Spheres and Maps
This Earth sphere includes living things like plants, animals, and humans.
What is the biosphere?
This term describes how much sunlight a surface reflects back into space.
What is albedo?
Fossils are preserved remains or traces of this.
What is past life?
Alfred Wegener proposed this idea explaining how continents move over time.
What is continental drift?
his Earth sphere includes oceans, rivers, and groundwater.
What is the hydrosphere?
Most of Earth’s freshwater is stored in this form rather than rivers or lakes.
What are glaciers and ice caps?
This Earth cycle includes evaporation, condensation, and precipitation.
What is the water cycle?
This law states that in undisturbed rock layers, the oldest layers are found at the bottom.
What is the Law of Superposition?
This supercontinent was once made up of all Earth’s landmasses.
What is Pangaea?
These preserved remains help scientists understand past environments and evolution.
What are fossils?
On a topographic map, contour lines that are very close together indicate this type of land feature.
What is a steep slope?
A mineral must be naturally occurring, inorganic, solid, and have these two defining characteristics.
What are a definite chemical composition and crystalline structure?
This type of dating determines the order of events but not exact ages.
What is relative dating?
New oceanic crust forms at this type of plate boundary.
What is a divergent boundary?
The youngest oceanic crust is always found near this feature.
What is a mid-ocean ridge?
This mapping system uses imaginary lines to locate positions north/south and east/west on Earth.
What are latitude and longitude?
This hardness scale is used to compare how easily minerals scratch each other.
What is the Mohs hardness scale?
This radioactive concept describes the time it takes for half of a parent isotope to decay.
What is half-life?
Earthquakes are especially common at this boundary where plates slide past each other.
What is a transform boundary?
This principle states that rock layers are originally deposited horizontally.
What is the Principle of Original Horizontality?
Explain one way a volcanic eruption shows interactions between all four Earth systems.
What is magma from the geosphere entering the atmosphere, affecting climate, impacting the biosphere, and interacting with water in the hydrosphere?
Describe one complete pathway through which a sedimentary rock could become a metamorphic rock.
What is burial, heat and pressure causing metamorphism?
Explain why carbon-14 dating cannot be used to date most rocks.
What is because rocks are too old and carbon-14 decays too quickly?
Explain how mantle convection drives the movement of tectonic plates.
What is heat from Earth’s interior causing convection currents that move plates?
Explain how human activity can affect Earth’s energy balance and climate.
What is increasing greenhouse gases or changing albedo through land use?