Scientific Methods
Information and data collected to find someone guilty in a trial and to support a scientific idea.
What is evidence?
All of the planets orbit the Sun in this flat plane.
What is the ecliptic?
It's made mostly of solid iron and nickel.
What is the inner core?
Once an island, now smashing into Eurasia to make the Himalayas.
What is India?
The earliest Eon.
What is the Hadean?
Iron in Earth's core is very heavy compared to silica due to this property (g/cm3).
What is density?
The process of separating the planet into layers.
What is differentiation?
It's composed of the crust and uppermost mantle.
What is the lithosphere?
The name of the current magnetic chron, it has lasted 700,000 years.
What is the Brunhes?
The time it takes for 75% of a parent isotope to turn into daughter isotopes.
What are two half-lives?
An "educated guess" and preliminary idea to explain something with science.
What is a hypothesis?
The mineral that is found in great abundance in the crust of the Moon.
What is plagioclase feldspar.
The rock that's found in the mantle, made mostly of olivine and pyroxene.
What is peridotite?
A mineral that's hard to get rid of, and holds evidence of early Earth events like the formation of continental crust and of life on Earth.
What is zircon?
This event is responsible for the many impact craters on the moon and the higher amount of water on Earth.
What is the Late Heavy Bombardment?
Planets in the inner solar system are made of these materials that form solids at high temperatures.
What are refractory materials?
Rock that forms oceanic crust on Earth and the dark areas on the Moon.
What is basalt?
Some types of earthquake waves are blocked by this because it's liquid.
What is the outer core?
The minerals in low-density granite of continental crust include feldspar, mica, and this very common mineral.
What is quartz?
A meteorite that may have contributed significant amounts of water and the ingredients of life to Earth.
What is a carbonaceous chondrite?
The age of the oldest fossils on earth, but not necessarily when life began.
What is 3.48 billion years?
The oldest rocks on Earth, about 4 billion years old.
What is the Acasta Gneiss?
The "dip angle" of the Earth's magnetic field at different latitudes.
What is the "inclination?"
A dipping zone of earthquakes above a subducting plate.
What is the Wadati-Benioff Zone?
The migration of Jupiter and the other giant planets into the inner solar system and back out again.
What is the Grand Tack?