CDA Study Guide-Inside the Earth
1. The interior (inner most layers) of the Earth are the inner core, outer
core, and mantle.
2. The lithosphere is made of the upper mantle and crust.
3. The mantle has the greatest thickness of all the layers of the Earth.
4. As you go deeper in the Earth the heat and pressure INCREASES.
5. The crust is less dense than the mantle, that means the particles are
farther apart and it also would weigh less.
6. When an island forms because of volcanic activity, this means that
magma (liquid rock) flows from the mantle and cools on the surface.
7. Rifts and mid-ocean ridges are most likely to occur where the plates are
diverging (moving apart).
8. The tectonic plates that move on the Earth’s surface because of the hot
material (rock-magma-asthenosphere) in the mantle.
9. The movement of Earth’s tectonic plates causes changes in the shape of
land surfaces.
10.A tsunami is a gigantic wave created by an Earthquake under the ocean
floor. Hawaii is a state that can be affected by tsunamis.
11.Volcanoes that erupt can cause changes in the weather on Earth.
Volcanoes can spew dust into the air which can cause a decrease in the
amount of SOLAR ENERGY that reaches the Earth. If this happens,
temperatures in certain parts of the world can be lower than normal
because of this fact.
12.If you were to find fossils along a banks of a creek, in three different
layers of soil (the top layer is the youngest and the bottom layer is the
oldest), the bottom layer would contain the fossil that is oldest.
***Remember Superposition
13.If a fossil of an ocean fish was found in rock on top of a mountain, this
probably means that the mountain was raised up after the fish died
because of Plate Tectonics.
14.Fossil reveal or show that changes in the Earth’s climate and surface
feature happen over time.
15.If you found a fossil of a palm tree in Alaska, this would show that the
CLIMATE of Alaska was once warmer than it is now.
16.Alfred Wegener hypothesized (came up with an educated guess), that
there was once a gigantic supercontinent named Pangaea that existed
about 200 million years ago, and identical fossils are located directly
opposite each other on widely separated continents (South America and
Africa).
17.When two tectonic plates slip past each other, like along transform
boundaries and strike-slip faults, Earthquakes are mostly likely to
happen or occur here.
18.The crust of the Earth (lithosphere) is a thin, hard, outer layer of the
Earth made of various minerals.
19.Volcanic activity (volcanoes being formed and erupting), can shape the
lithosphere by raising mountains and adding rock from cooling magma.
20.When an oceanic plate and a continental plate CONVERGE (move
together), subduction (subsidence) will happen and the most dense
plate will move below the less dense plate because it is heavier. The
oceanic plate usually moves below the continental plate.