Lately it seems like the earth is revolting against everything which is being done to it. I think most of us have heard about tectonic plates. Since we all are on them their movement affects us. Even the plates we are not on, such as the ones the oceans are on have a tremendous effect on our lives. The ocean plates can cause a tsunami when they jam together and cause volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. This has been the case since the earth was formed, but now there is a new wrinkle. The tectonic plates are moving twice as fast as they did for the last two billion years. This might not bode well for us, because it just might cause collisions between plates to happen twice as often and with twice the force. One has to wonder why this is happening. I do know nature has a way of adjusting itself and we just might be in the middle of an emergency adjustment.

This fact may also mean the San Andreas Fault will become more active and that is the fault which runs through part of California. This is the same fault which was responsible for the San Francisco earthquake in 1906. There are many volcanoes in the Pacific Rim and the question is will they become more active because of the faster moving plates. Has anyone found a reason for this speed up in the movement of the tectonic plates? There was a recent discovery and it was of a huge underground ocean which holds more water than all the oceans of the world. Scientists think this water is speeding up the plate movement. This makes one wonder, because it seems if the plates are moving faster because of all this water it must not have been there before or the plates would have moved faster in the past if this is the cause. Some might say this may not be the case, because the water might have taken billions of years to somehow erode some of the material off of the plates and it took this long for them to finally get light enough to move faster or get enough lubrication to move faster.

Here is the really strange part about all this. As the earth ages it loses heat. This is to be expected, but scientists have predicted as we lose this heat it will slow down the movement of the tectonic plates, but the opposite has happened. When scientists examined the rocks of the world they decided they had found enough evidence to show the plates had been slowing down for the last 1.2 billion years. If this is a fact, then why the sudden speed up? Could there be some external force affecting plate movement? We are constantly learning new facts about space and our environment, maybe the movement of the plates is controlled by gravity and not necessarily the gravity of earth, but the effect of gravity from the moon, sun and other planets. Could it be the moon’s tug on the earth has increased?

Since the speed has increased the latitude changes of the continents has doubled. Not only has the speed of plate movement doubled, it is still increasing. It does make one wonder where this will all end. I don’t believe we will ever be able to feel the earth moving under our feet as the song says, but the speed could increase dramatically over the next billion years or so. Not every scientist believes the plates are speeding up, there are some who think they are slowing down. It certainly makes one wonder why they don’t all agree on such a fundamental issue. Even at an increase of double the speed of plate movement we have no instruments which can detect if all the plates are moving and how fast. We can look at some points such as the fault line at the San Andreas Fault and note some movement there, but this does not mean all the plates are moving at the same speed.

All this plate movement makes me wonder about things like this. I have to wonder if some plates move faster than others, if we are correct in saying all plates move and if every moving plate is headed in the same direction. Scientists tell us these plates move in a straight line and can also spin and that they also jump due to friction and a sort of stop start motion at times due to resistance. If one wants to know how fast plates travel we are told it is similar to the speed which our finger nails grow.

I think everyone remembers the 2011 Japan tsunami. Plate tectonics were responsible for this. It was caused by the largest fault slip ever recorded. Here is what the researchers had to say about that. They went on record saying the fault zone got lubricated by a buildup of clay and this caused the plates to slip. It seems plate movement is regulated by many different forces and friction is one of the big ones. If there is less friction, the plates are free to move even if it is over or under each other. When this happens so do earthquakes.

The earth’s crust is made up of several huge plates and about twelve smaller ones. The edges of the plates are called boundaries or margins. There are huge mountain chains under the oceans which are bigger than anything on the surface and these mountains mark the tectonic plates meeting. Molten lava comes up in these areas and creates new material and this makes the seafloor spread. There are three kinds of tectonic plate boundaries and they are divergent, convergent and transform plate. The divergent is plates moving away from each other, the convergent is plates moving toward each other and the transform plate boundary is when plates slide past each other and form a new boundary.

It will be interesting to see if this same type of plate movement will exist on other worlds as we discover them. Scientists say Mars is no longer active, but they see evidence in some of the cracks on the planet’s surface it has tectonic plates. Scientists state there is no evidence to indicate the moon ever had tectonic plates.