What Cracked the Earth’s Outer Shell and Started its Plate Tectonics?

A snapshot of a model from the new work, showing the late stages of growth and coalescence of a new global fracture network. Fractures are in black / shadow, and colors show stresses (pink color denotes tensile stress, blue color denotes compressive stress). Image Credit: Tang et al, 2020.

Earth’s lithosphere is made up of seven large tectonic plates and a number of smaller ones. The theory of plate tectonics that describes how these plates move is about 50 years old. But there’s never really been an understanding of how this system developed, and how the Earth’s shell split into separate plates and started moving.

Now a group of researchers have a possible explanation.

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