How does movement of plates lead to the formation of folds and faults?
In: Earth Science
The earth isn’t sitting still. Inside it’s wiggly so the parts we live on can’t sit still. We live on plates. There’s land plates and ocean plates.
When land plates touch ocean plates, the heavy one goes down. Ocean plates are heavy, that can make it sink and make volcanoes like in Washington state or Japan.
When land plates are crashing together, they make big mountains, like mount Everest and the rest of Himalaya Mountains.
When land plates slide past each other, they get stuck and build up more and more energy. Then when they slip past each other they let out an earthquake, like 1906 or 1989 in San Francisco.
When land plates go apart, it stretches out. If you look at east Africa or the sea of Cortéz in between Baja California and the rest of Mexico.
When ocean plates go apart, that makes a cool long skinny mountain where lava comes up. One of those made Brazil and Africa move away but by bit until they got to where they are now.
The whole world keeps inching, sticking and earthquaking around all the time. You can’t feel it, see it or tell when there will be an earthquake. It keeps happening anyway.
Don’t worry too much. There are people watching the earthquake zones and the volcanoes. I’m places like Japan they build the houses bendy to stay up in Earthquakes. Many places where there’s a volcano, there are a lot of people paying attention to it.
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