Plate Tectonics
What causes tectonic plates to move and create plate boundaries, earthquakes, and volcanos?
Heat energy from Earth's mantle
The cutting down and removal of large areas of forests, vegetation, or grasslands, causing the increase of weathering and erosion.
Deforestation
Name the three primary layers of earth
Crust, Mantle, and Core
What happens to sharp jagged rocks when they are exposed to weathering and erosion for very long periods of time?
They become rounded and smooth
The continents were all once part of one supercontinent named
Pangaea
What kind of rock is the lithosphere (The crust and solid upper mantle) made of?
Hard, thin, and brittle rock.
In an undisturbed sequence of sedimentary rock layers, the oldest layers are at the bottom and the youngest layers are at the top.
Law of superposition
The innermost, solid layer of Earth that is made of iron and nickel.
Inner core
What causes desertification?
The loss of vegetation due to human activity and climate change.
If an atom has 5 protons and 7 neutrons, is it stable or radioactive? How do you know?
Radioactive because the nucleus has two more neutrons than protons.
Why are the same fossils found on the coasts of continents that are separated by oceans?
Continental drift moves tectonic plates and at one time all of the continents were connected.
A type of geological dating that gives an estimated number of years that something has existed. It gives an absolute or numerical age. Scientists can use radioactive dating to calculate these ages.
Absolute age
What layer of earth do tectonic plates move around on top of?
The mantle
How is a metamorphic rock formed?
Heat and pressure
Define radioactive dating
By understanding how quickly the radioactive material decays, scientists can estimate how long the process has been happening. The percent of decay directly tells scientists how old something is.
Name the three types of boundaries and give an example of one landform that forms at each of them.
Convergent- Mountains, trenches, volcanoes, islands. Divergent- Valleys, ridges, volcanoes. Transform- Faults and earthquakes.
The process where sediment is dropped in a new location after being carried by water, wind, ice, or gravity.
Deposition
The tectonic plates include the ______ and _______
The crust and upper mantle
What type of rock does deforestation contribute to making more of and why?
Sedimentary because it increases weathering and erosion.
A _________ is the amount of time it takes for half of the radioactive parent material in a sample to decay.
Half-life
What is subduction and what landforms can form at these boundaries?
When one plate sinks below another at a convergent boundary. Trenches and volcanoes.
Radioactive atoms are unstable and naturally change into different atoms over time
Radioactive decay
Activity in the mantle such as heat transfer causes the tectonic plates to move and form earthquakes and volcanos at plate boundaries.
Convection
What geological process creates sand dunes?
Wind erosion
What does relative age tell scientists about a material?
Tells scientists how old something is compared with something else.