Latest Historical geology Stories
Millions of years ago, the creatures who would become the ancestors of all life, animals and humans alike, were simple, sometimes composed of individual cells. Evolution had been slow, with very little diversification. Then, as the waters began to shift and separate exposing new areas of land to air and daylight, this slow evolution began to explode into activity. Referred to as the Cambrian Explosion, this diversification is estimated to have taken several million years itself, breeding many...
The March GSA TODAY, the Geological Society of America’s open-access science and news magazine, is now online at http://www.geosociety.org/gsatoday/archive/22/3/. This month’s science article, by Todd LaMaskin of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, presents uranium-lead dating analyses of detrital zircon grains in Paleozoic-Mesozoic basin sediments in the Cordillera of western North America. LaMaskin's analysis shows a systematic variation in age distribution within the...
University of Miami study offers new geochemical clues to understand conditions just prior to major climatic event In a study published in the journal Geology, scientists at the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science suggest that the large changes in the carbon isotopic composition of carbonates which occurred prior to the major climatic event more than 500 million years ago, known as 'Snowball Earth,' are unrelated to worldwide glacial events. "Our...
University of Colorado researchers have found that worms were among the first animals to surface after an asteroid plowed into the Gulf of Mexico 65.5 million years ago. Geological sciences Associate Professor Karen Chin of the university said this "K-T extinction" is often focused on the survival and proliferation of mammals, and studies show some of the earliest terrestrial ecosystems to emerge were aquatic plants. However, new evidence from North Dakota shows networks of...
Global glaciation likely put a chill on life on Earth hundreds of millions of years ago, but new research indicates that simple life in the form of photosynthetic algae could have survived in a narrow body of water with characteristics similar to today's Red Sea. "Under those frigid conditions, there are not a lot of places where you would expect liquid water and light to occur in the same area, and you need both of those things for photosynthetic algae to survive," said Adam Campbell, a...
University of Pennsylvania evolutionary biologists have resolved a long-standing paleontological problem by reconciling the fossil record of species diversity with modern DNA samples. Cataloging the diversity of life on earth is challenging enough, but when scientists attempt to draw a phylogeny — the branching family tree of a group of species over their evolutionary history — the challenge goes from merely difficult to potentially impossible. The fossil record is the only...
VANCOUVER, Aug. 4, 2011 /PRNewswire/ - Ralph Rushton, the President of Emerick Resources Corp. (TSXV: ERC) is pleased to announce that the Company has negotiated an option to acquire a 75% interest in an extensive claim package in the Northwest Territories controlled by GGL Resources Corp. ("GGL"), subject to TSX Venture Exchange approval. A finder's fee is payable to Axemen Resource Capital Ltd., an Exempt Market Dealer. The Providence Greenstone Belt ("PGB") project covers...
According to MIT researchers, new fossils suggest life had a rapid recovery after a global freeze. Researchers at MIT, Harvard University and Smith College discovered hundreds of microscopic fossils in rocks dating back about 710 million years, which is around the time frame that the planet emerged from the "Snowball Earth" event. The team said new fossils are remnants of tiny organisms that survived the harsh post-glacial environment by building armor and reaching out with...
Carbon found within ancient rocks has played a crucial role developing a time line for the emergence of biological life on the planet billions of years ago. But applying cutting-edge technology to samples of ancient rocks from northern Canada has revealed the carbon-based minerals may be much younger than the rock they inhabit, a team of researchers report in the latest edition of the journal Nature Geoscience.The team "“ which includes researchers from Boston College, the Carnegie...
Scientists have discovered that a community of seaweeds and worm-like animals lived in a quiet deep-water niche under the sea about 600 million years ago near what is now Lantian, which is a small village in Anhul Province of South China. The scientists identified about 15 different species at the site, in addition to the ancient versions of algae and worms. The researchers said that the fossils suggest that morphological diversification of macroscopic eukaryotes may have occurred only tens...
Latest Historical geology Reference Libraries
Rainforests are forests that are characterized by high levels of rainfall, with definitions based on a minimum usual annual rainfall of about 68 to 78 inches. The monsoon trough, or otherwise known as the intertropical convergence zone, holds an important role in producing the climatic conditions that are essential for the Earth’s tropical rainforests. About 40 to 75 percent of all biotic species are native to the rainforests. It’s been estimated that there might be many millions of...
Climate change is a substantial and lasting change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns over periods of time ranging from decades to millions of years. It might be a change in the average weather conditions, or in the distribution of weather around the average conditions. Climate change is a result of factors that include oceanic processes, biotic processes, variations in solar radiation received buy Earth, volcanic eruptions, and plate tectonics, and human induced alterations...
The Neoproterozoic is the third of three subdivisions of the Proterozoic Eon (occurring from 1 billion years ago to 542 million years ago). This terminal era of the Proterozoic is itself divided into three sub-periods called the Tonian, Cryogenian, and Ediacaran Periods. The most severe glaciation known in the geologic record occurred during the Cryogenian Period, when ice sheets reached the equator and formed a possible “Snowball Earth.” And the earliest fossils of multi-cellular life...
The Paleoproterozoic is the first of three subdivisions of the Proterozoic Eon (occurring from 2.5 billion to 1.6 billion years ago (Ga). This period is marked by the first stabilization of the continents, and also when cyanobacteria--a type of bacteria that uses biochemical processes of photosynthesis to produce oxygen--evolved. Experts have found paleontological evidence that during at least part of the Paleoproterozoic era, about 1.8 Ga, the earth year was about 450 days long, with days...
The Archean (formerly Archaeozoic) is a geologic eon between the Hadean and Proterozoic eons. The Archean Eon begins at roughly 3.8 billion years ago (Ga) and ends at about 2.5 Ga. But unlike all other geological ages, which are based on stratigraphy, The Archean eon is defined chronometrically. The lower boundary of 3.8 Ga has also not been officially recognized by the International Commission on Stratigraphy. The name Archean is derived from the ancient Greek (Arkhe), meaning...
