Earth Sciences 2240F/G Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Vanishing Point, Radiography, Outer Core

• School: Western University
• Department: Earth Sciences
• Course: Earth Sciences 2240F/G
• Professor: Sean Shieh

Document Summary

In the first few words of this course we noted that natural disasters and catastrophes result from sudden release of large amounts of energy, and that energy may be internal to earth or external. This unit will be confined to considerations of internal energy release. So, we"ll certainly be looking at earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and some of their side effects. We will not consider some other processes caused by energy release, such as landslides, land subsidence, etc. ; those processes are too small to ever make it onto the catastrophic events scale. However, before we get into a discussion of the sources of earth"s internal energy, and the processes that result from the release of that energy, we need to review the current structure of earth. If we remove a wedge, to view earth"s internal zones, we"d see the structure shown in figure 1: A hot, solid inner core of nearly pure metal.