This caused the planet’s crust to begin cracking and breaking into pieces. Some were smaller, some were huge. This is how petrified lithospheric plates separated from each other by tectonic faults on the Earth’s surface were formed. Beneath these plates are mantle layers with lower degrees of hardness.

Because the upper and lower layers have different strengths, the plates can move as if they were floating on an ocean of molten magma. They collide with each other, forming high mountains, or they separate in different directions, allowing molten rock to escape and form a new frozen surface. Volcanoes erupt and earthquakes frequently occur in such places.

How many lithospheric plates are there on Earth?

So how many such plates cover the surface of our planet? It is impossible to give a definitive answer here, as it depends on the point of view on the classification of this phenomenon. However, the number varies from 12 to 100.

Most geologists agree on this There are 12 to 14 “primary” major plates that cover most of the Earth’s surface. The area of ​​each of them is at least 20 million square kilometers. The largest include North America, Africa, Eurasia, Indo-Australia, South America and Antarctica. But they all remain in the shadow of the Pacific Plate, which covers a huge area of ​​103.3 million square kilometers.

In addition to the seven major plates, there are five smaller plates: Philippine, Cocos, Nazca, Arabian and Juan de Fuca. Some geologists consider the Anatolian Plate, which is part of the larger Eurasian Plate, as a separate entity, like the East African Plate, which is part of the African Plate. The view they developed is that these two plates are moving at clearly different speeds from their parent plates.

Therefore, the number of main plates varies between 12 and 14.

Main lithosphere plates / Photo by Wikimedia/Sergento/Public domain

Lots of small plates

Things get complicated when you look at plate boundaries where tectonics is causing them to break into smaller pieces. With a surface area of ​​less than 1 million square kilometers, some scientists estimate that there are about 57 of them on Earth, but they are not usually marked on maps because scientists are still uncertain about their formation.

The number of microplates will continue to change as we learn more about how different scientists define them and how and where deformation occurs at plate boundaries.
– explains Saskia Gouse, a scientist from Imperial College London.

Earth’s moving plates create some fascinating scenarios as geologists solve this dynamic puzzle. The Pacific plate is probably the fastest, moving northwestward at a rate of 7-10 centimeters per year. Such a movement could even swallow the continents that rise above the ocean and that we humans live on. But it is completely imperceptible within the framework of our life. It takes millions of years for plates to travel a visible path.