Plate tectonics is the grand unifying framework of Earth sciences, explaining earthquakes, volcanoes, mountain building, and the distribution of fossils through the motion of rigid lithospheric plates atop a convecting asthenosphere. From Alfred Wegener's hypothesis of continental drift in 1912 to the seafloor spreading evidence of the 1960s, it took half a century for the theory to achieve acceptance.
These simulations let you drive oceanic plates into subduction trenches, generate new crust at mid-ocean ridges with magnetic stripe patterns, watch Rayleigh-Bénard convection cells in the mantle, reconstruct Pangaea through geological time, and trace hotspot plumes that build volcanic island chains — all with real-time interactive controls rooted in geophysical models.