Answer. Movements of tectonic plates create volcanoes along the plate boundaries, which erupt and form mountains. A volcanic arc system is a series of volcanoes that form near a subduction zone where the crust of a sinking oceanic plate melts and drags water down with the subducting crust.

If for some reason convection stopped, air would not circulate, and weather would stop. Air wouldn’t flow over the waters, suck up moisture and then rain it out on land. Without this rain, all plants and crops would die.

As tectonic plates slowly move away from each other, heat from the mantle’s convection currents makes the crust more plastic and less dense. The less-dense material rises, often forming a mountain or elevated area of the seafloor. Eventually, the crust cracks.

The theory of plate tectonics states that the Earth’s solid outer crust, the lithosphere, is separated into plates that move over the asthenosphere, the molten upper portion of the mantle. Thus, at divergent boundaries, oceanic crust is created.

The main features of plate tectonics are: Convection currents beneath the plates move the crustal plates in different directions. The source of heat driving the convection currents is radioactivity deep in the Earths mantle.

The outer shell of the Earth is a series of large blocks called the tectonic plates. Though the surface of the Earth appears to be still, it is actually moving all the time. The plates float on a weaker upper mantle or asthenosphere. They are named after the major continents and ocean floors that they encompass.

It Might Look Like This. These pieces, the tectonic plates, move around the planet at speeds of a few centimetres per year. Every so often they come together and combine into a supercontinent, which remains for a few hundred million years before breaking up.