Earth Science Vocabulary 1

4. The idea that new crust forming at ridges spreads apart the old sea floor on both sides of the ridges.
7. The layer of solid rock that makes up the Earth’s surface that includes the crust and the upper mantle.
11. An educated guess about why a natural event occurs.
14. The process in which heat moves from a location of higher temperatures to a location of lower temperatures.
15. The innermost, densest layer of the Earth. The inner core is solid and the outer core is liquid metal.
18. Movement of material due to differences in temperature.
19. The gradual movement of continents across the Earth’s surface throughout geological time. A Hypothesis that a supercontinent split into pieces and the pieces moved away from each other.
22. A tectonic boundary where two plates are moving away from each other and new crust is formed from magma that rises to the Earth’s surface between the plates
25. The middle layer of the Earth made of hot rocks. The layer beneath Earth’s crust.
26. Equipment that measures earthquakes.
27. A device capable of measuring a magnetic field.

1. Gasses that surround the Earth.
2. Waves of energy that come from earthquakes
3. Model that explains the movement of continents and the sea floor.
5. A tectonic boundary where two plates slide past one another.
6. Hot, molten rock beneath the sea floor.
8. Name of the process when a denser oceanic plate may slide under another plate.
9. slab of the Earth’s lithosphere that can move around on the planet’s surface.
10. The layer below the lithosphere that is a portion of the upper mantle.
12. horizontality: Rocks that form in flat, level layers.
13. The relative orientation of the poles.
14. The rocky outer layer of the Earth’s surface. Earth’s solid surface.
16. The part of the surface directly above the center of the earthquake.
17. A circular-shaped hole into which a volcano collapses during an eruption.
20. Dark, dense igneous rock that makes up the mantle.
21. A tectonic boundary where two or more plates are colliding. One plate eventually slides beneath the other causing subduction.
23. Boundaries where plates slide past each other.
24. The study of underwater depths of ocean floors.