Plate tectonics. How it works / Тектоника плит. Как это работает

Plate tectonics is a major new paradigm, or scientific worldview, that profoundly changes our ideas about how the earth works. It has been compared to the Bohr theory of the atom in its simplicity, its elegance, and its ability to explain a wide range of experiments and observations.Tectonics is the study of the forces within the earth that give rise to continents, ocean basins, mountain ranges, earthquake belts, and other large-scale features of the earth's surface. A revolution in tectonic thinking was brought about by plate tectonics and two closely related ideas, seafloor spreading and the use of geomagnetic reversals. The latter is a method for clocking plate tectonic processes. These three ideas were advanced and substantiated between 1962 and 1968 by a handful of scientists working on problems that at first seemed unrelated but which suddenly came together to form a tightly knit fabric. This major revolution was triggered by no more than a dozen key articles that were published during these few years. <...>