Download Elaborating on a Preexisting Concept

Elaborating on a
Preexisting Concept
Restructuring a Network
of Concepts
Achieving New Levels of
Explanation
1. Soil must have always been in its present form.
2. Mountains are created rapidly.
3. Earth is molten, except for its crust.
4. Earth’s gravitational attraction is drastically reduced on mountaintops.
5. Continents do not move.
6. Boiling or burning radioactive material can reduce radiation.
7. River valleys were created by earthquakes or movements of the earth.
8. Mountains and valleys have always been on Earth.
9. Water comes on shore as waves and evaporates.
10. River channels were there before the water, and the water just follows them not
creates them.
11. Glaciers retreat. Turn and go in the opposite direction, instead of melt.
12. Rocks are stronger than the forces of nature (water, wind, ice).
13. Lava comes from the center of the Earth.
14. Earthquakes are caused only by explosions from volcanoes.
15. A continent is a plate; plates are the same shape as the continents.
16. Continents have no relationship to the plates.
17. Continents move by somehow floating across oceans.
18. All plates move in the same direction and at the same speed.
19. If plates are moving apart two centimeters per year, that distance is so insignificant
that it could never be noticed.
20. Since the supercontinent Pangaea split up ~200 million years ago, the continents
have remained in essentially the same positions.
21. Erosion is the only process that alters the appearance of the Earth.
22. All changes to Earth’s surface occur suddenly and rapidly.
23. All events that affect the Earth are gradual or slow.
24. Earthquakes are caused by plates crashing into each other.
25. Earthquakes cause all volcanic eruptions. Volcanic eruptions cause all
earthquakes.
26. “New” rock is created when a large rock is broken into smaller pieces – the smaller
pieces are the “new” rock.
27. All rocks on Earth are the same age.
28. New rock is added to plates only from the top when volcanoes spew out molten
rock that solidifies into new rock on the surface of the plate.