Plate tectonics, an elegantly simple model

Plate tectonics appeals to me as the most elegant model of physical processes since Newton. It provides a unified basis for over 200 years of hard-slogging geological research.
Molten rock surfaces and solidifies into new crust at the mid-ocean ridge. The newly solidified crust slides away from the ridge at about the rate that fingernails grow. When the oceanic crust encounters a continent that can't slide with it the oceanic crust dives under the lighter and thicker continental crust. The wrinkling from pushing the two together forms an offshore trench and an inshore mountain range. New continental crust forms from the sediment scraped off the top of the thinner, heavier oceanic crust. As the oceanic crust dives deeper into the earth and gets heated bubbles of molten rock rise from it and add to the continental crust above, pushing mountains higher. That, in a nutshell, is plate tectonics.
Continental geology is so difficult to study and visualize essentially because the continents consist of all of the foam scraped from the top of oceanic crust since the plane cooled, plus all of the lighter remelt as the oceanic crust dives back into the mantle, plus whatever bending, stretching and erosion has happened to the rocks since they were first scraped or bubbled off. I find it amazing that geologists prior to the mid-twentieth century, when we got tools to study the ocean bottom, were able to make as much sense as they did from the reworked continental mess.