Plate and Rift

Plate took a slow, deliberate step toward the globe. It placed a heavy, gentle hand on one of the huge foam sections that represented North America. "Everything you stand on," Plate said in its low, unhurried voice, "is a piece like this one. A plate. And we are always, always moving."

With immense slowness, Plate pushed the foam continent. It only moved a tiny bit, less than the width of Maya's finger. "See? You can barely tell," Plate continued. "Your fingernails grow faster than I move a continent. But I am very, very strong. And I never, ever stop."

Maya watched, her eyes wide. It didn’t look like much, but she imagined what that tiny push meant on the scale of a real planet. It was a mind-boggling amount of power, happening so slowly you could never feel it.

"I carry everything," Plate explained, patting the foam shape. "Cities and mountains and forests and oceans. I just… drift. It takes millions of years to cross an ocean. But when you have that much time, you can go anywhere. The whole surface of the world is just a puzzle of pieces like me, all floating and shifting, day after day, century after century."

"And where the pieces move, I happen!" Rift crackled, zipping over to where Plate's hand had been. Rift hovered right over the seam between the North American plate and the Eurasian plate. "He pushes, see? He pulls! He grinds! But what happens to the space he leaves behind?"

Rift vibrated with excitement. "Me! I'm what happens!" A bright light pulsed from Rift, illuminating the seam that ran right through the foam model of Iceland. "When two plates pull apart, they make a space. A gap. A… well, a rift! And that's not empty space for long. New rock bubbles up from deep inside the Earth to fill it. It’s hot and fresh and it makes the ground stretch and crack and—SHAKE!"

On the word "shake," Rift sent a tiny tremor through the foam globe. It was just a little wobble, but Maya felt the vibration through the floor. She looked from the slow, steady Plate to the zinging, energetic Rift. One was the cause, the other was the effect. One was the quiet movement, the other was the noisy result. "So… an earthquake is the ground splitting to make room for new ground?" she asked.

"Exactly!" Rift and Plate said at the same time. Plate's voice was a low rumble, and Rift's was a high-pitched crackle. They sounded like a strange, geological chord.

"I provide the movement," Plate said, giving the foam piece another microscopic push. "The slow, unstoppable separation."

"And I am the separation itself!" Rift buzzed, glowing brightly in the ever-so-slightly-wider gap. "You can't have one without the other. If he doesn't move, I don't exist. If I don't open up, he can't go anywhere. We're a team."

Maya looked at the globe, then at her tablet. The blinking red dot was right on top of the seam that Rift was lighting up. "So Iceland is a place where two plates are… moving apart?" she asked. "That's why it has so many earthquakes and volcanoes?"

"She gets it!" Rift fizzed.

Plate gave a slow, deep nod that seemed to take a full ten seconds. "The motion," it rumbled, "has a shape. A geometry. The shaking happens along our edges. You just found one."