Accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) is a form of mass spectrometry that accelerates ions to

extraordinarily high kinetic energiesbefore mass analysis. The special strength of AMS among the
mass spectrometric methods is its power to separate a rare isotope from an abundant neighboring
mass ("abundance sensitivity", e.g. 14C from 12C).[1] The method suppresses molecular isobars
completely and in many cases can separate atomic isobars (e.g. 14N from 14C) also. This makes
possible the detection of naturally occurring, long-lived radio-isotopes such as 10Be, 36Cl, 26Al and 14C.
Their typical isotopic abundance ranges from 10−12 to 10−18. AMS can outperform the competing
technique of decay counting for all isotopes where the half-life is long enough.[2]

Mass spectrometry (MS) is an analytical technique that measures the mass-to-charge ratio of ions.
The results are typically presented as a mass spectrum, a plot of intensity as a function of the mass-
to-charge ratio. Mass spectrometry is used in many different fields and is applied to pure samples as
well as complex mixtures.

The Paleozoic Era, which ran from about 542 million years ago to 251 million years ago,
was a time of great change on Earth. The era began with the breakup of one
supercontinent and the formation of another. Plants became widespread. And the first
vertebrate animals colonized land.

Life in the Paleozoic

The Paleozoic began with the Cambrian Period, 53 million years best known for ushering
in an explosion of life on Earth. This "Cambrian explosion" included the evolution of
arthropods (ancestors of today's insects and crustaceans) and chordates (animals with
rudimentary spinal cords).
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During the Mesozoic, or "Middle Life" Era, life diversified rapidly and giant reptiles,
dinosaurs and other monstrous beasts roamed the Earth. The period, which spans from
about 252 million years ago to about 66 million years ago, was also known as the age of
reptiles or the age of dinosaurs.

Boundaries
English geologist John Phillips, the first person to create the global geologic timescale,
first coined the term Mesozoic in the 1800s. Phillips found ways to correlate sediments
found around the world to specific time periods, said Paul Olsen, a geoscientist at the
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York.

The Permian-Triassic boundary, at the start of the Mesozoic, is defined relative to a

particular section of sediment in Meishan, China, where a type of extinct, eel-like
creature known as a conodont first appeared, according to the International Commission
on Stratigraphy.
The end boundary for the Mesozoic Era, the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary, is defined by
a 20-inch (50 centimeters) thick sliver of rock in El Kef, Tunisia, which contains well-
preserved fossils and traces of iridium and other elements from the asteroid impact that
wiped out the dinosaurs. The Mesozoic Era is divided up into the Triassic, Jurassic, and
Cretaceous periods.
Life and climate
The Mesozoic Era began roughly around the time of the end-Permian extinction, which
wiped out 96 percent of marine life and 70 percent of all terrestrial species on the
planet. Life slowly rebounded, eventually giving way to a flourishing diversity of animals,
from massive lizards to monstrous dinosaurs.

The Triassic Period, from 252 million to 200 million years ago, saw the rise of reptiles and
the first dinosaurs, the Jurassic Period, from about 200 million to 145 million years ago,
ushered in birds and mammals, and the Cretaceous Period, from 145 million to 66 million
years ago is known for some of its iconic dinosaurs, such as Triceratops and Pteranodon.
Coniferous plants, or those that have cone-bearing seeds, already existed at the
beginning of the era, but they became much more abundant during the Mesozoic.
Flowering plants emerged during the late Cretaceous Period. The lush plant life during
the Mesozoic Era provided plenty of food, allowing the biggest of the dinosaurs, such as
the Argentinosaurus, to grow up to 80 tons, according to a 2005 study in the journal
Revista del Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales.
Earth during the Mesozoic Era was much warmer than today, and the planet had no
polar ice caps. During the Triassic Period, Pangaea still formed one massive
supercontinent. Without much coastline to moderate the continent's interior
temperature, Pangaea experienced major temperature swings and was covered in large
swaths of desert. Yet the region still had a belt of tropical rainforest in regions around
the equator, said Brendan Murphy, an earth scientist at St. Francis Xavier University in
Antigonish, Canada.
Extinctions
The Mesozoic Era was bookended by two great extinctions, with another smaller
extinction occurring at the end of the Triassic Period, Olsen said.

Around 252 million years ago, the end-Permian extinction wiped out most life on Earth
over about 60,000 years, according to a February 2014 study in the journal Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). At the end of the Triassic Period, roughly
201 million years ago, most amphibious creatures and crocodile-like creatures that lived
in the tropics were wiped out. About 65 million years ago, a giant asteroid blasted into
Earth and formed a giant crater at Chicxulub in the Yucatan Peninsula.

Because the fossil record is incomplete, it's difficult to say exactly what caused the
extinctions, or even how rapidly they occurred. After all, certain species or traces of
catastrophic events could be missing in the fossil record simply because the sediments
may have disappeared over tens of millions of years, Olsen said.

"Nature is very efficient at getting rid of its corpses," Olsen told Live Science.

However, there are a few prime suspects in each of the extinctions.

At the end of the Permian, the Siberian Traps underwent massive volcanic eruptions,
which most geologists believe caused the world's biggest extinction. Exactly how,
however, is up for debate.
The volcanic eruptions caused a spike in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, though the
2014 PNAS study suggests that the spike was brief. The eruptions may have increased
sea surface temperatures and led to ocean acidification that choked out sea life. And
another study published in March 2014 in PNAS proposed that the eruptions released
huge troves of the element nickel, which fueled a feeding frenzy by nickel-munching
microbes known as Methanosarcina. Those microbes may have belched out huge
amounts of methane, superheating the planet.
Most scientists agree that an asteroid impact wiped out the dinosaurs at the end of the
Cretaceous Period. The impact would have kicked up so much dust that it blocked the
sun, halted photosynthesis, and led to such a huge disruption in the food chain that
everything that wasn't a scavenger or very small died.
But the Deccan Traps, in what is now India, were spewing massive amounts of lava both
before and after the asteroid impact, and a few scientists believe these flows either
directly caused or accelerated the dinosaurs' demise.

Volcanism may also be to blame for the end-Triassic extinction. Though volcanism in
general leads to global warming, after an initial volcanic eruption, huge amounts of
sulfur spew into the air and cause a brief period of global cooling. Such cooling-heating
cycles may have occurred hundreds of times over 500,000 years. Similar cold snaps
have been tied to huge crop failures in historical times, such as in Iceland in the 1700s,
Olsen said.

As a result, animals used to constant, balmy temperatures in the tropics were wiped out,
while animals that were insulated with proto-feathers, such as pterosaurs, or that lived
at higher latitudes and were already adapted to big temperature variations, did just fine,
Olsen said.

"When you have these volcanic winters, where temperatures may have dropped even
below freezing in the tropics, it was devastating," Olsen said.
The study of the Earth from the beginning of time to the present has been the task of geologists who attempt to
unravel the events that have shaped our planet as it is today. The Earth carries the history of geological events in its
rock layers. It follows that the oldest layers are at the bottom and the youngest are at the top. With this
understanding geologists are able to determine the ages of rock relative to one another. By assembling all these
layers together, scientists have worked out what is known as the stratigraphic column or record of the various ages
of rock. This record spans the 4.6 billion year record of Earth's history.

In order to simplify the huge amount of geological information, geologists have broken Earth's history down into
sections which are called geological eras, periods, and epochs. Fossils records have shown that life existed for about
3,800 million years, but complex life emerged only about 600 million years. Over time, life forms change. Their
fossil record allows geologists to date and compare rocks across geological time. For example, dinosaur fossils are
only found during the Mesozoic era some 245 to 65 million years ago.