Geology Jimi
Terms
undefined, object
copy deck
- A naturally occurring material that is almost a mineral, but which dos not meet the remaining 4 criteria (usually applied to amorphous materials)
- Mineraloid
- Many form-one of two or more minerals having the same chemical composition but different crystalline structure
- Polymorph
- The difference in elevation between two forms
- Relief
- An adjective to describe a continental margin not associated with a plate boundary; or a method of remote sensing that does not provide its own source of illumination
- Passive
- An adjective to describe basaltic lavas that were extruded under water
- Pillow
- The fracture of glasses and quartz, giving smoothly curved surfaces
- Conchoidal
- The logical process of deriving general principles from observations and measurements
- Inductive Reasoning
- Wegener’s prodposed supercontinent that began to break apart 200 Ma
- Pangaea
- The orderly internal atomic arrangement of atoms in a crystal
- Lattice
- An irreversible change in the shape or size of a rock caused by an applied stress
- Strain
- A property of matter that is independent of the object’s size or shape
- Intrinsic
- An adjective to describe classification schemes which group items based on the processes that created them
- Genetic
- A geometric form having four faces where each face is an equilateral triangle
- Tetrahedron
- The concept that the processes that have shaped Earth in the geologic past are essentially the same as those operating today – the present is key to the past and the past is key to the future
- Uniformitarianism
- The actual mineral composition of an (unaltered) igneous rock
- Mode
- The study of rocks
- Petrology
- The transfer of heat by the mass movement or circulation of a hot substance
- Convection
- The unmixing of minerals when ionic substitutions made at high temperatures become unstable at lower temperatures.
- Exsolution
- The concept that Earth’s crust is floating in gravitational balance upon mantle material
- Isostasy
- A submerged flat-topped seamount; a tablemount
- Guyot
- An adjective to describe igneous intrusive bodies that cut across the fabric of the country rock
- Discordant
- A general force per unit area in a solid so that the magnitude of the force per unit area can very with direction
- Stress
- The percentage of ferromagnesian (mafic) minerals in a phaneritic rock
- Color Index
- The process of forming heterogeneous layers or magmas from a homogeneous common source
- Differentiation
- A rock having a mixture of both igneous and metamorphic features; a transitional rock between solid-state metamorphism and igneous melting
- Migmatite
- A textural adjective indicating that the vesicles in an extrusive igneous rock s have been filled by secondary mineralization
- Amygdaloidal
- “False Form†– (1) a natural fossil or cast (2) an apparent crystal that has the outward form of one mineral but which has been replaced by, or altered to, a different mineral
- Pseudomorph
- The process by which silicate tetrahedral link together in many different configurations
- Polymerization
- A piece of country rock enclosed within an igneous rock
- Xenolith
- A small, spherical particle formed in the solar nebula that would accrete to form the terrestrial planets
- Chondrule
- A thin annual double layer of sediments found in glacial lakes where coarser sediments settled out in summer and the finest sediments settled out after the lake iced over in winter
- Varve
- A general, blanket term for pyroclastic materials without regard to the size of the particles
- Tephra
- A deep-seated massive igneous intrusive body
- Pluton
- An igneous rock having a bimodal grain size distribution
- Porphyry
- “Section Writing†– The reconstruction of an image of the body using multiple x-ray sources or images of Earth’s interior built up from multiple seismic sources
- Tomography
- A mud-flow of pyroclastic material down the radial drainage pattern of a volcano
- Lahar