Continental Accretion

Real World Example

Imagine you're trying to build a larger snowman by adding snow to an existing, smaller snowball. Just like you gather bits of snow and pack them onto the snowball to make it bigger, continental accretion is the process where bits of Earth's crust and sediments are added to a tectonic plate at a subduction zone, making the continent larger. In this analogy, the snowball is the tectonic plate, the added snow represents the material accreting at the subduction zone, and the growing snowman is like the expanding continent.