Plate Tectonics

Geology is the study of Earth’s crust and the processes that have shaped its surface throughout history. Heat escaping from the interior provides energy for the formation of our planet’s mountains, valleys, volcanoes, and even the continents and ocean basins themselves. But not until the middle of the twentieth century did geologists succeed in understanding just how these landforms are created.

Plate tectonics is a theory that explains how slow motions within the mantle of Earth move large segments of the crust, resulting in a gradual “drifting” of the continents as well as the formation of mountains and other large-scale geological features. Plate tectonics is a concept as basic to geology as evolution by natural selection is to biology or gravity is to understanding the orbits of planets. Looking at it from a different perspective, plate tectonics is a mechanism for Earth to transport heat efficiently from the interior, where it has accumulated, out to space. It is a cooling system for the planet. All planets develop a heat transfer process as they evolve; mechanisms may differ from that on Earth as a result of chemical makeup and other constraints.

Q. What can be inferred from paragraph 2 about the state of the Earth without plate tectonics?