The Plate Tectonics Museum
In sixty years one idea explained almost every feature of Earth's surface — continents, oceans, mountains, volcanoes, earthquakes, the shapes of coastlines, the matching fossils on opposite shores.
Plate Boundary Lab
Cycle through the four boundary types and watch what each one builds: ocean floor, mountains, faults, island arcs. The numbers are real (typical-case spreading rates and seismicity); the cartoon is schematic.
Two plates pulling apart. Mantle rises into the gap, melts as pressure drops, and freezes onto each plate as new crust — the slowest assembly line on Earth.
The Collection
37 artifacts across the theory's history, the three boundary types, volcanoes, mountain-building, oceanic features, and the lines of evidence that won the argument. Click any card to copy its description.
No artifacts in this category.
Four Centuries of Argument
From 1596 to 2020 — four hundred years of arguing about what the continents are doing.
Hands-on Instruments
Mix and match plate compositions in the boundary lab, translate centimetre-per-year rates into human-scale distances, and browse the geological events the modern theory was built to explain.
Pick the composition of two plates and how they're moving relative to each other. The lab predicts the resulting boundary type and what surface features develop over millions of years.
Tectonic plates drift at speeds comparable to human fingernail growth — 1–17 cm per year. Slow on a human timescale, but over geological time it builds oceans and mountain ranges. Pick a rate and see how far a plate moves over your lifetime, recorded history, and the age of life on land.
A walk through the geological events that the theory of plate tectonics was built to explain — and the ones that, after the theory, finally made sense. Each card includes the tectonic context that's now the standard interpretation.
Tectonic context