Pacific Plate Being Torn Apart From Japan To New Zealand, Finds Study
NDTV
The latest research has identified new points at which the Pacific plate is being pulled down into the mantle.
Earth's rigid outer shell is divided into a dozen large tectonic plates, and a major one - the Pacific plate - is being pulled apart. The discovery has been made by researchers from University of Toronto and is shedding new light on the century-old model of plate tectonics. The team found that the Pacific plate is scored by large undersea faults that are pulling it apart. The research has been published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters and talks about the enormous forces that are tugging away the plates.
The undersea faults are hundreds of kilometres long and thousands of metres deep.
"We knew that geological deformations like faults happen on the continental plate interiors far from plate boundaries. But we didn't know the same thing was happening to ocean plates," Erkan Gun, a post-doctoral researcher in the department of Earth Sciences in the Faculty of Arts & Sciences, told phys.org.
