This is amazing when you think about it. We all think of the Earth as being solid and unmoving beneath our feet, but it is actually in motion. Plate movement is slow. Plate speeds range from 5 to 17 centimeters per year. This is about as fast as your fingernails grow in a year. This may seem slow, but over the millions of years of Earth history, it means that plates can move long distances.

Plates interact in three basic ways they past by each other (A), they diverge from each other (B), or they converge or collide into each other (C). To develop this amazing story it took many lines of evidence to convince the scientific community that the Earth can actually move.