Assignment 5 The Living Machine

PLANET EARTH: Episode 1: The Living Machine (Annenberg/PBS)

Part I: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qN_sCTXMdTE

Part II: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NqHXxKGyZY

1.What is plate tectonics?

2.What is the Greek root of the word “tectonics”?

3.How are the layers in the Grand Canyon like the pages in a book?

4.Where did the scientific revolution of geology begin?

5.When did churchmen say the earth was created (B.C.)? How old was the earth in their estimation?

6.Who was the “Father of Geology”?

7.What did the volcanoes around Edinburgh suggest to Hutton?

8.What did most people in the 18th century think about how most rocks form? How did Hutton explain the origin of granites?

9.What did Hadrian’s Wall tell Hutton about the pace of geologic change?

10.What did Siccar Point tell Hutton?

11.What evidence led Alfred Wegener to suggest that continents might move?

12.How did geologists react to Wegener’s ideas in the 1920s?

13.What did oceanographers discover in the Mid-Atlantic?

14.What did dredging and ocean coring tell us about the age of the ocean floor?

15.What did Harry Hess propose in 1960?

16.What did Cox and Dalrymple discover about what happened to the magnetic field of the earth?

17.What did Vine and Matthews discover about the magnetic pattern over mid-ocean ridges? How did they explain it?

18.What did deep-sea drilling reveal about the age of the seafloor on either side of the mid-ocean ridge?

19.How are pillow lavas formed?

20.What is the lithosphere? How many plates is it made of?

21.What is happening along the western edge of the Pacific Plate? What geologic events are a consequence?

22.What is happening between India and Asia? What is it doing to the plate boundary?

23.How is the San Andreas moving? What will eventually happen to San Francisco and LA?

24.What do the Caltech computer models show us about the activities in the mantle?

25.How are Kilauea volcano and the other volcanoes of Hawaii different from most of the world’s volcanoes? What formed the chain of Hawaiian Islands?

26.What happened in New Madrid, Missouri, in 1811-1812? What could it mean for cities like Memphis or St. Louis?

27.What did scientists discover about San Francisco from the rocks in the Marin Headlands?

Assignment 5 The Living Machine Answer

1.What is plate tectonics?

Answer: It says that the Earth’s rigid outer shell is broken into huge moving plates.

2.What is the Greek root of the word “tectonics”?

Answer: Tecton means to build

3.How are the layers in the Grand Canyon like the pages in a book?

Answer: The layers in the Grand Canyon are like the pages in a book, because it tells a story of the events that the Grand Canyon had experience or has had. It shows some two billion years of an Earth that has changed its surface many times. It tells the history of the Earth.