Geology Trivia Quiz Questions With Answers

Interesting geology trivia quiz questions with answers

Geology Trivia Quiz Questions With Answers

What is geology?
A: Geology is an earth science concerned with the solid Earth, the rocks of which it is composed, and the processes by which they change over time.

Geology can also refer to the study of the solid features of any what?
A: Terrestrial planet or natural satellite such as Mars or the Moon.

Modern geology significantly overlaps all other earth sciences, including what?
A: Hydrology and the atmospheric sciences.

What does geology describe?
A: The structure of the Earth beneath its surface, and the processes that have shaped that structure.

It also provides tools to determine the relative and absolute what?
A: Ages of rocks found in a given location, and also to describe the histories of those rocks.

By combining these tools, geologists are able to chronicle the geological what?
A: History of the Earth as a whole, and also to demonstrate the age of the Earth.

Geology provides the primary evidence for what?
A: Plate tectonics, the evolutionary history of life and the Earth's past climates.

In practical terms, geology is important for what?
A: Mineral and hydrocarbon exploration and exploitation, evaluating water resources, understanding of natural hazards, the remediation of environmental problems, and providing insights into past climate change.

The majority of geological data comes from research on what?
A: Solid Earth materials.

These typically fall into one of what two categories?
A: Rock and unconsolidated material.

The majority of research in geology is associated with the study of what?
A: Rock, as rock provides the primary record of the majority of the geologic history of the Earth.

What are the three major types of rock?
A: Igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic.

When a rock crystallizes from melt (magma or lava), it is a what?
A: An igneous rock.

This rock can be weathered and eroded, then redeposited and lithified into a what?
A: A sedimentary rock.

It can then be turned into a metamorphic rock by what?
A: Heat and pressure that change its mineral content, resulting in a characteristic fabric.

All three types may melt again, and when this happens what is formed?
A: New magma is formed, from which an igneous rock may once more crystallize.

To study all three types of rock, geologists evaluate what?
A: The minerals of which they are composed.

Each mineral has distinct what?
A: Physical properties, and there are many tests to determine each of them.

Testing for Luster measures what?
A: The amount of light reflected from the surface.

Luster is broken into what?
A: Metallic and nonmetallic.

How is a streak test performed?
A: By scratching the sample on a porcelain plate.

The color of the streak can help do what?
A: Name the mineral.

What is specific gravity?
A: The weight of a specific volume of a mineral.

Effervescence testing involves what?
A: Dripping hydrochloric acid on the mineral to test for fizzing.

What is used to test for magnetism?
A: A magnet.

Minerals can have a distinctive taste, like halite which tastes like what?
A: Table salt.

What does sulfur smell like?
A: Rotten eggs.

Geologists also study unlithified materials (referred to as drift), which typically come from what?
A: More recent deposits.

These materials are superficial deposits that lie where?
A: Above the bedrock.

This study is often known as Quaternary geology, after the what?
A: Quaternary period of geologic history.

In the 1960s, it was discovered that the Earth's lithosphere, which includes the crust and rigid uppermost portion of the upper mantle, is separated into what?
A: Tectonic plates that move across the plastically deforming, solid, upper mantle.

This theory is supported by several types of observations, including seafloor spreading and the global what?
A: Distribution of mountain terrain and seismicity.

Oceanic plates and the adjoining mantle convection currents always move how?
A: In the same direction.

This coupling between rigid plates moving on the surface of the Earth and the convecting mantle is called what?
A: Plate tectonics.

Mid-ocean ridges, high regions on the seafloor where hydrothermal vents and volcanoes exist, are seen as divergent boundaries, where what happens?
A: Two plates move apart.

Arcs of volcanoes and earthquakes are theorized as convergent boundaries, where what happens?
A: One plate subducts, or moves, under another.

Transform boundaries, such as the San Andreas Fault system, resulted in what?
A: Widespread powerful earthquakes.

Plate tectonics also has provided a mechanism for Alfred Wegener's theory of continental drift in which the continents do what?
A: Move across the surface of the Earth over geologic time.

The power of the theory of plate tectonics lies in its ability to combine all of these observations into a single theory of what?
A: How the lithosphere moves over the convecting mantle.

Advances in seismology, computer modeling, and mineralogy and crystallography at high temperatures and pressures give insights into what?
A: The internal composition and structure of the Earth.

Seismologists can use the arrival times of seismic waves in reverse to do what?
A: To image the interior of the Earth.

Early advances in this field showed the existence of a liquid outer core (where shear waves were not able to propagate) and a what?
A: A dense solid inner core.

These advances led to the development of a what?
A: A layered model of the Earth, with a crust and lithosphere on top, the mantle below (separated within itself by seismic discontinuities at 410 and 660 kilometers), and the outer core and inner core below that.

More recently, seismologists have been able to create detailed images of wave speeds inside the earth in the same way a doctor does what?
A: Images a body in a CT scan.

Methods for relative dating were developed when geology first what?
A: Emerged as a natural science.

The principle of uniformitarianism states what?
A: That the geologic processes observed in operation that modify the Earth's crust at present have worked in much the same way over geologic time.

A fundamental principle of geology advanced by the 18th century Scottish physician and geologist James Hutton is what?
A: That "the present is the key to the past."

In geology, when an igneous intrusion cuts across a formation of sedimentary rock, it can be determined that the igneous intrusion is what?
A: Younger than the sedimentary rock.

Different types of intrusions include what?
A: Stocks, laccoliths, batholiths, sills and dikes.

Faults are younger than the rocks they what?
A: Cut; accordingly, if a fault is found that penetrates some formations but not those on top of it, then the formations that were cut are older than the fault, and the ones that are not cut must be younger than the fault.

Finding the key bed in these situations may help determine whether the fault is a normal fault or a what?
A: A thrust fault.

The principle of inclusions and components states that, with sedimentary rocks, if inclusions (or clasts) are found in a formation, then the inclusions must be what?
A: Older than the formation that contains them.

The principle of original horizontality states what?
A: That the deposition of sediments occurs as essentially horizontal beds.

The principle of superposition states what?
A: That a sedimentary rock layer in a tectonically undisturbed sequence is younger than the one beneath it and older than the one above it.

Logically a younger layer cannot what?
A: Slip beneath a layer previously deposited.

This principle allows sedimentary layers to be viewed as a form of what?
A: A vertical time line, a partial or complete record of the time elapsed from deposition of the lowest layer to deposition of the highest bed.