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

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Physical Geology Workbook Copyright © 2019 by Joyce M. McBeth is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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