Given that San Francisco is located on the North American...

Given that San Francisco is located on the North American Plate and Los Angles is located on the Pacific Plate, are these two cities getting closer together or farther apart over time?
a. Closer
b. Farther

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Key Concepts

Relative Plate Motion

This concept refers to the movement of tectonic plates in relation to one another. In regions where different plates host adjacent geographic locations, each area's motion is dictated by the dynamics of its underlying plate. Understanding this relative motion is key to determining whether areas on different plates are moving closer together or farther apart over time.

Plate Tectonics

This concept explains that the Earth's outer shell is divided into several large, rigid plates that move over the underlying, more fluid mantle. The movement of these plates is fundamental to understanding many geological phenomena, including earthquakes, volcanic activity, and the shifting positions of continents over time.

Plate Boundaries

Plate boundaries are the edges where two tectonic plates interact. There are three main types of boundaries—divergent, convergent, and transform. Each type is characterized by a different kind of movement and interaction between the plates, which in turn affects the geological features and relative motion of regions situated on different plates.

Transcript

00:01 Hey, what's up guys, it's eric, and today we're asked with finding the nautical distance between seattle and san francisco.

00:08 And we're just going to assume that the two cities have the same longitude.

00:12 So the only difference between the coordinates of those two cities are the degrees latitude.

00:17 So i've gone ahead and i've copied down the latitude measurements for seattle and san francisco.

00:23 But in order to compare the two and find the distance in article miles between those two cities, we need to convert everything into.

00:31 Degrees.

00:31 So instead of using the dms system, degrees minutes, a second system, we're going to have to convert everything directly into degrees.

00:40 So let's get started.

00:41 With seattle, it's 47 degrees and 36 minutes in latitude.

00:46 Separating these two, we get 47 degrees and 36 minutes again.

00:50 Now we're going to multiply this 36 minutes by our conversion factor, our special number one, which doesn't change the mathematical integrity of this 36 minutes.

01:00 It maintains the same meaning as 36 minutes, but it converts 36 minutes into different units.

01:09 So after applying this, what we're going to do is we're going to multiply out this 36 with this conversion factor.

01:20 36 divided by 60, and canceling out the minutes unit gets us the degrees unit...

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