Plate tectonics in the twenty-first century

The emergence of plate tectonics in the late 1960s led to a paradigm shift from fixism to mobilism of global tectonics, providing a unifying context for the previously disparate disciplines of Earth sciences. Although plate tectonics was originally defined by the kinematics of the Earth's outer shell (lithosphere) on the underlying asthenosphere, a number of dynamic interpretations for its operation have developed in the past five decades.