History of Geologic Time Scale

In 1669, Danish scientist Nicolas Steno published the first law of

stratigraphy (the science of interpreting the strata, or layers of rock, in Earth’s
outer surface). Steno argued that the layers closer to the surface must be younger
than the layers below them. So the farther down you dig, he thought, the older
the fossils are that you find there. But in Steno’s day, when some people thought
that fossils had literally fallen from the sky, for some reason but this was a pretty
revolutionary idea.

Building on Steno’s ideas, Italian geologist Giovanni Arduino went a step

further and began naming the layers of rock. In the 1760’s, Arduino studied the
Italian Alps, organizing their layers based on their depth and composition. The
lowest layers of metamorphic and volcanic rocks, he called the Primary layer.
Above those were hard sedimentary rocks which he called Secondary. And the
top layers of softer alluvial deposits he named Tertiary and Quaternary. But,
because rock layers don’t appear in the same order all over the world, there’s no
way for geologists to compare rocks from one location to another. Without a way
to compare strata, there could be no universal time scale.

Finally, in 1819, English geologist William Smith figured out the solution to
this problem which is fossils. By comparing the remains of ancient organisms
form different rock formations, Smith could match their ages, regardless of how
far apart they were. For example, Smith realized that fossils of many early species
of trilobites are found below ammonite fossils, which are in turn below species of
shellfish. So any place in the world where you find these first trilobites, you know
that you’re looking at rock that’s older than ammonites lived. And even in the
most ancient rocks, that have little or no evidence of life, scientists can still look
for signs of the very earliest major geologic events, like when continents first
formed, and even when the Earth itself cooled and solidified.

Thanks to the work of early geologists like Steno, Arduino and Smith,
modern scientists have used these and other clues to create what we now call the
GEOLOGIC TIME SCALE.
What is Geologic Time Scale?

-GTS is a system of chronological dating that relates geological strata

(stratigraphy) time. It is used by geologists, paleontologists and other Earth
scientists to describe timing and relationships of events that have occurred during
Earth’s history.

-The GTS has been reworked many times to reflect the latest knowledge of
Earth’s history. It’s organized into five subgroups: Eons, Eras, Periods, Epochs and
Ages.

EONS- are the largest slices of time, ranging from a half billion to nearly 2 billion
years long. And the earliest Eon is known as the Hadean Eon –it begins with the
very formation of the Earth itself, around 4.6 billion years ago and ends 4 billion
years ago. And this is the only Eon that doesn’t have fossils. Hadean named after
the greek underworld Hades, the Hadean lived up to its name. While no fossils
have been found from this Eon, small amounts of organic carbon have been
discovered in Hadean rocks that some experts think is evidence of the earliest life.
These first organisms were tiny and single celled, but they were eventually able to
shape the future of the entire planet, so their appearance is the one major
benchmark of this Eon. The Hadean was brought to an end by the cooling of the
Earth’s crust, setting the stage for continents to eventually form.

And this cooling marked is the beginning of the next phase which we called the
Archean Eon, which ran from 4 billion to 2.5 billion years ago. Named for the
Greek word for “origin”, the Archean was once thought to be when the first signs
of life appeared. But at the very least, it’s fair to say it was the first time that life
flourished, forming mats of microbes in the primordial seas. The fossils that these
microbes left behind are called stromatolites, or sometimes, stromatoliths, and
the very oldest of them like those found in western Australia, date from the
Archean. During this time, the atmosphere was mostly carbon dioxide, but the
appearance of cyanobacteria was about to change all that. Then 2.5 billion years
ago, the Archean gave way to the Proterozoic Eon, meaning ‘earlier life’. And
around this time, photosynthetic bacteria, along with some multicellular forms of
life, spewed tons of oxygen into the atmosphere. This probably wiped out much
of the anaerobic life on Earth. But it cleared the path for crucial, new organisms
including the ancestral Eukaryotes, whose cells each have a nucleus and
organelles wrapped up in membranes. Eukaryotes develop into the first really big,
complex, and sometimes it’s kinda forms of life, like the frond-like Charnia and
the plat-shaped Dickinsonia.

These new, larger organisms quickly diversified, and by 541 million years ago, we
were at the doorstep of the next and current eon, the Phanerozoic. It’s name
means ‘visible life’ and the Phanerozoic was when life really became obvious. This
is the eon that’s home to trees, dinosaurs, nets, aardvarks, and humans. From
here, it’s best to explore the Phanerozoic Eon through it’s Eras, the next level
down in the division of time. This’ll let us explore more recent history in greater
detail.

The first era of our current eon is the Paleozoic Era, which began 541 million
years ago.