Plate Tectonics Word Search
This plate tectonics word search holds 40 terms from the unit: the lithosphere broken into a dozen or so moving pieces, each one a plate, the asthenosphere they slide on, the divergent, convergent and transform boundaries where they meet, and Pangaea, subduction and the Ring of Fire.
Alfred Wegener, a German meteorologist, proposed continental drift in 1912. He pointed to the way South America and Africa fit together and to the same fossil plants and reptiles on both sides of the Atlantic. Geologists rejected the idea for decades because he could not say what force moved whole continents. Wegener died on the Greenland ice cap in 1930, long before he was proved right.
The answer came from the sea floor. In the early 1960s Harry Hess proposed that magma rises at the mid-ocean ridges and pushes new crust outward, and stripes of reversed magnetism in the rock on either side of the ridges confirmed it. Old crust sinks back into the mantle at the trenches. Iceland sits on top of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and the plates there pull apart about as fast as your fingernails grow.
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Plate Tectonics Word Search Printable Puzzles
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15x15 grid, up to 23 hidden words
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12x12 grid, up to 15 hidden words
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10x10 grid, 5 words across and down
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Puzzle Vocabulary Words
Below you can see all possible words that the topic Plate Tectonics has.
Depends on difficulty level you select in the game amount of words hidden in the puzzle will be different.
In Easy game you have to find up to 5 words, medium game can have up to 15 words and hard puzzle can have up to 23 words.
Every time you start a new game - our word search generator will pick random words to build the puzzle.
- Andes
- Asthenosphere
- Basalt
- Boundary
- Collision
- Convection
- Convergent
- Crust
- Divergent
- Fault
- Gondwana
- Hawaii
- Hess
- Himalayas
- Hotspot
- Iceland
- Island Arc
- Laurasia
- Lithosphere
- Mantle
- Mountain
- Oceanic
- Paleomagnetism
- Pangaea
- Plate
- Plume
- Ridge
- Rift
- Ring of Fire
- San Andreas
- Seafloor
- Slab
- Spreading
- Subduction
- Supercontinent
- Tectonics
- Transform
- Trench
- Uplift
- Wegener