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| Tectonics (tekton meaning builder) |
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Definition
| The general term used by early geologists to describe mountain building, volcanoes, and other processes that construct geologic features on Earth's surface |
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| Large-scale movements of continents over the globe |
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| Gondwanaland (or Gondwana) |
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| Eduard Suess' theory that the combined present-day southern continents had onced formed a single giant continent called this |
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| Greek for "all lands," it was the supercontinent proposed by Alfred Wegener |
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| Convection in Earth's mantle can push and pull the continents apart, creating new oceanic crust through this process |
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| Plates move apart and new lithosphere is created |
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| Plates come together and one is recycled back into the mantle (plate area decreases) |
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| Transform-fault boundaries |
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Definition
| Plates slide horizontally past each other (plate area remains constant) |
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| An example is the Mid-Atlantic Ridge |
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| Continental Plate Separation |
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| Examples are the East African Rift and the Rhine Valley |
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| The act of one oceanic plate descending beneath the other in an ocean-ocean convergence |
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| The cold lithospheric slab descends, the pressure increases, and the water trapped in the rocks of subducted oceanic crust is squeezed out. It rises into the asthenosphere above the slab. This fluid causes the mantle to melt, producing a chain of volcanoes, called this, on the seafloor beneath the trench. |
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| Fractures along which relative displacement occurs as horizontal slip between the adjacent blocks (San Andreas Fault is a prime example, the Pacific Plate slides by the North American Plate) |
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| Long, narrow bands that are parallel and almost perfectly symmetrical with respect to the crest of the mid-ocean ridge. The magnetic field alternates between high and low values in these. |
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| (1) Earth's magnetic field reverses its diection in intervals of tens of thousands of years and (2) seafloor spreading gradually moves newly magnetized crust away from the ridge crest |
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| The velocity at which one plate moves relative to the other plate |
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| Contours that connect rocks of equal age |
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