- The history of planet Earth is still being written. Continents are continually being shaped and reshaped by competing constructive and destructive geological processes.
What Are Some of the Impacts of Plate Tectonics on Planet Earth?
1. Plate tectonics directly impacts people in the following ways:
2. Most distributions of rocks within Earth's crust, including minerals, fossil fuels, and energy resources, are a direct result of the history of plate motions and collisions and the corresponding changes in the configurations of the continents and ocean basins.
3. Plate tectonics has directly influenced Earth's biological history. This is because organisms over the course of hundreds of millions of years must adapt to their natural environments in order to evolve as a species or they go extinct. Because plate tectonics continues to change the Earth's surface features as well as the Earth's climate; plate tectonics continues to influence Earth's biological history including the organisms that inhabit it. This will be the topic of our next unit of study.
What Would Earth Be Like Without Plate Tectonics?
We would have far fewer earthquakes and much less volcanism, fewer mountains, and probably no deep-sea trenches. Our weather would be more uniform due to the lack of significant topography and landscapes would be older due to a lack of tectonic renewal and would eventually weather away into sediments and deposited into the oceans. In other words, the Earth would be a much different place. It is fair to say that our planet is unique in several respects - it has an abundance of life, an abundance of water, and the surface is constantly renewed by plate tectonic processes.
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Topic Tips
- Earth has been constantly changing for hundreds of millions of years. The movement of Earth's crust has been creating new landforms as well as destroying others and has directly impacted Earth's biological (life) and geological (Earth) history. Earth's history is still being written by the process of plate tectonics and is expected to continue for hundreds of millions years.