Vocabulary
Arenal volcano, Costa Rica. Photo courtesy of Clearly Ambiguous/Flickr.
Licensed CC BY.
Convection: process in which material is circulated by heat.
Convection Current: process in Earth's mantle that drives tectonic plate movement. It is associated with heat transfer taking place in Earth's mantle.It occurs because of density differences in Earth's materials.
Plate tectonics: theory that the Earth's crust is moving as a series of large chunks. It combines the ideas of continental drift and seafloor spreading.
Tectonic plate: large parts of the lithosphere.
Subduction: process in which one plate moves beneath another. Occurs at convergent plate boundaries.
Last modified: Monday, 28 November 2011, 5:42 PM