The Noble Qur’an Reads: “And by the Earth that has its own fault” (86:12).
This Qur’anic verse comes in the context of an oath, while Allah (all glory be to Him) is definitely above giving such a pledge.
Consequently, this is understood as an emphasis for the special significance of the matter by which the oath is given.
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What is the special significance of the faults of our planet?
Early commentators on the Holy Qur’an saw this significance in the fracturing of the soil on watering it properly to give a free, safe passageway for the tender, green shoots coming out from the germinating seeds that are buried in the soil, in the form of sprouting plants, which is very true.
Once you place a seed in the soil and water it properly, it starts to germinate and a green shoot starts to penetrate the soil and grow into a fully developed plant, bearing beautiful flowers, delicious fruits or vegetables, and/or magnificent wood.
Such penetration takes place through tiny fractures that develop in the soil as a result of its inflation by hydrolysis and warping upwardly until thinning out to the point of fracturing.
However, Earth Scientists have recently discovered that the Earth’s outer rocky sphere (Lithosphere; which is about 65-70 km thick under the oceans and 100-150 km thick under continents) is broken up by a network of deep faults or rift systems into 12 main rigid plates, added to a number of small ones (microplates or platelets).
These plates float on a semi-molten plastic layer known as the asthenophere (the sphere of weakness) and move freely away from or towards each other, and past one another.
Earth’s Lithosphere and the Network of Faults
At one boundary of each plate (or microplate), molten rock (magma) rises to form strips of new ocean floor, and at the opposite boundary, the plate collides with the adjacent plate and moves to sink underneath it, to be gradually consumed in the underlying asthenophere at exactly the same rate of sea-floor spreading at the opposite side.
An ideal, rectangular, lithospheric plate would thus have one edge growing at a mid-oceanic rift system (divergent boundary), an opposite edge being gradually consumed into the asthenophere, below the over-riding or colliding plate (convergent boundary) with the other two edges sliding past the adjacent plates along a system of transform faults (transcurrent or transform fault boundaries).
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