The term first proposed by Paul Crutzen in 2000 to describe the current geological period when human activities have had a significant impact on the Earth’s ecosystems.
Basalt
A common extrusive volcanic rock. It is usually grey to black and fine-grained due to rapid cooling of lava at the surface.
Crust
The rocky outermost layer of the earth above the mantle.
Cryosphere
The portion of the Earth’s surface where water is in a solid state in the form of permanent ice, snow, frozen ground.
El Nino
An episodic movement of warm surface water that changes wind direction and precipitation patterns over much of the Pacific. This climatic phenomenon occurs irregularly, but generally every 3-5 years.
Epicentre
The point on the Earth’s surface directly above the focus of an earthquake.
Fault line
A geological term denoting a planar fracture or discontinuity in a volume of rock, where earth movement has caused significant displacement. Large faults within the earth’s crust result from the action of tectonic forces.
Isostatic Rebound
The rising of a landmass after the removal of ice (sometimes called post-glacial rebound, continental rebound).
Lithosphere
The rigid out part of the earth, consisting of the crust and upper mantle.
Liquefaction
When saturated soil is shaken with enough force that the soil loses strength and begins to act more like a liquid than a solid – essentially becoming like quicksand due to the increased pore pressure and reduced effective stress.
Magma
Hot fluid or semi-fluid material below or within the earth’s crust from which lava and other igneous rock is formed by cooling.
Mantle
The regions of the earth’s interior between the crust and the core, believed to consist of hot, dense silicate rocks.
Permafrost
A thick subsurface layer of soil that remains frozen throughout the year, found primarily in polar regions.
Plate boundary
A zone of seismic and tectonic activity along the edges of adjacent lithospheric plates.
Pleistocene
The epoch from 2.588 million to 12,000 years BP covering the world’s most recent period of repeated glaciations. It is the first epoch of the Quaternary period, between the Pliocene and the Holocene.
Richter Scale
A logarithmic scale from 1-10 formerly used to express the energy released by an earthquake. An increase of 1 represents a 32-fold increase in energy.
Rift Valley
A large, elongated depression with steep walls formed by the separation of crustal plates along a divergent plate boundary.
Seismograph
An instrument that measures and records details of earthquakes, such as force and duration.
Strain
The response of a solid material to an external or internal stress.
Stress
The internal distribution of force within a body reacting to applied forces which causes strain or deformation.
Tephrochronology
A stratigraphical technique that uses discrete layers of tephra (volcanic ash) from a single eruption to create a chronological framework in order to generate paleoenvironmental or archaeological records.
