[SOUND] [MUSIC] I've always been a little bit cautious in saying that all earthquakes occur along plate boundaries because that's actually not true. There are some earthquakes that happen in other parts of the lithosphere, and let's go through some of those now. The first type are earthquakes that occur along structures called rifts. Rifts are places where continents are beginning to stretch, beginning to break apart. Normal faults are active, but they have not yet broken apart far enough for a new mid-ocean ridge to form and seafloor spreading to begin. So, what we have in a rift is a region where the continental lithosphere is stretching and thinning but has not yet broken through. If a rift continues until it is successful, it will eventually break a continent in two, and a new mid-ocean ridge will form and a new ocean basin will grow. Today there's a very large rift in the Western United States, and it creates a region of broken up crust called the Basin Range, shown by the area that I've just indicated by yellow shading. If we look at the topography of that region, we see that there are a number of roughly north-south trending linear mountain ranges separated by basins. That's because, as the crust is pulling apart and stretching, blocks are breaking apart and areas of the crust are sinking and then being buried by sediments. Let's pick two points on opposite sides of the basin range. The basin range has stretched the crust by 100%. That means that, if those two points were originally 400 km apart, they are now 800 km apart, and the rifting is still continuing, so they're going to move even further apart every year that goes by. Another major active rift today Is the East African rift, that splits up the continent of Africa on its eastern side. In the case of the East African rift, it's a little bit different in character. It has a very narrow central region where the crust has dropped down, bounded by normal faults that's accommodating the pulling apart of easternmost Africa from Western Africa. So we've seen that there are places where continents are just beginning to break apart, or where continents are breaking apart in zones called rifts because faulting is involved, earth quakes are result. Another place is a place called a coalitional zone. Now, we talked about how oceanic plate can sink beneath another oceanic plate, or another continental plate. During the process of subduction to accommodate conversion plate motion. But what happens if there's a continent on a down-going slab? Let's say that there's a continent over here and it's being pulled into the conversion boundary. Well continents are made of a different kind of rock than ocean floor and the underlying mantle. Remember we said that continents are more or less composed. Where they have the chemical composition of a light colored relatively low density rock called granite. Well, it turns out that continents, basically are too buoyant to subduct. You don't think of them as being buoyant because they're made of rock, but relative to the mantle, relative to the very dense rock of the mantle. They are buoyant. So when a continent gets pulled into a convergent plate boundary it cannot sink, and rather, it squashes against the overriding plate. And that creates what's called a collisional mountain belt. So for example, when Africa, this is going way back in geologic time. There was a time when Africa collided With the eastern margin of North America. Then long after that, it drifted, and split apart, and the Atlantic Ocean formed. But again, during that earlier time when Africa actually was actually converging with North America, and actually collided, Africa didn't sink underneath North America, it created a big mountain welt, called the Appalachian Mountains. So here we see an example symbolizing the consequences of collision and the resulting collisional mountain dome. Now again, as these plates are moving together, it's not quite like that, that one plate sort of slides under another and you develop a series of reverse faults. But again, because there's faulting taking place There are earthquakes. That's the kind of earthquake that happens along much of the Himalayan Mountains, which is why there is a seismic belt along the Himalayans. In the location of the Himalayans, India is sliding underneath the edge of Asia. The rest of Asia and the crust is squashing together to form the Himalaya Mountains. And it's a little bit more complicated also is resulting in a very broad region of uplift called the Tibetan Plateau. [MUSIC]