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The crust
a. Where we live
b. Made up of
i. Continental crust
1. Thick (10-70 km)
2. Buoyant (less dense than oceanic crust)
3. Mostly old
ii. Oceanic crust
1. Thin (~7 km)
2. Dense (sinks under continental crust)
3. Young
Continental drift
a. Alfred Wegener in the early 1900s proposed the
hypothesis that continents were once joined
together in a single large land mass he called
Pangea (meaning all land in Greek)
b. He proposed that Pangea had split apart and the
continents had moved gradually to their present
positions a process that became known as the
continental drift
c. Evidence for continental drift
i. Continents fit together like a puzzle
1. Ex: The Atlantic coastlines of Africa
ii. Fossils of plants and animals of the same
species found on different continents
d. Rock sequences (meaning he looked at the order
of rock layers) in South America, Africa,
Antarctica, and Australia
Types of plate boundaries
a. Divergent
i. Spreading ridges
a. Ex: mid-Atlantic ridge
c. Transform
i. Where plates slide past each other
1. Ex: San Andreas Fault
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