Chapter 11 Vocab Flashcards
Ancestral Rockies
The late Paleozoic uplifts of the Rocky Mountain region; they eroded away long before the present Rocky Mountains formed.
Archean Eon
The middle Precambrian Eon.
Banded iron formation (BIF)
Iron-rich sedimentary layers consisting of alternating gray beds of iron oxide and red beds of iron-rich chert.
Basin and Range Province
A broad, Cenozoic continental rift that has affected a portion of the western United States in Nevada, Utah, and Arizona; in this province, tilted fault blocks form ranges, and alluvium-filled valleys are basins.
Cambrian explosion
The remarkable diversification of life, indicated by the fossil record, that occurred at the beginning of the Cambrian Period.
Craton
A long-lived block of durable continental crust commonly found in the stable interior of a continent.
Cratonic platform
A province in the interior of a continent in which Phanerozoic strata bury most of the underlying Precambrian rock.
Epicontinental sea
Shallow sea overlying a continent.
Exotic terrane
A block of land that collided with a continent along a convergent margin and attached to the continent; the term exotic implies that the land was not originally part of the continent to which it is now attached.
Gondwana
A supercontinent that consisted of today’s South America, Africa, Antarctica, India, and Australia. Also called Gondwanaland.
Hadean Eon
The oldest of the Precambrian eons; the time between Earth’s origin and the formation of the first rocks that have been preserved.
Laramide orogeny
The mountain-building event that lasted from about 80 Ma to 40 Ma, in western North America; in the United States, it formed the Rocky Mountains as a result of basement uplift and the warping of the younger overlying strata into large monoclines.
Laurentia
A continent in the early Paleozoic Era composed of today’s North America and Greenland.
Pangaea
A supercontinent that assembled at the end of the Paleozoic Era.
Phanerozoic Eon
The most recent eon, an interval of time from 542 Ma to the present.
Pleistocene Ice Age
The period of time from about 2 Ma to 14,000 years ago, during which the Earth experienced an ice age.
Proterozoic Eon
The most recent of the Precambrian eons.
Rodinia
A proposed Precambrian supercontinent that existed around 1 billion years ago.
Shield
An older, interior region of a continent.
Superplume
A huge mantle plume.
Stromatolite
Layered mounds of sediment formed by cyanobacteria; cyanobacteria secrete a mucous-like substance to which sediment sticks, and as each layer of cyanobacteria gets buried by sediment, it colonizes the surface of the new sediment, building a mound upward.
