Earth
Folds and faults
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Folds and faults
Sliding plates and drifting continents are responsible for some of the Earth’s major landscape features. If a large slab or plate of the Earth’s surface is gradually squeezed...
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Great Rift Valley
The biggest gash in the Earth’s surface on land is the Great Rift Valley. This series of rifts runs from the eastern Mediterranean southeast through the Dead Sea and Red Sea...
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Mountains
In those regions where tectonic plates push against one another, the land ‘‘folds up” like a rug on the floor. This process, called orogeny, is how many mountain ranges, over...
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Rift valley lake: Lake Baikal
Millions of years ago, Asia split apart and the floor of the Baikal valley dropped away along a series of giant faults, cracks in the Earth’s crust. The bedrock plunges to a...
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