Plate Tectonics Vocabulary
Terms
Ali White
1-24-12
Core1
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Inner Core
A ball of hot, solid metals
It is solid.
It is about 2400 km in diameter.
Intense pressure makes it solid.
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Outer Core
A layer of liquid metals that surround the
inner core.
The pressure is lower than the inner core.
The metal is liquid.
It is about 2300 km thick.
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Mantle
Hot rock that is less dense than the
metallic core.
It is Earth’s thickest layer.
It measures nearly 2900 kilometers.
It is not solid.
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Crust
The thin layer of rock above Earth’s
mantle
It is the layer we walk on
It is the thinnest layer
It is solid
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Lithosphere
The layer in Earth made up of the crust
and the rigid rock of the upper mantle
It is the crust
The very upper part of the mantle is solid
rock
It does not include the sky
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Asthenosphere
The layer in Earth’s upper mantle directly
under the lithosphere
It lies below the lithosphere
It has a relatively low density
Seismic waves pass slowly through this
layer
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Tectonic Plate :{)
One of the large, moving pieces into which
Earth’s lithosphere is broken and which
commonly carry both oceanic and
continental crust
There are 10 different plates
They are part of the lithosphere
They are on top of the athenosphere
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Continental Drift
The hypothesis that Earth’s continents
move on Earths’ surface
It was first put out by Abraham Ortelius
It was first introduced in 1596
Plate tectonics helped the theory of the
continental drift.
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Pangaea
A hypothetical supercontinent that once
included all of the landmasses on Earth
The name comes from Ancient Greek
They say it formed 300 million years ago
They say it began to break up about 200
million years ago
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Convection Current
A circulation pattern in which material is
heated and rises in one area, then cools
and sinks in another area
Convection is caused by them.
They circle throughout Earth’s layers
They are very important
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Divergent Boundary
A boundary along which two tectonic
plates move apart
It is related to plate tectonics
It is part of the process of two plates
moving apart
It occurs in the lithosphere
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Convergent Boundary
A boundary along which two tectonic
plates push together
In plate tectonics, a convergent boundary, also known as a
destructive plate boundary (because of subduction), is an
actively deforming region where two (or more) tectonic plates or
fragments of lithosphere move toward one another and collide. As
a result of pressure, friction, and plate material melting in the
mantle, earthquakes and volcanoes are common near convergent
boundaries
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Transform Boundary
A boundary along which two tectonic
plates scrape past each other
A transform fault or transform boundary, also known as
conservative plate boundary since these faults neither create nor
destroy lithosphere, is a type of fault whose relative motion is
predominantly horizontal in either sinistral or dextral direction
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Magnetic Reversal
A switch in the direction of Earth’s
magnetic field so that the magnetic north
pole becomes the magnetic south pole
A geomagnetic reversal is a change in the Earth's magnetic field such
that the positions of magnetic north and magnetic south are
interchanged.
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Hot Spot
An area where a column of hot material
rises from deep within a planet’s mantle
Subduction
The process by which an oceanic tectonic
plate sinks under another plate
In geology, subduction is the process that takes place at convergent boundaries by
which one tectonic plate moves under another tectonic plate, sinking into the Earth's
mantle, as the plates converge. These 3D regions of mantle downwellings are
known as "Subduction Zones
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Source For Facts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki