Ch 10 Vocabulary
Terms
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- Convergent Boundary
- Boundary between two plates that are colliding creating mountains, volcanoes deep-sea trenches.
- Pangaea
- Single large landmass made up of all the continents connected together that broke apart about 200 million years ago.
- Lithosphere
- rigid, outer-most layer of Earth that is about 100 km thick, and is composed of the crust and part of the upper mantle.
- Divergent Boundary
- Boundary between two plates that are moving apart creating mid-ocean ridges or rift valleys.
- Plate
- Section of Earth's lithosphere that are composed of oceanic crust, continental crust, and rigid upper mantle that move around on the plasticlike layer of the mantle.
- Plate Tectonics
- Theory that Earth's crust & upper mantle are broken into sections that move around on a plastic-like layer of the
- Seafloor Spreading
- Theory that magma from below Earth's crust is forced upward toward the surface at the mid-ocean ridge, flows from the cracks as the seafloor spreads apart & becomes solid as it cools, forming new seafloor.
- Asthenosphere
- Plastic-like layer below the lithosphere.
- Convection Current
- Cycle of heating, rising, cooling & sinking that is thought to be the force behind plate tectonics.
- Transform Fault Boundaries
- Boundary between two plates that are sliding past each other often creating earthquakes.
- Continental Drift
- Hypothesis proposed by Alfred Wegener that states that continents have moved slowly to their current locations on Earth.