GEOL 212 Study Guide - Quiz Guide: Seismology, Continental Crust, Oceanic Crust
26 Dec 2017
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Document Summary
By the 1950s, paleomagnetic evidence made it difficult to deny that. Answering that question was the transformational work of a professional group collaborating over a decade: the result was a theoretical basis for understanding how this movement was possible: the theory of plate tectonics. The result is the theory of plate tectonics, which has become the unifying theory of modern geology: between 1960 and 1970, the academic community was won over to it. Lithosphere: the zone in which rocks are rigid and deform brittlely. In map view, the lithosphere is broken into distinct rigid plates. Asthenosphere: a thin region of the upper mantle beneath the lithosphere in which rock is partially molten. (mentioned briefly in discussion of seismology. ) In this region, ductile deformation is particularly pronounced. The asthenosphere corresponds to the low velocity zone (lvz) identified by seismology. No surprise, as p waves propagate faster through solids.
