As stated earlier, no one locality on Earth provides a complete record of our planet’s history, because stratigraphic columns can contain unconformities. But by correlating rocks from locality to locality at millions of places around the world, geologists have pieced together a composite stratigraphic column, called the geologic column, that represents the entirety of Earth history (figure above a, b). The column is divided into segments, each of which represents a specific interval of time. The largest subdivisions break Earth history into the Hadean, Archean, Proterozoic, and Phanerozoic Eons. (The first three together constitute the Precambrian.) The suffix zoic means life, so Phanerozoic means visible life, and Proterozoic means first life. (It wasn’t until after the eons had been named that geologists determined that the earliest life, cells of Bacteria and Archaea, appeared in the Archean Eon.) The Phanerozoic Eon is subdivided into eras. In order from oldest to youngest, they are the Paleozoic (ancient life), Mesozoic (middle life), and Cenozoic (recent life) Eras. We further divide each era into periods and each period into epochs.
Where do the names of the durations come from? They refer either to localities where a fairly whole stratigraphic column representing that time c language became ?Rst identi?Ed (as an instance, rocks representing the Devonian Period crop out near Devon, England) or to a feature of the time (rocks from the Carboniferous Period comprise a number of coal). The terminology changed into not set up in a deliberate fashion that might make it smooth to analyze. Instead, it grew haphazardly within the years between 1760 and 1845, as geologists started out to re?Ne their information of geologic records and fossil succession. Also, due to the fact the divisions have been de?Ned earlier than numerical ages could be decided, they may be all of different periods.
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| Life evolution in the context of the geologic column. The Earth shaped at the beginning of the Hadean Eon. |
The succession of fossils preserved in strata of the geologic column defines the course of life’s evolution throughout Earth history (figure above). Simple bacteria and archaea appeared during the Archean Eon, but complex shell-less invertebrates did not evolve until the late Proterozoic. The appearance of invertebrates with shells defines the Precambrian-Cambrian boundary. At this time, there was a sudden diversification in life, with many new types of organisms appearing over a relatively short interval this event is called the Cambrian explosion.
Progressively more complex organisms populated the Earth during the Paleozoic. For example, the first fish appeared in Ordovician seas, land plants started to spread over the continents during the Silurian (prior to the Silurian, the land surface was unvegetated), and amphibians appeared during the Devonian. Though reptiles appeared during the Pennsylvanian Period, the first dinosaurs did not stomp across the land until the Triassic. Dinosaurs continued to inhabit the Earth until their sudden extinction at the end of the Cretaceous Period. For this reason, geologists refer to the Mesozoic Era as the Age of Dinosaurs. Small mammals appeared during the Triassic Period, but the diversification (development of many different species) of mammals to fill a wide range of ecological niches did not happen until the beginning of the Cenozoic Era, so geologists call the Cenozoic the Age of Mammals. Birds also appeared during the Mesozoic (specifically, at the beginning of the Cretaceous Period), but underwent great diversification in the Cenozoic Era.
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| Correlation of strata a few of the countrywide parks of Arizona and Utah. |
To conclude our dialogue of the geologic column, let?S see how it comes into play while correlating strata throughout a vicinity. We go back to the Colorado Plateau of Arizona and Utah, within the southwestern United States (figure above a, b). Because of the lack of plant life on this place, you may without problems see bedrock exposures at the walls of cliffs and canyons; a number of those exposures are so beautiful that they have got emerge as national parks. Using correlation techniques, geologists have determined that the oldest sedimentary rocks of the vicinity crop out near the bottom of the Grand Canyon, whereas the youngest form the cliffs of Cedar Breaks and Bryce Canyon. Walking via those parks is for this reason like on foot via Earth?S records every rock layer gives an indication of the climate and topography of the area at a time within the past. For example, whilst the Precambrian metamorphic and igneous rocks exposed inside the internal gorge of the Grand Canyon ?Rst fashioned, the location became a high mountain variety, perhaps as dramatic because the Himalayas these days. When the fossiliferous beds of the Kaibab Limestone on the rim of the canyon ?Rst evolved, the region was a Bahama-like carbonate reef and platform, bathed in a warm, shallow sea. And while the rocks making up the towering purple cliffs of sandstone in Zion Canyon were deposited, the location turned into a Sahara-like wilderness, included with massive sand dunes.
Credits: Stephen Marshak (Essentials of Geology)
