Continental drift

CONTINENTAL DRIFT
Many traces of past geological events are scattered across our globe.

[edit] Continental drift
Movement of the continents into some configurations can cause or contribute to extinctions in several ways: by initiating or ending ice ages; by changing ocean and wind currents and thus altering climate; ...

Continental Drift:
Any major new idea in science appears to lead instantly to a search of the past for those who might once have proposed similar concepts and with whom the current proponents should therefore share the credit.

Continental drift is the movement of the Earth's continents. The land masses are hunks of Earth's crust that float on the molten core. The ideas of continental drift and the existence of a supercontinent ( ) were presented by Alfred Wegener in 1915.

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CONTINENTAL DRIFT
Continental drift is the movement of the Earth's continents. The land masses are hunks of Earth's crust that float on the molten core.

Continental drift - The slow movement of the continents across the Earth's surface.
Core - The center of a star or planet.
Double Star - A binary star; two or more stars orbiting each other.

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The theory encompasses the older concepts of continental drift, developed during the first decades of the 20th century by Alfred Wegener, and seafloor spreading, understood during the 1960s....

This is called continental drift colloquially, and plate tectonics (see also this summary) in technically more precise language. This is newly won knowledge.

As mentioned, Mars has no continental drift like Earth. This can be seen by the abscence of long mountain ranges on Mars.
Mars has two small satellites. Even the larger one is no more than 13 km in radius. Unlike the Moon, they are not round in shape.

This is thought to be higher than normal due to resonance frequencies in the slosh time of the current configuration of oceans (which changes with continental drift).

Continents drift laterally along the convecting system of the mantle away from hot mantle zones toward cooler ones, a process known as continental drift.

Surface activity on the Earth - that is, volcanoes, earthquakes, and the slow motions of its crust called continental drift - eventually masks even the largest impact craters over periods of millions to hundreds of millions of years.

The positions of the continents affect the amount of ice than can form, however, so continental drift can affect climate.

The theory of plate tectonics states that the lithosphere is divided into plates which interact with each other and float around the planed on the asthenosphere. This helps explain continental drift and the Ring of Fire, ...

Few underwater craters have been discovered because of the difficulty of surveying the sea floor; the rapid rate of change of the ocean bottom; and the "subduction" of the ocean floor into the Earth's interior by processes of continental drift.

Convection currents within the mantle transfer most of this heat energy from deep within the earth to the surface and are the driving force behind continental drift.

currents in the mantle provide the driving force for this motion. The plate motion is responsible for global mountain building, earthquake activity, and volcanism, all of which are most pronounced along plate boundaries ~ See Also: continental drift.

See also: Earth, Ocean, Time, Mass, Atmosphere