Slab Suction
Slab suction is one of the four main forces that drive plate tectonics. It creates a force that pulls down plates as they are subducting and speeds up their movement, creating larger amounts of displacement. It is because of these forces, slab pull, ridge push, mantle convection, and slab suction that the earth's crust is able to move and orient itself in various arrangements. This is how throughout the earth's history there has been the ability to create super continents where all of the land mass has converged into one (for example, Pangaea). Slab suction occurs when a subducting Subduction is a geological process in which the oceanic lithosphere is recycled into the Earth's mantle at convergent boundaries. Where the oceanic lithosphere of a tectonic plate converges with the less dense lithosphere of a second plate, the ... slab drives flow in the lower mantle by exerting additional force down in the direction of the mantle's convection currents. This flow then exerts she ...
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Plate Tectonics
Plate tectonics (from the la, label= Late Latin, tectonicus, from the grc, τεκτονικός, lit=pertaining to building) is the generally accepted scientific theory that considers the Earth's lithosphere to comprise a number of large tectonic plates which have been slowly moving since about 3.4 billion years ago. The model builds on the concept of '' continental drift'', an idea developed during the first decades of the 20th century. Plate tectonics came to be generally accepted by geoscientists after seafloor spreading was validated in the mid to late 1960s. Earth's lithosphere, which is the rigid outermost shell of the planet (the crust and upper mantle), is broken into seven or eight major plates (depending on how they are defined) and