Video- Tectonic Plates
A short clip on Tectonic plates for younger students in science class!
Part 1
Part 2
Audio as a Podcast
Script
Hello everyone! Thank you for tuning into THROUGH A CHILDS EYES. It’s Liz the science Wiz! Welcome to today’s news episode of Science Rocks.
Today’s lesson is going to dive into the topic of the Continental drift; Tectonic plates. Tectonic plates are big slabs of rock that make up the Earth’s crust.
Just like the Ice Age movies, little things can make a huge difference. The movie begins when Scrat the saber-tooth squirrel, and his love of acorns cause the tectonic plates to shift. Slowly, we see the surface crack and break apart. Throughout the movie, small pieces of land are sinking and falling as the plates move.
To better understand how the tectonic plates move, we are going to use an exercise thank Kathryn Schulz created for her article in the New Yorker.
Take your hands and hold them palms down, middle fingertips touching. Your right hand represents the North American tectonic plate, and your left hand represents an oceanic plate, thousands of square miles in size. The place where they meet is the Cascadia zone. Now slide your left hand under your right one. That is what the ocean plate is doing: slipping beneath North America. When you try it, your right hand will slide up your left arm, as if you were pushing up your sleeve. That is what North America is not doing. It is stuck, wedged tight against the surface of the other plate.
Now, we are going to apply this lesson to the world around us!
Recently, scientists at Rice University in Texas published a study on small tremors in the United States. The location of a tremor is known as its fault line. The most known fault line in the United States is the San Andreas near the Bay Area, but we are going to focus on the Cascadia fault line, which runs through Washington, Oregon, and Northern California. These tremors are so small that most people wouldn’t even notice the tremors were happening. There are fluids beneath the surface that heat up under the plates but get trapped in the ground. Imagine holding your hands again and instead, f gradually pushing one hand over the other arm, every few moments, your hand jumps just a bit. At first, it’s not enough to move, but the more your hand jumps, the more unsteady it becomes. If you place something on top of your hand, eventually it will fall off. The heat creates small tremors that happen over time but can create as much damage as a magnitude seven earthquake! That much strength can cause tsunamis, topple houses, and destroy cities! Something so small can be very powerful!
Alright, everyone! Thanks for listening and learning about the tectonic plates. I’d like to thank Kathryn Schulz for a wonderful hands-on example of how the tectonic plates move. I’d also like to congratulate the researchers on their discovery, which can be found on EurekAlert!
Parents! Feel free to go online to read more about scientific discoveries and news finds!
Join us next time when we learn about dinosaurs that roamed the earth millions of years ago.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/earth/the-dynamic-earth/plate-tectonics/
https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/search-results/?q=tectonic%20plates