this is called ...
The Australian plate is moving about 6.9 cm (2.7 inches) a year in a northward direction and with a small clockwise rotation. The Global Positioning System must be updated due to the movement, as some locations move faster. [13] [14] [15] Technically movement is a vector and requires to be related to something.
The early Cenozoic uplift of the Rocky Mountains of Colorado provides an example. As the uplift was occurring some 10,000 feet (3,000 m) of mostly Mesozoic sedimentary strata were removed by erosion over the core of the mountain range and spread as sand and clays across the Great Plains to the east. [ 11 ]
Extensional tectonics is associated with the stretching and thinning of the crust or the lithosphere.This type of tectonics is found at divergent plate boundaries, in continental rifts, during and after a period of continental collision caused by the lateral spreading of the thickened crust formed, at releasing bends in strike-slip faults, in back-arc basins, and on the continental end of ...
Tectonic uplift is the geologic uplift of Earth's surface that is attributed to plate tectonics. While isostatic response is important, an increase in the mean elevation of a region can only occur in response to tectonic processes of crustal thickening (such as mountain building events), changes in the density distribution of the crust and ...
A number of factors, ranging from plate tectonics to erosion and deposition (also due to human activity), can generate and affect landforms. Biological factors can also influence landforms—for example, note the role of vegetation in the development of dune systems and salt marshes, and the work of corals and algae in the formation of coral reefs.
Surface map of oceanic crust showing the generation of younger (red) crust and eventual destruction of older (blue) crust. This demonstrates the crustal spatial evolution at the Earth's surface dictated by plate tectonics. Earth's crustal evolution involves the formation, destruction and renewal of the rocky outer shell at that planet's surface.