The Dynamic Planet
Tectonics & Earthquakes
Weathering and Mass Movement
Fluvial and Aeolian
Oceans and Glaciers
100
The principle that the same physical processes active in the environment today have been operating throughout geologic time.
What is uniformitarianism?
100
The vertical elevation differences in the landscape.
What is relief?
100
Any process that wears away or rearranges landforms.
What is denudation?
100
A level below which a stream cannot erode its valley.
What is a base level?
100
The area that extends to the highest waterline and to the deepest water that can move sediments (~60m).
What is the littoral zone?
200
The principles of buoyancy and balance which explain certain vertical movements of Earth's crust.
What is isostasy?
200
The San Andreas fault type that makes it impossible for California to fall into the ocean.
What is a strike-slip?
200
Earth's external surface system powered by insolation, air, water, ice, and gravity.
What is the exogenic system?
200
A drainage pattern formed in steep landscapes.
What is a parallel drainage?
200
The coastal environment that occurs where temperature do not drop below freezing.
What are mangrove swamps?
300
Sea-floor spreading centers where upwelling material from the mantle forms new seafloor and lithospheric plates spread apart.
What are divergent boundaries?
300
The Wrangellia Terranes are an example of this form of crustal formation.
What are migrating terranes?
300
A balancing act between tectonic uplift and erosion.
What is the dynamic equilibrium model?
300
The unwanted expansion of the Earth's desert lands as a result of poor agricultural practices.
What is desertification?
300
Super cool scientists that study ice cores, sediment cores, tree rings, platonic foraminifera to study past climates.
Who are paleoclimatologists?
400
The Holocene, the Pleistocene, the Pliocene, and the Miocene.
What are the last four epochs?
400
A region where a craton is exposed at the surface and where there is little earthquake activity.
What is a continental shield?
400
Fall, slide, flow, and creep.
What are the four classes of mass movements?
400
The three primary causes of deserts.
What are high pressure cells, rain shadows, and continental effects?
400
Melting glaciers and thermal expansion of water.
What are causes of sea-level rise?
500
The Basin and Range, the Colorado Plateau, and the Mid-Rockey Mountains.
What are the three geologic regions in Utah?
500
The three ways to build a mountain.
What is Ocean-continental plate collision, ocean-ocean plate collision, and continent-continent plate collision?
500
Red Rock Canyon, melting grave stones, and stalactites.
What are examples of chemical weathering?
500
The sphinx in Egypt is surrounded by an Erg desert. Thus this type of aeolian erosion is happening.
What is abrasion?
500
Milankovitch's three important astronomical cycles.
What are eccentricity, obliquity, and precession?
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