Class:__________________ Days:______Time:__________ Name:_______________________
Everest - How the Earth was Made
Mount Everest | How the Earth Was Made
1. The Himalayan Mountains stretch roughly ____________
1500 miles across southern Asia.
2. The rocks at the very summit of Mt. Everest are a gray-colored _____________,
limestone a common
sedimentary rock type.
3. Below the summit of Everest lies a broad “yellow band” of metamorphic rock called
____________.
marble
4. The base of Mt. Everest is composed of a coarse-grained, igneous rock called ____________.
granite
5. The limestone from the summit contains a fossil crinoid (sea lily) stem – which looks like a
fossilized “cheerio”- that is approximately ___________
400 million years old.
6. In the rivers of the high Himalayas, geologists can find fossil _______________,
ammonite an ancient
squid-like creature that swam a deep ocean that once lay between India and Asia.
7. Based on the distribution of Glossopteris fossil plants, geologists think that South America,
India, Africa, and Antarctica once formed a moderate-sided supercontinent called
Gondwanaland (now known as just Gondwana). Some _______ 80 million years ago, India
broke away from the supercontinent and drifted north toward Asia.
8. Some _________
50.5 million years ago, India collided with the continent of Asia.
9. The first step in forming the Himalayan Mountains is that the rocks are ____________.
folded
When that process continues, the folds become _______________
overturned folds, and when that
continues even further, the overturned folds move along a discreet ____________
fault plane.
10. Containing thin, blue crystals of kyanite, the kyanite gneiss (a metamorphic rock) tells
geologists that the gneissic rock was buried to depths of roughly _________
30 miles beneath
the mountain chain.
11. GPS measurements show that India is still moving at roughly _______
2 inches per year.
12. One theory (as yet unresolved) suggests that as the Himalayan Mountains grew higher, the
weathering and erosion of the mountain range increased, thus pulling ___________________
CO2
gas from the atmosphere. Because less of this greenhouse gas was available to warm the
Earth, the global climate cooled which led to the start of _____________
Ice Age some 2 ½ million
years ago.
