Why do earthquake causing fault lines shift or tectonic plates move at all?
Watching a documentary on the History Channel about San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake and the great devastation it caused made me wonder what activities inside our planet result into its surface shifting and quaking.
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There’s magma pushing the plates up. There’s a layer of this stuff just flowing around and the plates are essentially “floating” on top of it.
I Am Not A Geologist (IANAG) but I believe it is not correct to refer to the bulk of the material in the upper mantle (which is what supports the plates that make up the crust) as magma. Magma is indeed liquid while the mantle is generally a viscous solid.
I just like saying “Red hot magma.”
@Rarebear Do you say it with your right pinky pointing at the corner of your mouth? ;)
“1 million red hot magma…hmmhmmm ok 100 billion red hot magma”
duhduhduuuuuuuuh
Ok, so if I’m Magmaman and I have the superpower to stop it from moving, would that help?
Your not magmaman your mazingerzman uh, aaaakward
٩(●̮̮̃•̃)۶
@mazingerz88 Shoot, you’re right. I’m good at chopping onions though.
Fault lines don’t actually exist. The earth moves whether or not humans draw lines. The lines are our attempts to predict where the most seismic activity will occur. Other than that, magma is correct. It provide upward pressure that pushes the surface of the planet in various directions. The pushing happens very slowly, but fast enough that sometimes the parts of the earth’s surface that are sticking together, suddenly lose their grip and shift with relation to each other. Sometimes they shit a millimeter or so, and sometimes a few feet at a time.
Lol @ “shit a millimeter…”
I mean, @Rarebear, that what you see there as bumps on the surface of the earth exist, but fault lines are an abstract concept made up by human beings. Do not mistake the name for the thing. The earth holds reality. The name is something made up by humans and, as such, has no earthly reality.
The reason why I bring that up is that this question has it backwards. Earthquakes are what we call it when the earth moves. Fault lines are what we call the places where the earth tends to move most. They are not what moves. It is the earth that moves. The rest is just human names.
No. Fault lines are the edges where tectonic plates interact, and the resulting cracks in the crust that are associated with them. They are quite real and not abstract at all. They are well established scientific fact.
@Rarebear Never argue metaphysics with a physicist. I think we’re talking about two different things. Was it Shakespeare who said, “the word is not the thing?”
@Rarebear If I’m not mistaken, what @wundayatta is saying based on how I framed my question is that fault lines do not cause earthquakes, earth movement do because of magma.
Why the heck does magma, I mean red hot magma exist in the first place?!
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