Week 9 - History of the Earth

Lab:

This week in Lab we worked to create a realistic and to scale timeline of the creation of the universe all the way up until today. We divided our timeline into 14 meters to have 1 meter represent a billion years. Before we got to find out when humans, animals, and plants all appeared on Earth, we placed our initial individual guesses on the timeline so that we can see how that differed from when these things actually appeared/came to be. It was actually crazy to see how close dinosaurs, the first land animals, first land plants, humans, and the creation of the moon were in our timeline. I feel like in all our our educations, we would make these timelines but they weren't up to scale and they didn't accurately represent the amount of time between each of these milestones.

Lecture: Exam

Textbook: History of the Earth

I learned that the Earth was almost entirely ice at least 3 times in it's history. I remember reading about one of these event's briefly but didn't know that it happened on several occasions between 580 and 750 million years ago... wow... and the evidence we have of this comes from sedimentary rocks. Normally during an ice age, the types of rock being deposited by glaciers are found near Earth's poles. Geologists actually found glacial rocks (of similar ages) all over the world, leading to the Snowball Earth theory.

What I found most helpful: The images on this were very helpful for my learning. In particular, i thought the picture representing the timeline we were creating as a clock was cool and a great way to introduce this to young students. It puts the timelines such close relativity into perspective that young learners can grasp.

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