Tectonic Processes
Terms
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- lithosphere
- consists of the crust and the rigid upper mantle
- Pangaea
- large supercontinent in the Mesozoic era
- convergent boundary
- plates moving together where crust is destroyed
- subduction boundary
- when one of two plates is descending beneath another
- transform boundary
- plates sliding past each other; neither creation nor destruction of crust
- boundary
- the place where two plates meet
- seafloor spreading
- thoery that states that new ocean crust is formed at ocean ridges and destroyed at deep-sea trenches
- plate tectonics theory
- theory explains that Earth's crust and rigid upper mantle broke into enormous slabs that move
- Mid-Atlantic Ridge
- divergent boundary in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean
- continental drift hypothesis
- proposal that Earth's continents had once been joined as a single landmass
- plates
- the lithosphere cracked into these
- divergent boundary
- plates move apart and new crust is formed
- convection current
- the mechanism responsible for plate tectonics
- oceanic crust
- youngest crust and most dense
- ridge
- divergent boundary where new crust is created
- Alfred Wegener
- proposed the continental drift hypothesis
- trench
- deepest part of the ocean where one plate is subducted beneath another converging plate
- continental crust
- oldest crust and less dense than oceanic
- aesthenosphere
- plastic like upper part of the mantle on which the plates move
- collision boundary
- two continental plates colliding to create mountains