The venerable USGS plate-tectonic map I mentioned on Saturday is OK as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far at all. In 2006 the USGS produced a beautiful poster and website called This Dynamic Planet, and it includes a small world map that deserves wider exposure. It shows the plate boundaries, of course, but it also shows whether they're divergent, convergent, transform or diffuse—key to understanding how everything fits and interoperates.
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According to scientitsts at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, habitable worlds are most likely found on large, rocky planets that are up to ten times the size of Earth and contain plate tectonics. Plate tectonics play... Read Post
Maybe maps of plates like the one I posted about yesterday, all outlines and schematics, aren't what you want. What about a map of the geologic features themselves that stand for plate boundaries? After all, this is how geologists b... Read Post
If you want to find a plate boundary, follow the earthquakes. Plates are internally rigid and move about the Earth's surface without deforming very much, so most of the world's tectonic activity occurs at the boundaries where diff... Read Post