Force for the Plate Movement

The story of how plates move begins with a puzzle. When Wegener proposed continental drift, nearly everyone assumed the Earth was a solid, motionless body. That view has been completely overturned. Sea floor spreading and plate tectonics have shown that both the surface and the interior of the Earth are dynamic, not static. The movement of plates is now an accepted fact, but the deeper question is what drives them.

The answer lies in the rock beneath the rigid plates. This mobile rock is believed to move in a circular manner. Heated material rises toward the surface, spreads out, begins to cool, and then sinks back down into the depths. This cycle repeats endlessly, and scientists call it a convection cell or convective flow. Think of a pot of boiling water: hot water rises, cools at the top, and sinks again — the same looping motion happens inside the Earth, only far more slowly and on a massive scale. …