Have the earths tectonic plates passed through a sequential fragmentation process?
We tested this hypothesis by starting out with the National Geographics excellent map (April 1995) entitled “The Earth’s Fractured Surface,” which presented all the known boundaries of the earth’s tectonic plates. From this Winkel Tripel Projection, we replotted the boundaries on equal-area projections: the Peters projections to about 60o N and S latitude, and the Lambert projection of both poles. We measured the areas of 30 plates with a precision planimeter, and thus obtained the area of each plate in square kilometers (Table 1). We then estimated the thickness of each plate to obtain their volumes. Next we estimated the density of each plate to obtain their masses. Finally, we plotted the mass distribution of the plates and compared it to the “sequential fragmentation” theory (Brown and Wohletz, J. Applied Phys 78(4)). The result was that the mass distribution of the earth’s tectonic plates showed a rather broad peak that poorly fit a single Sequential Fragmentation curve (Figure 1)
