Answer:
Plate motions cause mountains to rise where plates push together or converge, and continents to fracture and oceans to form where plates pull apart or diverge. The continents are embedded in the plates and drift passively with them, which over millions of years results in significant changes in Earth's geography.
Step-by-step explanation:
Principles of plate tectonics
Earth's lithosphere and upper mantle
Earth's lithosphere and upper mantle
In essence, the plate-tectonic theory is elegantly simple. Earth’s surface layer, 50 to 100 km (30 to 60 miles) thick, is rigid and is composed of a set of large and small plates. Together, these plates constitute the lithosphere, from the Greek lithos, meaning “rock.” The lithosphere rests on and slides over an underlying partially molten (and thus weaker but generally denser) layer of plastic partially molten rock known as the asthenosphere, from the Greek asthenic, meaning “weak.” Plate movement is possible because the lithosphere-asthenosphere boundary is a zone of detachment. As the lithospheric plates move across Earth’s surface, driven by forces as yet not fully understood, they interact along their boundaries, diverging, converging, or slipping past each other. While the interiors of the plates are presumed to remain essentially undeformed, plate boundaries are the sites of many of the principal processes that shape the terrestrial surface, including earthquakes, volcanism, and orogeny (that is, the formation of mountain ranges).