It’s a sticky question that has graduate student Loes van Dam covered in corn syrup by the end of a day in the lab. So she designed and built a large tank, filled it with 2,000 pounds (907 kilograms) of corn syrup, and added six counter-rotating belts to study how tectonic plates drift and shift. The corn syrup represents the Earth’s mantle, which melts to form magma at volcanoes and ridges. The belts are the drifting and shifting tectonic plates. She always picked up rocks that fascinated her and got her first introduction to plate tectonics in a third-grade earth science class.

Source: National Post March 20, 2018 04:07 UTC