tectonic plates

Cultural  

1. The dozen or so plates that make up the surface of the Earth. Their motion is studied in the field of plate tectonics.

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The plates are not the same as the continents. The North American plate, for example, extends from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean to the west coast of the United States and Canada. These plates are about thirty miles thick.

Example Sentences

In general, earthquakes are caused by the tectonic plates that make up the earth moving and rubbing together.

From BBC

Instead, critics selected music that shifted the tectonic plates of pop...

From BBC

However, our drilling efforts recovered the first cores of this material after it has spent tens of millions of years being rafted across the seafloor as Earth's tectonic plates spread apart.

From Science Daily

This idea describes how hot, dense rock gradually detaches from the base of tectonic plates after continents split, behaving somewhat like blobs rising and falling in a lava lamp.

From Science Daily

“Reuther shifted the tectonic plates under American capitalism in favor of labor,” says Nelson Lichtenstein, a history professor at University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of “The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor.”

From The Wall Street Journal