Exam 17: Plate Tectonics: Can We Predict Destructive Earthquakes

On average, over the past 200 million years, how often has the Earth's magnetic field reversed its field so that the north magnetic pole switched and became the south magnetic pole and vice versa.

The North American Plate

What part of the Hawaiian Island chain is the oldest?

How often does the oceanic plate material of the Earth renew itself - in other words - how long to go through one replacement cycle?

The difference between continental and ocean basin rock is

How does seismic tomography give scientists a three-dimensional view of the Earth?

The continents of Eurasia and North America are currently moving apart at an average rate of

The northwestern coast of the United States is

What reasoning did scientists use to determine that the Atlantic Ocean is 140 million years old?

The Earth's magnetic field changes direction periodically over geologic time. Describe what evidence scientists have for this change.

What is the Richter scale and what does it measure?

What attributes of granite and basalt have resulted in the difference in elevations we see on Earth today?

Which of the following would not be seen in the United States?

How can you tell the relative age of a mountain by its physical features?

What effect did plate tectonics have on the human evolutionary aspect of walking upright?

If an ocean is opening at a rate of 5 cm/year and it has been doing so at the same rate for 10 million years, approximately how wide is that ocean?

What evidence did Wegener use in proposing the idea of continental drift? Why were his ideas not accepted?

What kind of plate boundary is neither divergent nor convergent? What are the characteristics of such a plate boundary?

If the Hawaiian islands are the result of hot-spot volcanism, why is there a chain of islands and not one big island in the Pacific?

What would be an architectural specification for a skyscraper built in an earthquake-prone region?