EARTHQUAKES
SCI/245
Introduction
In my opinion, to really know how earthquakes happen you need to have a general and basic understanding of plate margins and how the crust of the earth is formed. The Earth consists of different layers of rock and minerals. Basically you have a layer of crust called the lithosphere which floats on top of magma called the asthenosphere. And because the asthenosphere is always moving, it constantly moves the lithosphere around which is caused by the lithosphere to break up into large and small pieces called plates. The interaction and movement of these plates is what I will be focusing on in this paper.
Plate tectonics
The first thing that I would like to discuss is the interaction between the plates when they come into contact. The way that the plates react to each other when they come into contact depends on how the plates react from plate to plate and are classified into several groups called margins and faults. The first group I would like to talk about is convergent margins. According to Chapter 4 of Murke, Skinner & Mackenzie, "Convergent margins occur where two plates move toward each other" (Murke, Skinner, & Mackenzie, 2008). Depending on if these plates are continental plates or oceanic plates or if it's both different results can happen when the plates interact. When two continental plates converge you will most likely end up with a very huge lowering and rising of the landscape called a collision zone. One example of this would be the Himalayan Mountains. Another form is when one or more of the plates are oceanic. Most of the time, one of the plates will slip underneath the other creating a subduction zone. Our reading describes a subdeuction zone as, "marked by very deep oceanic trenches-the deepest points in the ocean-and, on the surface, by lines of volcanoes formed as a result of melting in the mantle, generated by water released from the subducting plate"...