Earth's Interior
Convection Currents and the Mantle
Drifting Continents
Sea-Floor Spreading
The Theory of Plate Tectonics
100
A force that builds up Earth's surface.
What is a constructive force?
100
Three types of heat transfer.
What are conduction, convection, and radiation.
100
The man who first hypothesized that the continents were moving.
Who is Alfred Wegener?
100
A process that continually adds new material to the ocean floor.
What is sea-floor spreading?
100
The geological theory that states that pieces of Earth's crust are in constant, slow motion, driven by convection currents in the mantle.
What is the theory of plate tectonics?
200
The three main layers of Earth.
What are crust, mantle, and core?
200
The transfer of heat through empty space.
What is conduction?
200
Three types of evidence that Wegener used to support his theory of continental drift.
What are landforms, fossils, and climate?
200
A device that bounces sound waves off underwater objects and records the echoes in order to map out the ocean floor.
What is sonar?
200
Pieces of earth's lithosphere.
What are plates?
300
Two conditions that change as you go deeper into the Earth's interior.
What are temperature and pressure?
300
The measure of how much mass is in a given space.
What is density?
300
A trace of an ancient organism that has been preserved in rock.
What is a fossil?
300
An underwater, divergent boundary, where new oceanic crust is created.
What is a mid-ocean ridge?
300
The three types of plate boundaries.
What are transform, divergent, and convergent?
400
Caused by the accelerated spinning of Earth's solid inner core (which spins faster than the Earth itself).
What is Earth's magnetic field?
400
The transfer of heat by the movement of a heated fluid.
What is convection?
400
The supercontinent that existed about 300 million years ago.
What is Pangaea?
400
The type of dense, igneous rock that is most common in oceanic crust?
What is basalt?
400
A surface feature caused by a divergent boundary between two continental plates.
What is a rift valley?
500
The two sub-layers of the upper mantle.
What are the lithosphere and the asthenosphere?
500
The sub-layer of the mantle in which convection currents form.
What is the asthenosphere?
500
The hypothesis that all the continents had once been joined together in a single landmass.
What is continental drift theory?
500
Formed by subduction of oceanic crust beneath continental crust at a convergent boundary.
What is a deep ocean trench?
500
It determines which plate comes out "on top" at a convergent boundary.
What is density of the plates?
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