Climate & Weather Systems
This term refers to the average year-after-year conditions of temperature precipitation winds and clouds in an area.
What is climate?
Day and night on Earth are caused by this specific planetary movement.
What is Earth's rotation on its axis?
To be a mineral a substance must be inorganic meaning it cannot contain any materials from this source.
What are living things (or once-living things)?
This German scientist originally proposed the revolutionary hypothesis of continental drift.
Who was Alfred Wegener?
This is the dynamic layer of gases that completely surrounds the Earth.
What is the atmosphere?
These are the two major factors used by scientists to classify different climates.
What are precipitation and temperature?
Seasons occur on Earth because our planet's axis is oriented in this specific way as it revolves around the sun.
What is tilted?
This is the hardest known mineral on the Mohs hardness scale.
What is a diamond?
This type of tectonic plate boundary occurs where two plates are moving away from each other such as at a mid-ocean ridge.
What is a divergent boundary?
This critical chemical layer in the atmosphere protects living things on Earth by absorbing harmful ultraviolet (UV) radiation.
What is the ozone layer?
This specific type of storm is characterized by a tropical low-pressure area that forms over warm ocean water with winds of 119 km/h or higher.
What is a hurricane?
This is the primary force responsible for causing ocean tides on Earth.
What is the gravitational pull of the moon?
Magma that cools very slowly deep beneath Earth's surface will form minerals with this type of crystal size.
What are large crystals?
Most geologists initially rejected the idea of continental drift because Wegener could not explain this crucial detail.
What is the force/mechanism that could actually move the continents?
As you rise higher and climb upward through the layers of the atmosphere this happens to the air pressure.
What is it decreases?
This weather pattern forms periodically in the tropical Pacific Ocean, disrupting global weather.
What is El Niño?
These two specific cosmic forces combine perfectly to keep the Earth locked in its stable orbit around the sun.
What are inertia and gravity?
This is the scientific term used to describe a mineral that splits apart unevenly rather than along flat surfaces.
What is a fracture?
This deep-ocean feature forms when a dense oceanic plate collides with a less dense continental plate and sinks into the mantle.
What is a deep-ocean trench (formed via subduction)?
This process is how the sun produces its immense light and thermal energy within its core.
What is nuclear fusion?
This phenomenon often called the 'butterfly effect' explains why long-term weather forecasting is not always 100% accurate.
What is the concept that a small unpredictable change in the weather today can cause a massive change a week later?
In the Southern Hemisphere this astronomical event occurs specifically when the sun is farthest south in the sky.
What is the summer solstice?
This is the reason why metamorphic rocks are rarely ever formed directly at the Earth's surface.
What is because they require intense heat and high pressure found deep underground?
This is what happens when two continental plates collide as opposed to an oceanic-continental collision.
What is they crash and squeeze upwards to form mountain ranges?
This is the specific property or variable that determines exactly how long a star will live.
What is its mass?