EESA06H3 Lecture 1: Lecture 1
Document Summary
Hydrogeology: study of ground water and how to prevent contamination. Definitions: geology: the study of planet earth and its history. Also referred to as earth science or geoscience. The earth is 4,500 million years old: physics: the study of elemental matter and energy, geophysics: the application of physics to geology. Plate tectonics: plate tectonics: earth"s surface is broken into large jigsaw pieces, arrows indicate which way the plates are moving, driven by convection currents. Slow stirring in hot mantle underneath: pangea (greek): means all the lands. Super continent cycle: stratigraphy: ordering rocks in terms of age. Right in the middle, just off of china. Atlantic starts to close -> beginning of pangea 2. Because after heating up, it cools down. When field is gone, life becomes impossible (dead planet) Important course themes: how our planet works (plate tectonics) from its deep interior to its surface, earth history: using plate tectonic theory to reconstruct past continents/oceans (the "supercontinent cycle"