Study Club Plate Tectonic

What chemical layers make up the lithosphere?

• The continental and oceanic crust.
• The elastic top surface of a planet
• The crust and the uppermost mantle.
• The ‘SiAl’ and the ‘NiFe’
• The rigid layer above the asthenosphere

What is the ‘Moho’?

• The nickname of a continental deep-drilling project
• The lower boundary of the lithosphere, below which the viscosity is too low for the rocks to be considered rigid on anything but very short timescales
• The region between 410 km and 670 km depth in the mantle
• A shortening of the name for a class of minerals that are common in the lithosphere: the Molybdenum Hydroxylases
• A shortening of the name for the chemical and seismic step at the base of the crust: the Mohorovičić discontinuity

The San Andreas Fault is…

• A consultative plate boundary between the Californian and Farallon plates
• A constructive boundary between the North and South American plates
• A destructive plate boundary between the North American and Pacific plates
• A conservative plate boundary between the North American and Pacific plates

• A great place for a ski holiday

Convection is a means of redistributing heat. How?

• By passing energy from atom to atom in a fluid
• As electromagnetic radiation.
• By exporting coldness into warmer regions of the fluid.
• By forming a thermal boundary layer at the top surface of the fluid
• By the ascent of warmed fluid in response to buoyancy contrasts

Earth’s mantle is heated…

• From within mostly by shear heating, and from below by conduction of heat from the outer core
• From above by volcanism and from within by radioactive decay processes
• From within only, by a combination of shear heating and radioactive decay processes
• From within mostly by radioactive decay and from below by conduction of heat from the outer core
• By tidal friction arising from the braking effect of the moon’s gravity

Conduction is a means of redistributing heat. How?

• By passing energy from atom to atom in a fluid
• As electromagnetic radiation
• By exporting coldness into warmer regions of the fluid
• By forming a thermal boundary layer at the top surface of the fluid
• By the ascent of warmed fluid in response to buoyancy contrasts