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Driving Forces: Slab Pull, Ridge Push

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Encyclopedia of Marine Geosciences

Definition

Plate Driving Forces: The forces that drive the motions of tectonic plates at the surface.

Slab Pull: The force exerted by the weight of the subducted slab on the plate it is attached to.

Ridge Push: The pressure exerted by the excess height of the mid-ocean ridge.

Introduction

The history of the development of plate tectonics is centrally tied to the question of what drives plate motions. This has been the case since the failure of Wegener’s ideas about polflucht to explain continental drift to the seminal papers by Elsasser (1969), Solomon and Sleep (1974), and Forsyth and Uyeda (1975) on slab pull and ridge push. This contribution cannot possibly review all the seminal and historical publications that led to the establishment of the terms and concepts of slab pull and ridge push as major plate driving forces; instead, it gives a brief historical introduction and then focuses on modern views of the plate-mantle system and what remains to be understood.

Historical Overview

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth Sciences, University College London, Gower Street, WC1E 6BT, London, UK

    Carolina Lithgow-Bertelloni

Authors
  1. Carolina Lithgow-Bertelloni
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Correspondence to Carolina Lithgow-Bertelloni .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences, University of Szczecin, Szczecin, Poland

    Jan Harff

  2. Institute of Geography and Geology, University of Greifswald, Greifswald, Germany

    Martin Meschede

  3. Leibiniz Institute of Marine Sciences, University of Kiel, Kiel, Germany

    Sven Petersen

  4. Academy of Sciences, Humanities, and Lit c/o Helmholtz-Center for Ocean Research, Kiel, Germany

    Jörn Thiede

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Lithgow-Bertelloni, C. (2014). Driving Forces: Slab Pull, Ridge Push. In: Harff, J., Meschede, M., Petersen, S., Thiede, J. (eds) Encyclopedia of Marine Geosciences. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6644-0_105-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6644-0_105-1

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  • Online ISBN: 978-94-007-6644-0

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