دیکشنری تخصصی مهندسی نفت - نسخه آنلاین

n: according to a theory proposed by Alfred Wegener, a German meteorologist, in 1910, the migration of continents across the ocean floor like rafts drifting at sea. Compare plate tectonics.

n pi: movement of great crustal plates of the earth on slow currents in the plastic mantle, similar to the movement of boxes on a conveyor belt. Today geologists believe that the earths crust is divided into six major plates and several smaller ones atop some of which the continents are carried away from a system of mklocean ridges and toward another system of deep-sea trenches. The theory of plate tectonics explains most of the mysteries that confounded earlier geologists. Compare continental drift.