MPE - Major Prehistoric Events Module Overview

EARTHSYSTEMS_OverviewBanner.png 

Major Prehistoric Events

Major Prehistoric Events Dinosaur PictureJust as detectives try to gather as much information as possible to recreate a crime scene, scientists gather multiple types of information to help provide a clearer picture of what happened during the billions of years before humans walked on Earth. Examining Earth's history is like looking through old photo albums; each snapshot captures a moment in history, but they are static moments taken from a continually moving timeline. An individual may have braces in one school photo and none in the next, but those two photos do not tell the entire story of what happened during the year between them. As scientists continue to discover more evidence, from a multitude of sources, the more complete our understanding of the past becomes.

Essential Questions:

  • What kinds of information can be collected from rocks and fossil succession in a rock sequence to interpret major events in Earth's history?
  • How can we use interpretations of major transitions in Earth's history from the fossil and rock record of geologically defined areas?

Key Words:

  1. Archean -  the time from 3,800 million years to 2,500 million years ago
  2. Cenozoic  - approximately the last 63 million years
  3. Continental Drift -  the gradual movement of a very large land mass
  4. Crater   -  a bowl-shaped geological formation at the top of a volcano
  5. Craton -  a large, stable block of the earth's crust forming the nucleus of a continent
  6. Eon -  the largest unit of geologic time
  7. Epoch  - a subdivision of geologic time that is longer than an age but shorter than a period
  8. Era -  a unit of geologic time that includes two or more periods
  9. Evolution -  sequence of events involved in the development of a species
  10. Extinct  - the state of being no longer in existence
  11. Glaciation  - the process, condition, or result of being covered by glaciers or ice sheets
  12. Gondwana  -  a large landmass that consisted of the continents of Africa, South America, Antarctica, and Australia
  13. Ice age -  any period of time during which glaciers covered a large part of the Earth's surface
  14. Laurentia  -  the large landmass that would become the continent of North America during the Paleozoic era
  15. Mesozoic -  from 230 million to 63 million years ago
  16. Orogeny -  a process in which a section of the earth's crust is folded and deformed by lateral compression to form a mountain range
  17. Paleontology -  the Earth science that studies fossil organisms
  18. Paleozoic -  from 544 million to about 230 million years ago
  19. Pangaea -  a hypothetical continent including all the landmass of the earth believed to have been in existence before the continents broke apart during the Triassic and Jurassic Periods
  20. Period -  unit of geologic time that is longer than an epoch but shorter than an era
  21. Phanerozoic -  the eon from about 5,400 million years ago until the present
  22. Plate tectonics -  branch of geology studying the Earth's Crust
  23. Precambrian  - the eon following the Hadean time and preceding the Phanerozoic eon; from about 3,800 million years ago until 544 million years ago
  24. Prehistoric  - belonging to or existing before recorded times
  25. Volcanism  - the phenomena associated with volcanic activity

EarthSystems_OverviewBottomBanner.png IMAGES CREATED BY GAVS OR OPENSOURCE