Plate tectonics can drift continents and push up mountains, but what drives the plates? This is an insider's account of how we answered questions posed over two centuries ago, and completed geology's quest for a driving mechanism. Forging through confusing evidence, apparent contradictions and raging debates we arrived at not one but two mechanisms: sinking plates and rising plumes.

Dynamic Earth clearly details the mechanisms responsible for plate tectonics, volcanic hotspots, and many resulting geological processes. Starting from basic principles, coverage provides a fundamental exploration into the principles of convection in the earth's mantle, summarizes key observations and presents all the relevant physics. The book begins with a brief history of the key ideas leading into mantle convection, covering more than 200 years of geological thought. It concludes with surveys of geochemical contraints on mantle evolution and the thermal evolution of the mantle, with implications for changes in the surface tectonic regime. Main concepts and arguments are presented with a minimum of mathematics. For the reader who desires fuller coverage, more mathematical versions of important aspects are also included. This book will be of interest to a broad range of geologists who desire a better understanding of the earth's internal dynamics. Graduate students and researchers working on the many aspects of mantle dynamics and its implications for geological processes will find it particularly useful. It is also suitable as a text for upper undergraduate and postgraduate courses in geophysics, geochemistry, and tectonics.

Mantle convection is the fundamental agent driving many of the geological features observed at the Earth's surface, including plate tectonics and plume volcanism. Yet many Earth scientists have an incomplete understanding of the process. This book describes the physics and fluid dynamics of mantle convection, explaining what it is, how it works, and how to quantify it in simple terms. It assumes no specialist background: mechanisms are explained simply and the required basic physics is fully reviewed and explained with minimal mathematics. The distinctive forms that convection takes in the Earth's mantle are described within the context of tectonic plates and mantle plumes, and implications are explored for geochemistry and tectonic evolution. Common misconceptions and controversies are addressed - providing a straightforward but rigorous explanation of this key process for students and researchers across a variety of geoscience disciplines.