The adjective atmospheric comes from atmosphere, which stems from the Greek root words atmos, “steam or vapor,” and spharia, “sphere or globe.”

An atmosphere (from the greek words ἀτμός (atmos), meaning ‘vapour’, and σφαῖρα (sphaira), meaning ‘ball’ or ‘sphere’) is a layer or a set of layers of gases surrounding a planet or other material body, that is held in place by the gravity of that body.

thermosphere

troposphere

The crust is made up of the continents and the ocean floor. The crust is thickest under high mountains and thinnest beneath the ocean.

crust

*Inner core It is the thinnest layer of the Earth. *The crust is 5-35km thick beneath the land and 1-8km thick beneath the oceans.

map. The most well-known feature associated with Earth’s lithosphere is tectonic activity. Click below to visit our MapMaker Interactive layer displaying the lithosphere’s tectonic plates. The lithosphere is thinnest at mid-ocean ridges, where tectonic plates are tearing apart from each other.

Crust

The lithosphere is the solid, outer part of the Earth. It includes the brittle upper portion of the mantle and the crust, the planet’s outermost layers. The lithosphere is located below the atmosphere and above the asthenosphere. The asthenosphere is made of melted rock that gives it a thick, sticky consistency.

The mantle is divided into several layers: the upper mantle, the transition zone, the lower mantle, and D” (D double-prime), the strange region where the mantle meets the outer core.

The crust is made of solid rocks and minerals. Beneath the crust is the mantle, which is also mostly solid rocks and minerals, but punctuated by malleable areas of semi-solid magma.

There are several layers shown, color coded brown and black, green, and reddish. The outermost brown and black layer, above the Moho (boundary between crust and mantle) is the crust….

As a result, oceanic lithosphere is much younger than continental lithosphere: the oldest oceanic lithosphere is about 170 million years old, while parts of the continental lithosphere are billions of years old.

blue

There are two main types of tectonic plates: oceanic and continental.

Primary plates

• African plate.
• Antarctic plate.
• Indo-Australian plate.
• North American plate.
• Pacific plate.
• South American plate.
• Eurasian plate.

There may be scientific consensus as to whether such plates should be considered distinct portions of the crust; thus, new research could change this list.

• African Plate.
• Antarctic Plate.
• Australian Plate.
• Caribbean Plate.
• Cocos Plate.
• Eurasian Plate.
• Nazca Plate.
• North American Plate.

The heat from radioactive processes within the planet’s interior causes the plates to move, sometimes toward and sometimes away from each other. This movement is called plate motion, or tectonic shift.

Earthquakes can cause the ground to shake and crack apart. Earthquakes occur along fault lines, cracks in Earth’s crust where tectonic plates meet. They occur where plates are subducting, spreading, slipping, or colliding. As the plates grind together, they get stuck and pressure builds up.

Plates at our planet’s surface move because of the intense heat in the Earth’s core that causes molten rock in the mantle layer to move. It moves in a pattern called a convection cell that forms when warm material rises, cools, and eventually sink down. As the cooled material sinks down, it is warmed and rises again.

Rates of motion These average rates of plate separations can range widely. The Arctic Ridge has the slowest rate (less than 2.5 cm/yr), and the East Pacific Rise near Easter Island, in the South Pacific about 3,400 km west of Chile, has the fastest rate (more than 15 cm/yr).