Please respond to both POST1: and POST2: in at least 200 words and APA cited reference.

Required

• Chapter 1 Introduction to Science in An introduction to geology. Salt Lake Community College. Open Educational Resource
• Chapter 2 Plate Tectonics in An introduction to geology. Salt Lake Community College. Open Educational Resource
• Chapter 4 Igneous Processes and Volcanoes (Section 4.5 only) in An introduction to geology. Salt Lake Community College. Open Educational Resource
• Chapter 8 Earth History in An introduction to geology. Salt Lake Community College. Open Educational Resource

Recommended

• Frebel, A., & Beers, T. C. (2018). The formation of the heaviest elements. arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.01190. Retrieved from https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.3815
• Kious, W. J., & Tilling, R. I. (1994). This dynamic Earth: The story of plate tectonics. United States Geological Survey.

POST1:

Great post on the Indian Plate! It has had quite a dramatic geologichistory. Has the Indian subcontinent always been attached to Asia? Whatkind of plate boundary currently connects the Eurasian Plate to theIndian Plate? How are the Himalayas a result of that plate interaction?Why aren’t there any volcanoes in the Himalayas (unlike the Andes, amountain chain that includes many active volcanoes)?

POST2:

Ichose to do the African plate. The African Plate is a major tectonicplate straddling the equator as well as the prime meridian. It includesmuch of the continent of Africa, as well as oceanic crust which liesbetween the continent and various surrounding ocean ridges.

The western edge of the African Plate is a divergent boundary withthe North American Plate to the north and the South American Plate tothe south which forms the central and southern part of the Mid-AtlanticRidge. The African Plate is bounded on the northeast by the ArabianPlate, the southeast by the Somali Plate, the north by the EurasianPlate, the Aegean Sea Plate, and the Anatolian Plate, and on the southby the Antarctic Plate.

The African Plate includes several cratons, stable blocks of oldcrust with deep roots in the subcontinental lithospheric mantle, andless stable terranes, which came together to form the African continentduring the assembly of the supercontinent Pangea around 250 millionyears ago. The cratons are, from south to north, the Kalahari Craton,Congo Craton, Tanzania Craton and West African Craton. The cratons werewidely separated in the past, but came together during the Pan-Africanorogeny and stayed together when Gondwana split up. The cratons areconnected by orogenic belts, regions of highly deformed rock where thetectonic plates have engaged. The Saharan Metacraton has beententatively identified as the remains of a craton that has becomedetached from the subcontinental lithospheric mantle, but alternativelymay consist of a collection of unrelated crustal fragments swepttogether during the Pan-African orogeny.
In some areas, the cratonsare covered by sedimentary basins, such as the Tindouf Basin, TaoudeniBasin and Congo Basin, where the underlying archaic crust is overlaid bymore recent Neoproterozoic sediments. The plate includes shear zonessuch as the Central African Shear Zone (CASZ) where, in the past, twosections of the crust were moving in opposite directions, and rifts suchas the Anza Trough where the crust was pulled apart, and the resultingdepression filled with more modern sediment.

The African Plate is rifting in the eastern interior of the Africancontinent along the East African Rift. This rift zone separates theAfrican Plate to the west from the Somali Plate to the east. Onehypothesis proposes the existence of a mantle plume beneath the Afarregion, whereas an opposing hypothesis asserts that the rifting ismerely a zone of maximum weakness where the African Plate is deformingas plates to its east are moving rapidly northward.
The AfricanPlate’s speed is estimated at around 2.15 cm (0.85 in) per year. It hasbeen moving over the past 100 million years or so in a general northeastdirection. This is drawing it closer to the Eurasian Plate, causingsubduction where oceanic crust is converging with continental crust(e.g. portions of the central and eastern Mediterranean). In the westernMediterranean, the relative motions of the Eurasian and African platesproduce a combination of lateral and compressive forces, concentrated ina zone known as the Azores–Gibraltar Fault Zone. Along its northeastmargin, the African Plate is bounded by the Red Sea Rift where theArabian Plate is moving away from the African Plate.
The New Englandhotspot in the Atlantic Ocean has probably created a short line of mid-to late-Tertiary age seamounts on the African Plate but appears to becurrently inactive.