Plate tectonics is a theory of geology developed to explain the phenomenon of continental drift and is currently the theory accepted by the vast majority of scientists working in this area.

In the theory of plate tectonics the outermost part of the Earth's interior is made up of two layers: the outer lithosphere and the inner asthenosphere.

The lithosphere essentially "floats" on the asthenosphere and is broken-up into ten major plates: African, Antarctic, Australian, Eurasian, North American, South American, Pacific, Cocos, Nazca, and the Indian plates..

For more information about the topic Plate tectonics, read the full article at Wikipedia.org, or see the following related articles:

Lithosphere — The lithosphere is the solid outermost shell of a rocky planet. On the Earth, the lithosphere includes the crust and the uppermost layer of the ...  > read more

Mid-ocean ridge — A mid-ocean ridge or mid-oceanic ridge is an underwater mountain range, formed by plate tectonics. This uplifting of the ocean floor occurs when ...  > read more

Crust (geology) — In geology, a crust is the outermost layer of a planet. The crust of the Earth is composed of a great variety of igneous, metamorphic, and ...  > read more

Oceanic trench — The oceanic trenches are hemispheric-scale long but narrow topographic depressions of the sea floor. They also are the deepest parts of the ocean ...  > read more

Related Stories

Plate Tectonics May Grind To A Halt, Then Start Again (January 7, 2008) — Plate tectonics, the geologic process responsible for creating the Earth's continents, mountain ranges, and ocean basins, may be an on-again, off-again affair. Scientists have assumed that the ...  > read more

Scientists Use Seismic Waves To Locate Missing Rock Under Tibet (February 9, 2007) — Geologists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have located a huge chunk of Earth's lithosphere that went missing 15 million years ago. By finding the massive block of errant rock ...  > read more

Scientists Fill Antarctic Plate Gap Linking Pacific To The Rest Of The World (March 15, 2000) — Using new information gathered from three research cruises to Antarctica, a scientific team led by Steven Cande of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, has ...  > read more

When The Earth Dried Out (February 11, 2002) — About a billion years ago, the continents emerged relatively suddenly from an ocean that covered 95 percent of the Earth's surface, according to a new theory by Eldridge Moores, a geologist at ...  > read more

How The Discovery Of Geologic Time Changed Our View Of The World (September 16, 2007) — In 1911 the discovery that the world was billions of years old changed our view of the world forever. Imagine trying to understand history without any dates. You know, for example, that the First ...  > read more

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