EAPS 100: Planet Earth

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Textbook Reading

Chapter 4: Earth History (p. 98 - 123)

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 Goals for this Module

You should be able to accomplish the following tasks…

• Describe the early efforts to produce the geologic timescale.

• Understand how ‘biostratigraphy’ works.

• Describe how radioactive decay can be used to determine geologic ages.

• Have a general idea of what the history of our planet has looked like.

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Conceptualizing Earth’s Antiquity

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What is the Age of the Earth?

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Early Naturalists

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Early Naturalists

Early naturalists recognized that the Earth’s

surface was not fixed. They knew that
erosion and sedimentation occurred and
that rocks currently in the mountains must
have once been below the sea. However,
no one tried to put together a serious
chronology.

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What is the Age of the Earth?
James Ussher (1581-1686)

• Northern Ireland
• Bishop in the Church of England
• Counted the number of
generations in the Christian Bible
and pegged this to known history
to arrive at a date for Earth’s
creation…

October 22, 4004 BC ~ 6:00 PM

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Hutton and the Birth of Geology

James Hutton (1726-1797)

• Scotland
• Gentleman-Farmer
• Began to develop a sense for how
sedimentary rocks are deposited
and formed
• Realized the great antiquity of the
Earth

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Hutton’s Unconformity

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Unconformities

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 Hutton’s Unconformity

“The result, therefore, of our present enquiry is, that we

find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.”

-James Hutton, 1788

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Stratigraphic Correlation

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Principle of Lateral Continuity

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Sedimentary Sequences
Records the same period of time

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How Do You Correlate Over Large Distances?

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Fossils

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Fossils

Fossils are remains of past

life. They require very
specific conditions to form
and represent only a small
fraction of former life. Most
living things will not
become fossils.

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Darwin and Evolution

Charles Darwin
(1809-1882)

Theory of evolution by
natural selection
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 Consequences for the Fossil Record

E F
D
Species only occupy a
distinct period of time
Time

before going extinct or

C undergoing speciation.
B

A
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Smith and the First Geological Map

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Biostratigraphy

William Smith realized that the same

fossils could be found in the same
relative position within the sedimentary
stratigraphy across all of England.

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Biostratigraphy

By identifying similar fossils in the

same relative stratigraphic position
across England, William Smith was
identifying layers of rock that were of
similar age!
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Biostratigraphy and the

Geologic Record

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 Biostratigraphy

So, if you are going to use fossils to correlate sedimentary

rocks that are the same age then you want fossils from
groups of animals/plants that are abundant and undergo
rapid evolutionary changes. These types of fossils are called
index fossils.

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Biostratigraphy

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Stratigraphy

Fossils, type of rock, geologic

mapping, etc. all feed into correlating
rocks of the same age globally and
reconstructing Earth’s history.
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Geologic Timeline

Phanerozoic Eon
“the age of visible life”

Precambrian

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Geologic Timeline

Divided into Eras, Periods,

and Epochs. Each unit of
time is defined by a similar
biota and is usually bounded
by major extinction events or
evolutionary radiations.

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Quantifying Geologic Time

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 Lord Kelvin
But let’s put numbers on it!
William Thomson (1824-1907)

• Lord Kelvin

• University of Glasgow

• Brilliant mathematician and

physicist

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Cooling of a Hot Earth
Assumed that the Earth began as
molten rock and has been cooling
ever since. (Not far from our current
understanding)

Used an assumed core temperature,

temperature gradient, and thermal
conductivity of rocks to estimate
how long the Earth has been
cooling…

He calculated 20 - 400 million years

old.

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Geology vs. Physics

Vs.

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What Did Kelvin Miss?

What did Lord Kelvin miss?

A) Incorrectly assumed the

composition of Earth’s core

B) Did not know about heating

from radioactive decay of
elements

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Lord Kelvin

However, Lord Kelvin did provide

the idea that the age of the Earth
is finite and can be estimated
using physical parameters.

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Radioactive Decay
Remember that the atomic
nucleus is composed of
positively charged protons and
neutral neutrons.

Different isotopes of the same

element had different numbers
of neutrons. Sometimes these
isotopes are unstable.
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 Radioactive Decay

Unstable Stable
Parent Isotope Daughter Isotope

238U 206Pb
Element name
Mass of isotope
New element
(protons + neutrons)

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Radioactive Decay

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Geochronology
Number of decays is
proportional to the amount of
parent isotope

λt
D = Di + N(e − 1)

Daughter
Today Decay
Constant
Initial
Daughter Elapsed
Parent Today Time
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Radioactive Decay

Sometimes radioactive
decay of an isotope can
take a complicated path
towards a stable isotope,
involving many different
decays. But we can still
find a decay constant for
the entire journey.

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 The Ideal Chronometer
λt
D = Di + N(e − 1)

Daughter
Zircon (ZrSiO4)
Today Decay
Constant U-Pb
Initial
Daughter Elapsed
Parent Today
Time
1/2
t238U = 4.5 billion years Sanidine (KAlSi3O8)
1/2
t235U = 704 million years K-Ar
1/2
t40K = 1.3 billion years
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 Aside about Carbon Dating

Carbon dating works a little differently. It requires creation of 14C

due to cosmic ray interaction with nitrogen in the upper
atmosphere, the incorporation of 14C into organic matter, and its
subsequent radioactive decay. It only works back to 50,000
years. So, it is not used to calibrate most of Earth’s history.

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Geochronology

Air fall tu s

We can date interbedded

volcanic units within
sedimentary sequences.

Zircon Sanidine
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 Geochronology

Geochronologists separate the elements of interest and then

measure isotopic composition on a mass spectrometer.

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A Brief History of Our Planet

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Calibrated Geologic Timescale

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Age of Solar System

The age of the solar system

(and Earth) is derived from U-
Pb dates from calcium-
aluminum inclusions in
chondritic meteorites.
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Archean and Proterozoic

Rise of Atmospheric Oxygen

First life
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 Early Life on Earth

Fossils of microbial organisms are as old

as 3.5 billion years! There is even some
evidence for earlier life, going back nearly
to the beginning of Planet Earth.
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 Rise of Atmospheric Oxygen

Cyanobacteria (single-celled photosynthetic organisms) evolved

early in Earth’s history and ultimately led to Earth’s oxygen rich
atmosphere. A major increase in oxygen occurred 2.5 billion
years ago. 50
Paleozoic

Mass extinction
Widespread forests
Colonization of land
First macroscopic animals

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 Cambrian Explosion

Major diversification event that took place between 541 and ~519
Ma when most modern animal phyla developed. Puzzled Charles
Darwin, because the geologic record seemed to go from no
evidence of life to a sea swarming with animals.
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 Colonization of Land
Animals and plants first colonized the
land during the Silurian and Devonian
periods ca. 440 - 358 million years
ago.

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Carboniferous

Development of wood during

the Carboniferous 358-298
million years ago and
widespread swampy
landscapes led to the
formation of coal. Coals of
this age are mined in West
Virginia, Pennsylvania, and
Kentucky.

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 End-Permian Mass Extinction
Earth’s biggest mass extinction occurred at the end of the
Paleozoic and is known as “The Great Dying”. Up to 96% of
all marine species went extinct. The cause remains debated
but rapid climate change related to intense volcanism is
favored.

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Mesozoic

Mass extinction
Dinosaur evolution

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 Dinosaurs
Dinosaurs evolved and dominated the world’s
terrestrial ecosystems from 251 to 66 million
years ago during the Mesozoic. This is a total
duration of 185 million years!

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K-Pg Mass Extinction

The Mesozoic came to an end with another

mass extinction. This one occurred 66 million
years ago and eliminated all non-avian
dinosaurs. It coincides with a major impact
event and intense volcanism. 58
Cenozoic
Human evolution
Ice Ages

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Cenozoic Climate

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 Cenozoic Climate

There have been periodic ice ages over the past 2.58 million years, during the
same period that we evolved.
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Human Evolution

Hominids have been

evolving for several
million years.
However, our own
species, Homo
Sapiens, has only
been around for a few
hundred thousand
years…

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