A world beneath your feet

Little Continents

Small movements.
Mountains of change.

Plate movement 4 cm / year

Combined movement of both plates. Set to zero to stop their motion.

0.0million years

0km closer

Experiment running

Show labels & movement arrows

An illustrative cutaway. Shapes and depths are exaggerated; each experiment explores 20 million years.

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Little Continents

Move Earth’s plates. Build a mountain range, follow a sinking slab, and watch new ocean floor grow in a little geological cutaway.

An oceanic plate curving beneath a green continent, with a trench, layered crust and the descending slab visible in cross-section.

Enable JavaScript in a browser with WebGL 2 to run this interactive simulation.

Earth’s outer shell is broken into moving plates. Their edges can build mountains, carry ocean floor underground, or make new crust.

Collide squeezes two continents together. Their thick, buoyant crust crumples upward into mountains and downward into a deep root.
Sink shows subduction: a dense oceanic plate bends beneath a continent. A deep ocean trench forms where the plate turns downward.
Spread pulls two oceanic plates apart. Magma rises into the opening and cools into new crust. Orange and gold mark young rock; older rock is darker.
Plate movement is the combined speed of the two plates. A few centimetres each year can add up to hundreds of kilometres over millions of years. Set movement to zero to stop the plates; ocean crust still ages as time passes.

Try this: Choose Sink, pause time, and select Cross-section to follow the slab underground. Then compare Spread at two plate speeds. Each choice starts a fresh 20-million-year experiment. Shapes and depths are exaggerated: this is an illustration, not a prediction of Earth’s future.