Quote:
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Originally Posted by aurora
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Brady Yoon
Does water act as a lubricant between the plates?
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It might. No one knows for sure, but that has been proposed.
It may also be that the Earth's crust was the right composition for plate tectonics only after the Mar's size impactor formed our Moon. I have seen that proposed as well.
The problem is that Earth is the only planet we know of that has ongoing plate tectonics, and it is hard to be certain of much when your sample size is = 1. |
I thought I read that Europa might have plate tectonics of a sort. Of course water would play a cruicial role in Europan tectonics since the materials are water ice sheets floating above a mantle of liquid water.