Simulate plate tectonics?

August 9, 2005 9:25 AM

Has anyone made or seen a good physical model for plate tectonics?

I'd like to let kids in a 4th-grade classroom simulate the creation of landforms by pushing slippery plates (I'm imagining wax) together, but I can't work out all the details. How would they slide? Could the plates drift (slowly) under their own power? Could I add heat to this process to provide the slipperiness and energy?

posted by argybarg to Education (3 answers total)

I don't know, maybe a solid wax skin on top of a pool of melted wax. It seems like you'd need to get the temperature *just* right, though.

If you could find some way to keep the top of the wax cold, and have some of the wax inside hot, maybe you could get stuff like volcanos or something like that, although I doubt it.

You might want to use ice, though, because as wax melts it gets softer, rather then going from rigid to liquid
posted by delmoi at 9:32 AM on August 9, 2005

You could get blocks of canning wax (Gulf Wax) and place them on a dish on a hot plate to demonstrate how the plates slide around. As for how they crash together, I've seen a demo where layers of colored play doh or modeling clay were made into two blocks and then rammed together pushing them downwards or upwards where they meet.
posted by Pollomacho at 9:44 AM on August 9, 2005

Bill Nye once used two cookies floating over colored liquid or wax. That seemed to work pretty well, plus the kids can eat the cookies.
posted by cyphill at 10:12 AM on August 9, 2005