re: Tectonic Plate Creation

Hey for real, the East African rift is splitting Africa into two plates. Eventually the sea will encroach and separate East and West Africa with a growing ocean. There will be the East African and West African plates.

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How do we know we are looking at the same moon each night and its not a moon from another planet?

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After they are created, they move. See the US west coast which seems to be where many exotic terraines have been sutured onto North America by multiple collisions over time.

Or has this theory been abandoned?

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what types of compositions are comprised together in the creation of a tectonic plate?

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What does this even mean?

Fracking

I may be wrong, but I think I remember reading earth is the only planet we know of that has tectonic plate activity. Is that right?

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I may be wrong, but I think I remember reading earth is the only planet we know of that has tectonic plate activity. Is that right?

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So far, Earth is the only planet known to have plate tectonics, where the crust is divided into pieces (plates) which float on top of the mantle, although there is now some evidence that Jupiter’s moon Europa does as well.

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LINK

In that link they debate whether or not tectonic plates are the key to life on earth. The elephant in the room that they don't talk about in that article is earth iron core.

Earth's iron core is vital to forming the earth's magnetosphere. The magnetosphere protects the earth from solar radiation. Solar radiation would strip away all the light atmospheric gases from the planet into space and we would be left with only CO2...like Venus and Mars. The further away from the sun the planet is the less atmospheric stripping occurs. That's why planets beyond Mars are able to hold on to the lighter atmospheric gases without a strong magnetosphere. Saturn is a good example were its atmosphere is almost all hydrogen which is very light. Just the opposite for Mercury with practically no atmosphere because of it close proximity to the sun and no or very weak magnetosphere. The sun strips Mercury's atmosphere totally into space.

The earth truly has a goldilocks composition and position in our solar system for life.

You can’t unsee it…

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The earth truly has a goldilocks composition and position in our solar system for life.

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It really does boggle the mind the myriad of variables that all had to fall into place precisely as they did for life to exist on earth. Even the slightest variation would mean Earth would be just another lifeless rock silently orbiting a run-of-the-mill star in a run-of-the-mill galaxy.

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I only took one course in geology as an elective.

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I took three, it was my favorite subject.

Unfortunately to go further it involved a lot of math, and I was burned out on that.