Steep dark rock walls border the Almannagjá rift at Þingvellir, Iceland.

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Preparing the 3D view

Preparing lighting and the first complete frame…

Model scale

Globe to scale. boundaries from Bird PB2002. reconstructed coastlines from GPlates.

Present-day plate boundaries

DivergentConvergentTransform

How to read these results

The older views carry modern coastlines backwards using a plate reconstruction; past sea levels and shorelines also differed.

Plate boundaries

Compare the motion at three types of plate boundary and explain how each produces characteristic landforms.

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Why it happens

At divergent boundaries plates separate, at convergent boundaries they approach, and at transform boundaries they slide past. These relative motions help explain the distribution of ridges, trenches and earthquakes.

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Almannagjá, Þingvellir: faults accommodate extension within Iceland's broad North American–Eurasian plate boundary zone.

Try a comparison

Scrub the globe back towards Pangaea using 10 Ma GPlates snapshots. These are modern coastlines carried by a plate-motion model, not ancient shorelines. Return to 0 Ma to locate Hawaii.

Reading the result

Past views move modern coastlines using a plate model, so they show continental positions rather than ancient shorelines.

Film

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The Plate Tectonics Revolution: Crash Course Geography #19 — Crash Course.

A common misunderstanding

Continents move through an ocean floor that stays still.

Both continents and ocean floor are carried by lithospheric plates. A plate may include continental and oceanic crust, and its boundary need not follow a coastline. Relative plate motion produces spreading, convergence or sideways slip, with different landforms and geological activity at each type of boundary.

Cases

Exam language

Divergent

Describing a plate boundary where plates move apart. Mantle rock rises and can partly melt as pressure falls, producing new oceanic crust at ridges. Continental divergence may first form a rift before an ocean basin develops.

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Almannagjá, Þingvellir: faults accommodate extension within Iceland's broad North American–Eurasian plate boundary zone.

Convergent

Describing a plate boundary where plates move towards one another. Dense oceanic lithosphere may be subducted, while a continent–continent collision thickens the crust. The plate types determine whether a trench, volcanic arc or broad mountain belt develops.

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The Himalaya from the ISS: crust shortened and thickened as India collided with Eurasia.

Transform

Describing a plate boundary where neighbouring plates slide horizontally past one another. Crust is neither systematically created nor consumed along the boundary. Earthquakes are common because friction allows stress to build before fault slip.

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San Andreas Fault in California's Sierra Madre Mountains. The fault accommodates mainly horizontal motion between the Pacific and North American plates.

Hotspot

A region of persistent volcanism that can occur within a plate or at a boundary. Many hotspots are associated with mantle upwelling; not all have an established deep plume origin.

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Hawaii from the ISS. The volcanic chain records Pacific plate motion relative to a long-lived hotspot; the youngest main island is at the southeast end.

Pangaea

A supercontinent assembled during the late Palaeozoic and broken apart during the Mesozoic. Its reconstruction uses evidence from rocks, fossils, magnetism and continental margins. Pangaea was one of several supercontinents in Earth’s history, rather than Earth’s original crust.

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Permian Glossopteris leaf from Antarctica. Related fossils on separated southern continents are evidence that these lands were once joined within Gondwana, which formed part of Pangaea.

Subduction

The descent of one lithospheric plate beneath another into the mantle at a convergent boundary, commonly involving oceanic lithosphere.

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NASA ARIA observations of surface displacement following the 2025 Kamchatka megathrust earthquake. The coloured displacement field is measured evidence of movement, not a photograph of the buried fault.

Mid-ocean ridge

A submarine mountain system at a spreading boundary, where mantle upwelling and melting form new oceanic crust. Seafloor generally becomes older away from the spreading axis.

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NOAA, Galápagos Rift, 21 July 2011. Lava quenched in seawater forms pillows close to a spreading centre, where new oceanic crust is built.

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Time before present0 MaBoundary type