What are tectonic plate hot spots?
What are tectonic plate hot spots?
A hot spot is an intensely hot area in the mantle below Earth’s crust. This heat causes the mantle in that region to melt. The molten magma rises up and breaks through the crust to form a volcano. While the hot spot stays in one place, rooted to its deep source of heat, the tectonic plate is slowly moving above it.
Where are some hotspots located?
Most of these are located under plate interiors (for example, the African Plate), but some occur near diverging plate boundaries. Some are concentrated near the mid-oceanic ridge system, such as beneath Iceland, the Azores, and the Galapagos Islands. A few hotspots are thought to exist below the North American Plate.
Where is a hot spot located in the United States?
Most hot spots are located at mid-ocean ridges, but there are a few located in the middle of plates, like Hawaii and Yellowstone. This is a map of the Hawaiian Islands today.
Do hotspots occur in the middle of a tectonic plate?
Hotspots can happen in the middle of oceanic plates—Hawaii is a case in point. Or they can occur amid continental plates—Yellowstone, for example, smokes and spews far from the grinding edges of tectonic plates.
Why are hotspots stationary?
Hotspots are aptly named- they are spots of the Earth that are hot. There is evidence that hotspots can drift extremely slowly in the mantle, but hotspots are essentially stationary relative to the faster-moving tectonic plates. As a tectonic plate moves over a mantle hotspot, a chain of volcanoes is produced.
What are hotspots in geology?
A hot spot is an area on Earth over a mantle plume or an area under the rocky outer layer of Earth, called the crust, where magma is hotter than surrounding magma. The magma plume causes melting and thinning of the rocky crust and widespread volcanic activity. 5 – 8. Earth Science, Geology, Geography, Physical …
How many hotspots are found in India?
four biodiversity hotspots
India has four biodiversity hotspots, i.e., Eastern Himalayas, Western Himalayas, Western Ghats and Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
Which are the hotspots found in India?
India hosts 4 biodiversity hotspots: the Himalayas, the Western Ghats, the Indo-Burma region and the Sundaland (Includes Nicobar group of Islands). These hotspots have numerous endemic species.
What are 5 hotspots in the world?
Hispaniola is among the Caribbean islands comprising a biodiversity hotspot.
- The Caribbean Islands.
- The Atlantic Forest in Brazil.
- Southeast Asia.
- The Philippines.
- The Horn of Africa.
- Madagascar.
- The California Coast.
What are the 3 biodiversity hotspots?
Officially, four out of the 36 Biodiversity Hotspots in the world are present in India: the Himalayas, the Western Ghats, the Indo-Burma region and the Sundaland. To these may be added the Sundarbans and the Terrai-Duar Savannah grasslands for their unique foliage and animal species.
What type of plate boundary is hot spot?
Hot spots are places within the mantle where rocks melt to generate magma. The presence of a hot spot is inferred by anomalous volcanism (i.e. not at a plate boundary), such as the Hawaiian volcanoes within the Pacific Plate.
How do you explain plate tectonics?
Plate tectonics is the scientific theory that attempts to explain the movements of the Earth’s lithosphere that have formed the landscape features we see across the globe today. By definition, the word “plate” in geologic terms means a large slab of solid rock.
What happens when tectonic plates separate?
Tectonic plates separate because of convection currents in the Mantle layer below. The Mantle is heated from even further below by radioactive elements in the interior of the Earth: this causes up-wellings then movement outwards from the up-wellings, then the cooler Mantle material sinks down again.
What is the description of plate tectonics?
plate tectonics. noun Geology. a theory of global tectonics in which the lithosphere is divided into a number of crustal plates, each of which moves on the plastic asthenosphere more or less independently to collide with, slide under, or move past adjacent plates.
