What would the earth be like if we didn have plate tectonics?
In our solar system, all of the planets with a surface (not the gaseous planets) have plate tectonics, so there’s nothing to compare to. There are some things that are caused by plate tectonics that would cease to exist. There would be no mountains as we know them. Hills may still exist due to erosion but they wouldn’t be very big (I would think cliffs are a possibility). There would be no volcanoes. Almost all land would be near sea level, so flooding would be more common, and large storms would cause more of a problem for cities. Plant life would be less diverse, which brings up a very interesting argument made by the author Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel. He claims that the main reason that European society is more advanced than Native American and African society can be directly linked to crop diversity. His thesis would take too long to explain, but if you asked Jared Diamond this question, he said that the societies of the Native Americans and Africans would be about as
