Relief of the Earth


1. What is a relief? What are the reasons for its diversity?

To answer the second question, it is necessary to imagine how the relief is formed, what forces contribute to the occurrence of unevenness on the Earth’s surface, how the internal and external influences during the formation of the relief differ from place to place on the surface of the Earth. In some areas of the Earth, the crust is elevated to a height of more than 8,000 m, and in other areas deep cracks form in the earth’s crust, which fill with water and form deep-sea lakes. For a long time, external forces smooth out the relief, destroying the uplifts, filling the depressions and cracks. Different impacts of relief forces in space and time lead to a variety of relief on the surface of the Earth.

2. Think whether it can be argued that external and internal forces act the same both on land and at the bottom of the ocean.

Based on our reasoning, you can independently perform the task and determine that this statement is incorrect.

On the ocean floor, mountain ridges can form and form, in the rift zones on the boundaries of lithospheric plates, under the pressure of internal forces, even a new oceanic crust is formed from magma. The effect of external forces under the thickness of water is significantly weakened and reduces mainly to the leveling of the relief due to the filling of depressions and cracks by various types of precipitation. The formation of the ocean floor relief is also affected by the fact that the oceanic crust is much thinner than the continental crust due to the absence of a granite layer.


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Relief of the Earth