3.2. Earth’s Interior – Vocabulary
Section 3.0. Introduction
- The Earth
- composition
- collision
- meteorite
- asteroid
- fragment
- altered / unaltered rock
Section 3.1. Earth’s layers: crust, mantle, and core
- layer
- radius
- crust
- mantle
- core
- outer core
- inner core
- physical properties
- density
- continental crust
- oceanic crust
- lithosphere
- asthenosphere
- felsic
- mafic
- ultramafic
- rigid
- D” layer
- abundance
- elements (e.g., iron, silicon, magnesium, aluminum, nickel, sulfur, oxygen)
Section 3.2. Imaging Earth’s interior
- seismology / seismologist
- vibration
- P waves
- S waves
- velocity (speed)
- seismic data
- seismic waves
- seismic ray path
- wave front
- reflect
- refract
- rigid
- Moho discontinuity / Mohorovičić discontinuity
- seismic station
- S-wave shadow zone
- P-wave shadow zone
- seismic tomography
Section 3.3. Earth’s interior heat
- geothermal gradient
- convection
- buoyancy
- molten
- liquid
- flow
- conduction
- mantle convection
- radioactivity
Section 3.4. Earth’s magnetic field
- Earth’s magnetic field
- inclination
- equator
- northern hemisphere, southern hemisphere
- compass needle
- North Pole, South Pole
- latitude
- magnetic field reversal / flip
- mathematical model
- rotation axis
Section 3.5. Isostacy
- isostatic
- sea level
- erosion
- float
- rebound
- glacier / glaciation / glacial ice
- subsidence
- solid
- plastic
- viscous
- non-Newtonian fluid
- stress
- deform
Other vocabulary (used in lectures, not in text for this chapter):
- geodesy
- geophysics
- Himalayan Mountains
- Mariana Trench
- Challenger Deep
- Mount Everest
- Mount Chimborazo
- homogeneous
- inhomogeneous
- longitude
- peak
- rotational forces
- spherical
- oblate spheroid
- topography
- mantle plumes
- ductile
