Continental Connections
This is the name of the supercontinent where all landmasses were joined 250 million years ago.
What is Pangaea?
These are the preserved remains of ancient plants and animals found in rock layers.
What are fossils?
This is the rigid, top layer of the Earth that is broken into tectonic plates.
What is the lithosphere?
This is the thinnest, outermost layer of the Earth where we live.
What is the crust?
According to the Law of Superposition, this is where you would find the oldest rock layer in a cliff.
What is at the bottom?
This is the scientific theory that the continents have moved across the Earth over millions of years.
What is Continental Drift?
This type of evidence states that some species of ancient animals and plants must have lived (and died) on one continuous landmass.
What is fossil evidence?
This is the soft, "plastic" layer of the mantle that the plates float on.
What is the asthenosphere?
This is the hottest and deepest layer of the Earth.
What is the core?
In an undisturbed stack of rock, the layer found at the very top is known as this.
What is the youngest layer?
The coastlines of South America and Africa are famous because they fit together like these.
What are puzzle pieces?
Geologists found these "ice scratches" in hot, tropical places, proving the land used to be near the cold South Pole.
What are glacial scratches (or striations)?
This circular motion of heating and cooling in the mantle moves the plates like a conveyor belt.
What are convection currents?
This layer makes up most of Earth's volume and is located directly below the crust.
What is the mantle?
Based on the Rule of Crosscutting, the relative age of an intrusion/disturbance into other rock layers must be this.
What is younger than the layers it intrudes into?
This is the scientist who first suggested that the continents were moving.
Who is Alfred Wegener?
Scientists found matching types of these across the ocean, which had to have formed under specific conditions, proving the continents were together.
What are rock layers or mountain belts?
In a convection current, hot material does this because it is less dense than the material around it.
What is rises?
This is the liquid layer of earth that creates the geomagnetic field.
What is the outer core?
If a marine shell fossil is found in a desert, it proves the desert was once covered by this.
What is an ocean?
For a long time, other scientists did not believe the continents moved because Wegener could not explain this.
What is the mechanism for how plates moved?
Finding glacial deposits in countries that are now tropical proves that the continent used to be further away from this warm area.
What is the equator? (0 degrees latitude)
This is the internal heat source that powers the movement of Earth's mantle.
What is the Earth's core?
The inner core remains a solid instead of a liquid because of this physical force.
What is extreme pressure?
This is the term for figuring out if a rock layer is older or younger than the layers around it.
What is relative age?