2: Physical Geology Overview
- Page ID
- 33080
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This chapter takes many of the topics addressed in an Introductory Geology course and presents them in a condensed format. Normally each of these topics would be their own chapter; this textbook only presents what is essential to understand the remaining topics in this textbook. Since the breadth of this subject is wide, often topics are simplified in order to gain the base-level understanding required for this course.
- 2.1: Earth’s Interior
- The Earth’s interior is made up of the crust—the upper 5 to 40 km of rigid rock, which is mostly granite on the continents and mostly gabbro and basalt under the oceans. The mantle is made up of ultramafic rock and can be divided into an upper rigid layer (lithospheric mantle), a semi-molten layer (asthenosphere) and all of the rest, which is plastic but solid. The core, which is dominated by iron, has a liquid outer part and a solid inner part.
- 2.2: Plate Tectonics
- The Earth’s lithosphere is divided into many large and small tectonic plates and the plates are moving in different directions. At plate boundaries places are either converging, diverging, or sliding past one-another. These boundaries are the most common sites of earthquakes and volcanoes.
- 2.3: Minerals
- It is important to understand the types of mineral bonding, including ionic and covalent bonds, the internal structures (lattices) of minerals, mineral compositions and mineral groups, and especially the compositions and structures of silicate minerals.
- 2.4: Rocks
- Igneous rocks are formed from magma either at depth in the crust or at the surface during a volcanic eruption. Sedimentary rocks are composed of weathered fragments of other rocks or are made up of minerals that have precipitated from ions. Metamorphic rocks form from either igneous or sedimentary rocks that have been heated so that minerals become unstable and are converted. The relationships between the types of rocks is understood through the rock cycle.