Geography Vocabulary Ch 5
Terms
undefined, object
copy deck
- Erosion
- the wearing away of land by water, wind, waves, ice, and other agents
- Rock Weathering
- the process that breaks up rocks and causes them to decay.
- Sediment
- small particles of mud, sand, or gravel created by rock weathering
- Glaciers
- a thick mass of ice that moves slowly across Earth's surface
- Lava
- melted liquid rock, or magma, from within Earth that spills out on the planet's surface
- volcano
- an opening in Earth's crust through which lava flows; the surface feature created by the lava
- fold
- a feature of Earth's crust created by the bending of rock layers.
- fault
- a feature of Earth's crust created by the breaking and movement of rock layers below the surface.
- Earthquakes
- the shock waves, or vibrations, caused by movement along a fault
- Landforms
- a shape on Earth's surface
- Plains
- a nearly flat area of land
- Plateaus
- an elevated flatland
- Plate tectonics
- theory that Earth's crust is divided into several rigid slow moving plates
- Mid-ocean ridge
- a chain of mountains on the ocean floor formed when molten rock rises from below the seafloor to fill openings created by plate movement.
- Abyssal plains
- a large, flat area on the ocean floor
- subduction
- the process in which a tectonic plate collides with and dives under another tectonic plate
- Trench
- a long, deep valley on the ocean floor caused by subduction
- relief
- the difference in elevation between the top and bottom of a landform
- floodplain
- a landform of level ground built by sediment deposited by a river or stream.
- Alluvial Fan
- a fan-shaped deposit of sediment located at the base of a mountain
- Delta
- the landform at the mouth of a river created by deposits of sediment