CHAPTER 3
Movement of the Earth’s Surface from Within
WIDESPREAD MOVEMENTS OF THE EARTH’S SURFACE
TO UNDERSTAND THE CHANGES and movements affecting the appearance of the landscape on large scales we need to review some geological systems, especially plate tectonics. Many of the large changes that have created landscapes over long periods of time can now be understood using this discovery.
Knowledge of the processes causing the movement of large (10–1,000 km length-scale) areas of the Earth’s surface has been revolutionised by scientific advances made over the last 40 years. During this time, scientists have become convinced that the whole of the Earth’s surface consists of a pattern of interlocking tectonic plates (Fig. 29). The word ‘tectonic’ refers to processes that have built features of the Earth’s crust (Greek: tektōn, a builder). The worldwide plate pattern is confusing – particularly when seen on a flat map – and it is easier to visualise the plates in terms of an interlocking arrangement of panels on the Earth’s spherical surface, broadly like the panels forming the skin of a football.
Tectonic plates are features of the lithosphere, the name given to the ≈125 km thick outer shell of the Earth, distinguished from the material below by the strength of its materials (Greek: lithos, stone). The strength depends upon the composition of the material and also upon its temperature and pressure, both of which tend to increase with depth below the Earth’s surface. In contrast to the mechanically strong lithosphere, the underlying material is weaker and known as the asthenosphere (Greek: asthenos, no-strength). Note that on figure 30 the crustal and outer mantle layers are shown with exaggerated thickness, so that they are visible.
Most of the strength difference between the lithosphere and the asthenosphere depends on the temperature difference between them. The lithosphere plates are cooler than the underlying material, so they behave in a more rigid way when subjected to the forces generated within the Earth. The asthenosphere is hotter and behaves in a more plastic way, capable of deforming without fracturing and, to some extent, of ‘flowing’. Because of this difference in mechanical properties and the complex internal forces present, the lithosphere plates can move relative to the material below. To visualise the motion of the plates, we can use the idea of lithospheric plates floating on top of the asthenosphere.
Looking at the surface of the Earth (Fig. 29), the largest plates show up as relatively rigid areas of the lithosphere, with interiors that do not experience as much disturbance as their edges. Plates move relative to each other along plate boundaries, in various ways that will be described below. The plate patterns have been worked out by investigating distinctive markers within the plates and at their edges, allowing the relative rates of movement between neighbouring plates to be calculated. These rates are very slow, rarely exceeding a few centimetres per year, but over the millions of years of geological time they can account for thousands of kilometres of relative movement.
It has proved to be much easier to measure plate movements than to work out what has been causing them. However, the general belief today is that the plates move in response to a number of different forces. Heat-driven circulation (convection) occurs within the mantle, but other forces are also at play. Where plates diverge, warm, new material is formed that is elevated above the rest of the plate, providing a pushing force to move the plate laterally, around the surface of the Earth. At convergent boundaries, cold, older material ‘sinks’ into the asthenosphere, providing a pulling force which drags the rest of the plate along behind it. Deep within the Earth, the sinking material melts and is ultimately recycled and brought back to the surface to continue the process.
FIG 30. Diagram of the internal structure of the Earth.
Knowledge of how tectonic plates interact provides the key to understanding the movement history of the Earth’s crust. However, most people are much more familiar with the geographical patterns of land and sea, which do not coincide with the distribution of tectonic plates. From the point of view of landscapes and scenery, coastlines are always going to be key features because they define the limits of the land; we make no attempt in this book to consider submarine scenery in detail.
The upper part of the lithosphere is called the crust. Whereas the distinction between the lithosphere and the asthenosphere is based upon mechanical properties related to temperature and pressure (see above), the distinction between the crust and the lower part of the lithosphere is based upon composition. Broadly speaking, there are two types of crust that can form the upper part of the lithosphere: continental and oceanic. An individual tectonic plate may include just one or both kinds of crust.
Continental crust underlies land areas and also many of the areas covered by shallow seas. Geophysical work shows that this crust is typically about 35 km thick, but may be 80–90 km thick below some high plateaus and mountain ranges. The highest mountains in Britain are barely noticeable on a scale diagram comparing crustal thicknesses (Fig. 31). Continental crust is made of rather less dense materials than the oceanic crust or the mantle, and this lightness is the reason why land surfaces and shallow sea floors are elevated compared to the deep oceans. Much of the continental crust is very old (up to 3–4 billion years), having formed early in the Earth’s life when lighter material separated from denser materials within the Earth and rose to the surface.
Oceanic crust forms the floors of the deep oceans, typically 4 or 5 km below sea level. It is generally 5–10 km thick and is distinctly denser than continental crust. Oceanic crust only forms land where volcanic material has been supplied to it in great quantity (as in the case of Iceland), or where other important local forces in the crust have caused it to rise (as is the case in parts of Cyprus). Oceanic crust is generally relatively young (only 0–200 million years old), because its higher density and lower elevation ensures that it is generally subducted and destroyed at plate boundaries that are convergent (see below).
Figure 29 shows the major pattern of tectonic plates on the Earth today. The Mercator projection of this map distorts shapes, particularly in polar regions, but we can see that there are seven very large plates, identified by the main landmasses located on their surfaces. The Pacific plate lacks continental crust entirely, whereas the other six main plates each contain a large continent (Eurasia, North America, Australia, South America, Africa and Antarctica) as well as oceanic crust. There are a number of other middle-sized plates (e.g. Arabia and India) and large numbers of micro-plates, not shown on the world map.
Figures 29 and 32 also identify the different types of plate boundary, which are distinguished according to the relative motion between the two plates. Convergent plate boundaries involve movement of the plates from each side towards the suture (or central zone) of the boundary. Because the plates are moving towards each other, they become squashed together in the boundary zone. Sometimes one plate is pushed below the other in a process called subduction, which often results in a deep ocean trench and a zone of mountains and/or volcanoes, as well as earthquake activity (Fig. 32). The earthquake that happened on the morning of 26 December 2004 under the sea off western Sumatra was the strongest anywhere in the world for some 40 years. It seized world attention particularly because of the horrifying loss of life caused by the tsunami waves that it generated. This earthquake was the result of a sudden lithosphere movement of several metres on a fault in the convergent subduction zone where the Australian plate has been repeatedly moving below the Eurasian plate.
FIG 31. Scale diagram comparing average thicknesses of oceanic and continental crust and lithosphere.
In other cases the plate boundary is divergent, where the neighbouring plates move apart and new material from deeper within the Earth rises to fill the space created. The new oceanic crust is created by the arrival and cooling of hot volcanic material from below. The mid-Atlantic ridge running through Iceland, with earthquakes and volcanic activity, is one of the nearest examples to Britain of this sort of plate boundary.
Other plate boundaries mainly involve movement parallel to the plate edges and are sometimes called transform boundaries. The Californian coast zone is the classic example but there are many others, such as the transform boundary between the African and Antarctic plates. In some areas, plate movement is at an oblique angle to the suture and there are components of divergence or convergence as well as movement parallel to the boundary.
Britain today sits in the stable interior of the western Eurasian plate, almost equidistant from the divergent mid-Atlantic ridge boundary to the west and the complex convergent boundary to the south where Spain and northwest Africa are colliding. In its earlier history the crust of Britain has been subjected to very direct plate boundary activity: the results of convergent activity in Devonian and Carboniferous times (between 416 and 299 million years ago) are visible at the surface in southwest England, and in Ordovician to Devonian times (between 490 and 360 million years ago) in Wales, northwest England and Scotland.
FIG 32. Diagram illustrating the movement processes of plates (not to scale).
UNDERSTANDING SURFACE MOVEMENTS
We have been considering the large movement systems that originate within the Earth. There are also more local movement systems operating on the Earth’s surface, which are linked to a very variable degree to the large-scale movements of plate tectonics. To explore this complex linkage further, it will be helpful to look now at different processes that may combine to cause particular local movements.
Horizontal movements as part of convergence, divergence or lateral transfer
Tectonic plates are recognised by their rigidity, so there is relatively little horizontal movement between points within the same plate compared to the deformation seen in plate boundary zones. This extreme deformation may involve folding and fracturing of the rock materials, addition of new material from below, or absorption of material into the interior during subduction.
Nonetheless, deformation is not restricted solely to plate boundaries, and does occur to a lesser extent within the plates. In some cases, major structures that originally formed along a plate boundary can become incorporated into the interior of a plate when prolonged collision causes two plates to join. Southern England includes the remains of a former convergent plate boundary and contains many examples of structures of this sort (particularly around Dorset and the Isle of Wight). These structures have often been reactivated long after they first formed in order to accommodate forces along the new plate boundary via deformation within the plate. Conversely, changes of internal stress patterns can sometimes lead to the splitting of a plate into two, forming a new, initially divergent plate boundary. Many of the oil- and gas-containing features of the North Sea floor originated when a belt of divergent rift faults formed across a previously intact plate.
It needs to be stressed that the patterns of deformation (fracturing and folding) due to these plate motions occur at a wide range of different scales, from centimetres to thousands of kilometres. Sometimes they are visible at the scale of an entire plate boundary, such as the enormous Himalayan mountain chain that marks the collision of India with Asia.
The effects of features as large as plate boundaries on landscapes persist over hundreds of millions of years, long after the most active movement has ceased. For example, parts of southwestern England, Wales and the Scottish Highlands are underlain by bedrocks that were formed in convergent boundary zones of the past. The tin and lead mines of Cornwall owe their existence to a 300-million-year-old convergent plate boundary, where an ocean was destroyed as two plates converged and continents collided. The convergence released molten rock that rose in the crust and gradually cooled to form granite, while metals were precipitated in the surrounding crust as ‘lodes’ containing tin and lead (see Chapter 4).
Mapping the patterns of bedrock exposed at the surface often reveals folds and faults that provide key information about the movements that have taken place during the past. Figure 33 provides a key to some of the terms commonly used to classify these structures as a step towards understanding the sorts of movement patterns that they represent. In broad terms, folds tend to indicate some form of local convergent movement, though they may be the result of larger movement patterns of a different kind. Normal faults tend to indicate divergent movements, at least locally, whereas reverse and strike-slip faults tend to indicate convergence. Two broad types of fold are distinguished: synclines are u-shaped downfolds, while anticlines are the opposite – n-shaped upfolds.
Further mapping of folds and faults often reveals complex patterns of changing movements. In the example shown in Figure 34, divergent movements in an area of crust produce plastic deformation in the warmer lower crust, and faulting into a number of discrete blocks in the colder, more brittle, upper crust. This is then followed by an episode of convergent movement that results in closing up the upper crustal blocks and further flow in the plastic lower crust, causing crustal thickening and mountain building at the surface.
Vertical crustal movements as part of other crustal movements
The movement of lithospheric plates is the main cause of convergent and divergent movements affecting thousands of kilometres of the Earth’s surface. As shown in Figures 33 and 34, these horizontal movements are generally accompanied by vertical movements that can produce very large scenic features, such as a mountain belt or a rift valley. In this book we are primarily concerned with scenic features at a more local scale, so we now consider various other processes that may be important in creating vertical crustal movements without contributions from large-scale plate interactions.
Vertical changes by erosion or deposition
Addition or subtraction of material to the surface of the Earth is happening all the time as sediment is deposited or solid material is eroded. The field of sedimentology is concerned with the wide range of different processes that are involved in the erosion, transport and deposition of material, whether the primary agent of movement is water, ice, mud or wind. An important point is that few of these sedimentary processes relate directly to the large tectonic movements of the Earth’s crust that we have discussed above. Scenery is often produced by erosion of thick deposits that formed in sedimentary basins where material eroded from the surrounding uplands accumulated. One of the characteristic features of these thick deposits is their layered appearance, which is often visible in the scenery. Layering varies from millimetre-scale laminations produced by very small fluctuations in depositional processes, to sheets hundreds of metres thick that extend across an entire sedimentary basin. These thicker sheets are often so distinctive that they are named and mapped as separate geological units representing significant changes in the local environment at the time they were deposited.
FIG 34. Example of a cross-section through the crust, showing how a divergent movement pattern (A) may be modified by later convergent movements (B and C).
Vertical crustal movements resulting from loading or unloading
In addition to the direct raising or lowering of the surface by erosion or deposition, there is a secondary effect due to the unloading or loading of the crust that may take some thousands of years to produce significant effects. As mentioned above, we can visualise the lithosphere as ‘floating’ on the asthenosphere like a boat floating in water. Loading or unloading the surface of the Earth by deposition or erosion will therefore lower or raise the scenery, just as a boat will sit lower or higher in the water depending on its load.
An example of this is the lowering of the area around the Mississippi Delta, loaded by sediment eroded from much of the area of the USA. The Delta region, including New Orleans, is doomed to sink continually as the Mississippi river deposits sediment around its mouth, increasing the crustal load there.
A second example of such loading is provided by the build-up of ice sheets during the Ice Age. The weight of these build-ups depressed the Earth’s surface in the areas involved, and raised beaches in western Scotland provide evidence of the high local sea-levels due partly to this lowering of the crustal surface.
Unloading of the Earth’s surface will cause it to rise. Recent theoretical work on the River Severn suggests that unloading of the crust by erosion may have played a role in raising the Cotswold Hills to the east and an equivalent range of hills in the Welsh Borders (see Chapter 6, Area 9). In western Scotland, as the ice has melted the Earth’s surface has been rising again.
Vertical movements by expansion or contraction
Changing the temperature of the crust and lithosphere is an inevitable result of many of the processes active within the Earth, because they often involve the transfer of heat. In particular, rising plumes of hot material in the Earth’s mantle, often independent of the plate boundaries, are now widely recognised as an explanation for various areas of intense volcanic activity (for example beneath Iceland today). These plumes are often referred to as ‘hot spots’ (see Fig. 32). Heating and cooling leads to expansion or contraction of the lithosphere and can cause the surface to rise or sink, at least locally.
An example of this is the way that Southern England was tilted downwards to the east about 60 million years ago. At about this time, eastern North America moved away from western Europe as the North American and Eurasian plates diverged. The divergence resulted in large volumes of hot material from deep within the Earth being brought to the surface and added to the crust of western Southern England. It is believed that the heating and expansion of the crustal rocks in the west has elevated them above the rocks to the east, giving an eastward tilt to the rock layers and exposing the oldest rocks in the west and the youngest ones in the east. This sequence has important implications for the scenery of England’s south coast (see Chapter 5).
HOW CAN LOCAL SURFACE MOVEMENTS BE DETECTED?
Having just reviewed some of the processes that cause vertical movements of the Earth’s surface, it is useful to consider the practical difficulties of how such movements are measured.
For present-day applications, it seems natural to regard sea level as a datum against which vertical landscape movements can be measured, as long as we remember to allow for tidal and storm variations. However, much work has demonstrated that global sea level has changed rapidly and frequently through time, due to climate fluctuations affecting the size of the polar icecaps and changing the total amount of liquid water present in the oceans and seas. It has also been shown that plate tectonic movements have an important effect on global sea level by changing the size and shape of ocean basins.
Attempts have been made to develop charts showing how sea level, generalised for the whole world, has varied through time. However, it has proved very difficult to distinguish a worldwide signal from local variations, and the dating of the changes is often too uncertain to allow confident correlation between areas.
In sedimentary basins, successful estimates of vertical movements have been made using the thicknesses of sediment layers accumulating over different time intervals in different depths of water. In areas of mountain building, amounts of vertical uplift have been estimated using certain indicator minerals that show the rates of cooling that rocks have experienced as they were brought up to the surface. However, both these approaches are only really possible in areas that have been subjected to movements of the Earth’s crust that are large and continuous enough to completely dominate other possible sources of error.
Local horizontal movements are also difficult to estimate, although fold and/or fault patterns may allow a simple measure in some cases. Movement of sediment across the Earth’s surface by rivers or sea currents can be estimated if mineral grains in the sediment can be tracked back to the areas from which they have come. In the detailed consideration of landscapes in this book, we have to rely on using the widest possible range of types of evidence, carefully distinguishing the times and scales involved. Even then, we are often left with probable movement suggestions rather than certainties.