howdy everyone and finally our final plate tectonic boundary video on transform boundaries transform boundaries are different than convergent and divergent nothing is spreading apart nothing is colliding together instead we just have two tectonic plates that are sliding past one another now these occur most commonly along segments of the mid ocean ridge and I'll show you that here in a second but the most famous transform boundary I think is the San Andreas fault zone in Southern California which you probably all have heard about before and we'll talk more about now transform boundaries again nothing is splitting apart nothing is colliding so we're not creating any crust here and we're not destroying any crust here so we're actually not going to see any volcanoes here however we still have hazards associated with this because this process is also not a smooth process our lithosphere is very rigid very irregular these things are sliding past one another or trying to slide past one another but they get stuck as well and when they get stuck they're still trying to move that pressure is building and building and building until it exceeds its strength and it finally slips and breaks that's our earthquake so we're still getting moderate to large earthquakes with transformed boundaries they are still dangerous places on Earth and again that San Andreas fault is probably the most famous one that we all think about and we know that California is plagued with earthquakes and this is the exact reason why it's this transformed boundary now transformed boundaries are most commonly found at the mid ocean ridge so here in red is our mid ocean ridge these are our divergent plate boundaries this is where we have new oceanic um crust forming so we have new oceanic crust being um formed here because the plates are splitting apart allowing that hot mantle material to rise up and push the old stuff away but it's not happening at the same rate everywhere so some places are creating more crust faster than others so this creates a little bit difference and are spreading and those yellow segments in between are transform boundaries that are accommodating that difference in speed so those cracks you see in the middle of the ocean the horizontal displacement those are our transform boundaries the red are our divergent boundaries that's where most of our transform boundaries are but the San Andreas fault is a transformed plate boundary between the North American plate and the Pacific plate so this is where we have those two plates that are sliding past one another and here in this image you'll see the plate boundary itself with this line we have locked parts and we have creeping parts now which part do you think is probably going to be the most concerning the locked parts right this means that the plates are stuck they're still trying to move though creeping is actually a good thing it means it's still able to move we're not building up as much pressure because it's able to move but those locked parts they're locked they're stuck but it's still trying to move so we have lots of pressure that is building up on those red segments those locked segments and if you'll notice some of the cities that are associated with this San Francisco Los Angeles these are disasters waiting to happen my friends our transform boundary is locked and at some point enough pressure is going to build up where it's going to become unlocked and that energy is going to be released all at once in the form of an earthquake so here's what the San Andreas fault in Southern California looks like now we're not seeing any mountains um that are being created here because nothing's colliding or subducting you don't see any volcanoes there's not a whole lot of crazy features but you can see features being displaced that's one of the clues that we're dealing with the transform boundary here what do I mean by that well if you look at this river or this gully when it hits that plate boundary you don't see it continue on the other side that's because it's been moved over here you see this mountain range hits the plate boundary mountain range is is gone on the other side because that whole mountain range has been moved so this displaces features it doesn't really create them if that makes sense so we have no new crust being created here no crust being destroyed here so no volcanoes but we're still dealing with significant earthquake activity when those things get locked and those are our three types of plate boundaries: divergent convergent and transform