Lesson 2 Convection and the Mantle Pages 106-109

Vocabulary
Radiation Convection Conduction Convection currents Density = mass/volume

Heat from the core and the mantle itself cause convention currents in the mantle.

What is molten rock?

Molten Rock
If you could travel to the center of the Earth, you would find that it gets hotter and hotter as you travel deeper. The heat is naturally produced when radioactive elements break apart. Within the Earths mantle, it is hot enough that much of the rock has melted, turning it into a liquid that we call molten rock.

Magma
Molten rock is called magma. Magma is so hot that it glows white and is so bright that youd need sunglasses to look at it! If it flows into an area underground that is less hot, it cools, becomes yellow, and then increasingly deeper shades of red. As it cools slowly, minerals crystallize from the melt forming large crystals. Intrusive igneous rocks like granite have coarse grains.

Lava
If magma finds a crack in the Earth and comes to the surface, it is called lava. Lava cools quickly to form extrusive igneous rocks like basalt. Extrusive rocks are fine grained rocks because large crystals have no time to form during the cooling process, forming
http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/geology/ig_magma.html