Earth Science
Terms
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- terristrial planets
- solid, rocklike, and dense planets; the inner planets - Mercury, Venus, Earth & Mars
- space probes
- rocket-launched space vehicles loaded with instruments and cameras to gather data
- asteriods
- thousands of minor planets in space
- Ring of Fire
- zone that circles the Pacific Ocean where many volcanic eruptions occur
- convergent boundry
- where two continental plates meet and converge or collide
- comet
- a mass of frozen gases, dust, and rocky particles that orbits the sun
- divergent boundry
- where two continental plates move away from one another
- plates
- large moving pieces of Earth's crust and mantle
- continental drift
- the theory that Earth's continents have moved over time
- hot spots
- areas where volcanoes form because of powerful pressures that push magma up through the crust
- mantle
- the middle zone of the earth
- metallic core
- the most interior zone of the earth
- transform boundry
- where two plates slide past one another, or in the same direction, but at different speeds
- Richter scale
- a scale for describing the measurement of the seismic waves of an earthquake
- solar system
- the planets that move around a star
- theory
- an organized set of observations, ideas, experimental evidence, and thought that is designed to predict or explain an event or phenomenon
- orbit
- a planet's path through space and around the sun
- crust
- the surface of the earth
- meteors
- smal chunks of orbiting matter that have reached Earth's atmoshpere
- lava
- magma that rises to Earth's surface
- epicenter
- the area on Earth's surface above the center of an earthquake
- lithosphere
- the layer of Earth made up of the crust and the upper mantle and is divided into seven large and several smaller pieces of rock
- plate tectonics theory
- the idea that Earth's lithosphere is broken into several large pieces of land that move around on Earth's convecting asthenosphere
- eclipse
- when an object passes into the shadow of another object
- subduction
- when one continental plate slips under the plate with which it is colliding
- diurnal tides
- where there is only one high tide and one low tide each day
- magma
- molten rock inside Earth
- fault
- place in Earth's crust where a rock mass has broken and moved in relation to another rock mass
- ellipse
- an oval shape
- semidiurnal tides
- when an area has two high tides and two low tides daily
- compression
- the process of squeezing together; one way mountains ar formed
- Jovian planets
- the large, outer planets made of gas - Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, & Neptune
- crustal movement
- the movement of the lithospheric pieces that causes the continents to shift
- geologic areas
- major geologic time divisions
- rotation
- a spinning motion, Earth rotates on its axis