Volcanoes
Magma once it reaches the Earth's surface.
What is lava?
The name of the supercontinent present before plates drifted to their modern locations.
What is Pangaea?
This law states that in undisturbed layers of rock, the bottom layers will be older than the layers of rock on top.
What is the Law of Superposition?
What are the three chemical layers of the Earth, from outside to inside?
Crust, Mantle, Core
The three main types of plate boundaries
What are convergent, transform, and convergent boundaries?
Where almost all of the world's volcanoes are located.
What are tectonic plate boundaries?
The idea that continents were once connected and slowly moved to their current locations.
What is continental drift?
The eon we are currently living in that saw biodiversification of multicellular organisms, including the evolution of humans.
What is the Phanerozoic Eon?
What is the crust?
What is a convergent boundary?
Why don't volcanoes form just anywhere on Earth?
Because the Earth's surface is solid and magma needs cracks to reach the surface.
The first person to suspect that the continents may be moving.
Who was Alfred Wegener?
A method used in absolute dating that examines a rock's physical properties in order to determine how old it is.
What is radioactive dating?
This layer includes the crust and the upper mantle.
What is the lithosphere?
The type of plate boundary most associated with earthquakes, two plates sliding past each other.
What is a transform plate boundary?
What happens at a divergent boundary that allows volcanoes to form?
Plates move apart, allowing magma to rise to the surface.
Several important pieces of evidence (3) supporting the theory of plate tectonics shifting.
What are rock formations (matching age and style across oceans), fossils (same land species across oceans from each other), paleoclimatic evidence (coal found in arctic regions; glaciers found in tropical regions)?
"Single worst event life on Earth has ever experienced," 96% of marine life went extinct during this mass extinction that was caused by a massive volcanic event int he Siberian Traps.
What was the Permian-Triassic Extinction?
This layer is responsible for convection currents that move plates.
What is the asthenosphere (or mantle)?
The type of plate boundary that is the result of two plates moving away from each other, creating a trench.
Why is Hawaii considered unusual compared to most volcanoes?
It formed over a hotspot in the middle of a plate, not at a boundary.
Coal has been found in modern day glacial regions. There is evidence of ancient glaciers in modern-day rainforests. How do these facts serve as evidence supporting continental drift?
hint* climate is largely based on distance from the equator.
The continents moved to different climate zones over time.
During this mass extinction, an asteroid about 7.5 miles across impacted the Gulf of Mexico at 45,000 miles per hour. It sparked climate change by flinging dust and debris into the atmosphere, causing a global mass cooling. 76% of life went extinct, including the dinosaurs.
What was the Cretaceous-Paleogene Extinction?
Why can tectonic plates move on the asthenosphere?
The asthenosphere (lower mantle) is moving semi-liquid. Its motion allows for the solid lithosphere (crust and upper mantle) to move.
Large mountain ranges form at this kind of convergent boundary.
What is a continental-continental convergent plate boundary?