Lost Tectonic Plate 'Found' Under The Pacific Ocean

IN NEWS

• Scientists have reconstructed a long-lost tectonic plate that may have given rise to an arc of volcanoes in the Pacific Ocean 60 million years ago.

ABOUT

• A team of geologists at the University of Houston College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics have erected a model that proves the plate existed. By studying the existing mantle tomography images of our planet, the geologists have “found” resurrection to exist in northern Canada.
• The researchers think that this lost plate was responsible for the link between the ancient Pacific Ocean and North America. Also, it led to the creation of the Ring of Fire in the Pacific Ocean.
• The third major geologic era of Earth, the Cenozoic Era, is considered to be the time period when the continents had assumed their modern or current shapes and sizes. It follows the Mesozoic Era and extends from 66 million years ago to the present day.
• As we are currently living in the Cenozoic era, the plate tectonics of the age are still undergoing. However, there has been a dispute regarding the resurrection plate that is believed to have been present in the early Cenozoic era.
• Now the latest study has found that resurrection existed in between two larger plates called Kula and Farallon.

TECTONIC PLATE

• Plate tectonics is a scientific theory describing the large-scale motion of seven large plates and the movements of a larger number of smaller plates of Earth's lithosphere, since tectonic processes began on Earth between 3.3 and 3.5 billion years ago.
• The model builds on the concept of continental drift, an idea developed during the first decades of the 20th century. The geoscientific community accepted plate-tectonic theory after seafloor spreading was validated in the late 1950s and early 1960s.