Plate Tectonics
These are features that form along convergent plate boundaries and are the deepest parts of the ocean.
What are ocean trenches?
When a denser plate is pushed beneath another plate into the mantle.
What is subduction?
This is the most common feature of the ocean floor, a large stretch of flat ocean floor covered in layers of sediment.
What is the abyssal plain?
This is the ocean floor feature that hydrothermal vents form at.
Mid-ocean ridges.
This type of sediment is created from the remains of once living things such as seashells and plankton skeletons.
This is the person who came up with the theory of plate tectonics.
Who was Alfred Wegener?
This is the name of the supercontinent created by all the other continents put together.
What is Pangea?
These underwater volcanoes are formed at hot spots near convergent boundaries.
What are seamounts?
This is the process that bacteria use to turn chemicals like hydrogen sulfide into food. Hint: it's like photosynthesis.
What is chemosynthesis?
This type of sediment is created from weathered and eroded bits of rock.
What is lithogenous sediment?
This type of plate boundary does not create or destroy crust, the plates slide past each other.
What is a transform boundary?
These are currents of dense, sediment rich water that create submarine canyons in the continental slope.
What are turbidity currents?
This is a part of the continental margin with the continental land on one side and the continental slope on the other side.
What is the continental shelf?
This allows Riftia tube worms to get their energy through a symbiotic relationship.
What is chemosynthetic bacteria?
This type of sediment is made from material from space such as tektites and meteorites.
What is cosmogenous sediment?
This type of plate boundary is associated with mid-ocean ridges.
What is a divergent boundary.
This is the less steep base of the continental slope.
What is the continental rise?
This is the steep drop off that comes from the continental shelf and leads to the continental rise.
What is the continental slope?
Name two organisms that live at a hydrothermal vent?
Various answers
This is an organism that biogenous sediment can be made out of the remains of.
Could be plankton, clams, mussels, oysters, coquina, diatoms, etc.
Name 3 pieces of evidence for plate tectonics
Could be magnetic stripes on the seafloor, the fit of the continents and mountain ranges, fossil and rock distribution, etc.
This is what we call molten rock that is under the Earth's crust.
What is magma?
This is what forms when a volcanic island no longer has an active volcano, and the rock erodes away. It erodes to create this flat topped underwater structure.
What is a guyot?
Hydrothermal vents spew water at up to these temperatures.
600-700 degrees Fahrenheit
This is an area where the sediment is made of at least 30% biogenic material.
What is an ooze?