The Movement of Tectonic Plates

Author's Note:

This is an essay I wrote using a report type voice and I'm focusing on formatting.

You watch as the earth cracks right in front of you, you hear the screams of hundreds.  The ground is moving and breaking just under your nose and there is nothing you can do to stop it.  Once everyone thought that all of the damage is done, the water comes.  All of the water comes in huge amounts, crashing at the shore.  Each wave is more than twenty feet tall and creating floods in all coastal cities.  You think the worst of what has happened in only minutes.  Thousands of people's lives are at stake through all of these natural disasters. What caused it is simple, the Earth's tectonic plates were shifting. Earth would be a wonderful place if each plate wouldn't move.

The overall pattern of movement of the tectonic plates is a widening of the Atlantic Ocean and a shrinkage of the Pacific Ocean. The Atlantic is widening because sea-floor spreading at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge continues to create lithosphere. The Pacific is shrinking because much of it is ringed by convergent plate boundaries that are consuming its lithosphere. 

Tectonic plates have been shifting for millions of years. According to the commonly accepted description of plate movement, all the continents once formed part of an enormous single land mass called Pangaea. This mass was surrounded by a giant ocean known as Panthalassa.  About 200 million years ago, Pangaea began to break up into two large masses called Gondwanaland and Laurasia. Though each plate is only able to move four inches apart each year. These masses, in turn, broke up into the continents, which drifted to their present locations.

Each plate movement is a cause and each cause has an effect.  The effects of plate movement are scary and depressing times. There can be devastating earthquakes and powerful tsunamis.  These disasters cause one twenty sixth of all deaths each year on average.  Could imagine being in one of these disasters and not knowing whether your even going to live or not?

Living through a massive earthquake is a great feat. All around the world, four percent of people die each year from disasters tectonic plates cause. While it may not feel it, the earth is moving right below us.  It creates earthquakes and tsunamis, but has created the world that we know today.

Sources:
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"Plate Tectonics." UCMP - University of California Museum of Paleontology. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 May 2011. .
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