ROCK on!!!
This rock type is formed from the cooling and solidification of molten rock (magma or lava).
What is Igneous Rock
These massive, slow-moving bodies of ice are responsible for carving out U-shaped valleys.
What are Glaciers?
This Eon, whose name means "hidden life," covers about 88% of Earth's history, spanning from the planet's formation until about 541 million years ago.
What is precambrian
This fundamental law states that in an undisturbed sequence of rocks, the oldest layers are at the bottom and the youngest are at the top.
What is the Law of Superposition?
This "Supercontinent" existed about 300 million years ago before breaking apart into the continents we see today.
What is Pangea?
Intense heat and pressure transform existing rocks into this category, often creating "foliation" or layers.
What is Metamorphic Rock
This "colorful" Arizona landmark was primarily carved by the erosive power of the Colorado River over millions of years.
What is the Grand Canyon?
Known as the "Age of Reptiles," this Era included the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods.
What is the Mesazoic Era
This term describes a gap in the geologic record, usually caused by erosion, where a rock layer is "missing" from the timeline.
What is an Unconformity?
This is the process where one tectonic plate is forced downward into the mantle beneath another plate.
What is Subduction?
This is the only rock type where you are likely to find fossils, as they form from compressed layers of sand, silt, and organic matter.
What is Sedimentary
What is Ice wedging
We are currently living in this Epoch, which began about 11,700 years ago after the last major ice age (though some scientists argue we've entered the "Anthropocene").
What is the Cenozoic Era
If an igneous intrusion or a fault cuts through an existing rock layer, this rule states that the feature doing the cutting must be younger.
What is the Law of Cross-Cutting Relationships?
The San Andreas Fault is a famous example of this type of boundary, where two plates slide past each other horizontally.
What is a Transform boundary?
From the Greek for "broken," these sedimentary rocks are made of fragments of pre-existing rocks, like conglomerate or shale.
What is a Clastic Rock
This process slowly breaks the rocks over many years to create cliffs and beached that we have today.
What is weathering
These organisms are very simple and existed during the first era of earth history, the precambrian era
What are unicellular organisums
Geologists use these specific types of fossils—which were widespread but lived for only a short period—to identify and date the layers they are found in.
What are Index Fossils?
This massive underwater mountain range was formed by a divergent plate boundary in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
What is the Mid-Atlantic Ridge?
This glassy, black igneous rock forms so quickly that no crystals have time to grow.
What is obsidian
This process caused the Statue of Liberty, which is made of copper and was once brown, but is now green.
What is oxidation
This specific method of dating uses the decay of isotopes, like Carbon-14 or Uranium-238, to find the absolute age of a rock or fossil.
What is absolute dating
In radiometric dating, this is the specific amount of time it takes for half of the parent isotopes in a sample to decay into daughter isotopes.
What is a Half-Life?
This is the rigid, outermost shell of the Earth, comprising the crust and the upper portion of the mantle.
What is the Lithosphere?