Earth Science

whatchoo got so far?

Sounds silly.

Yeah -- whatcha got? Mebbe what you've come up with can be parceled out into more specific (and more numerous) chunks.

dont know much about this but i'm thinking a blown up ballon with "plates glued on to it. As you let air out the plates slide over each other.

I have the basic ones:

continental drift would not occur-- our continents would stop moving becuase the plates is the reason for their drift

earthquakes would be in different spots, volcanoes too, as they both occur along plate boundaries

the temperature would not be regulated b/c this would mess up with ccarbon cycle

and thats it!! i need so many more... ugh...

thanks in advance guys

Hmmm.... "Drift" is a description of their movement, so I think you might be being redundant here. Sort of like saying, "If continents didn't move, they wouldn't move."



Would we even have earthquakes? (I ask out of ignorance. Mebbe there would still be trembles.)



Again, I'm ignorant on this one: what do plate tectonics have to do with the carbon cycle?



You haven't said anything about the effects on biodiversity/evolution. Dadpad is from Australia. What would have been the implications for life in Australia if it hadn't been separated from the other continents?

I think we wouldn't have earthquakes at all..... we would have far fewer mountains, especially those which form as ranges. the landscape would look very different. most of our land surface would look flat and featureless. Perhaps, most of our landmass would even erode away into the seas making a water world. Volcanoes would still rupture the crust, I'd think, in many places. But the volcanoes which made the Japanese archipelagos were fed by the subduction of the oceanic plates to the east. So.... volcanoes would likely still form over hot spots like the Hawaiian chain (unless these have some tectonic nature I don't understand).

The sub-continent of India would still be part of Africa.

Oh! All of the landmass might still be one chunk of flattish, volcano-pocked earth. Or we might have flattish earth with volcanic mounts dotting the sea.

I think Earth would be a radically different place without plate tectonics. Almost anything you can name would be different.

At least one mass extinction would not have occured, and that alone would have altered biological evolution before Dinosaurs even had a chance to evolve.

Subduction of accumulated carbon materials allows them to be reinserted into the atmosphere as a gas (the carbon cycle you mentioned).

The location of our land masses would be very different. That would result in different atmospheric patterns as well as changes in the deep ocean currents (no more el nino's and no more gulf stream).

With continents in different locations, ice caps could cover huge amounts of ocean and trap much more fresh water. Ocean salinity could be higher, and rainfall could be less. Or the reverse could be the case, all depending on where the continents originally formed (and never moved).

Plate tectonics result from magma movement and from the relative distributions of light and heavy elements. If plate tectonics didn't exist, it would probably be a result of major changes in magma composition and/or relative quantities of light/heavy elements. Internal magma movement gives Earth it's magnetic poles, and they protect us from cosmic radiation.

The Himalayas would not exist, and Andes would not exist, and the Amazon would not exist. And if the Amazon didn't exist, the legends of Amazon warrior women wouldn't exist. Big changes indeed.

No Xena Warrior Princess?

Not an existence I would care to contemplate.

Thongs would be on our arses not on our feet.

Evolution and/or extinction of branches of same or similar genuses to cope with different climates. Ie Antarctic (emporer) penguins. as opposed to tropical (galapagos?) penguins.

A lot of very fertile agricultural land is volcanic soil. so- no plates, no volcanoes, no high fertility soil less able to support population explosion.

you got weather/climate and all of life
.Now the others are a bit more deductive. Where do most of our metals come from? How about silica sand? Oil? How are ores emplaced and basins made?

Gravity and magnetism, how about them?