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(Click to zoom) See legend below This is the legend for the North American geological map above. Geologic map of North America. The geology of North America is a subject of regional geology and covers the North American continent, the third-largest in the world. Geologic units and processes are investigated on a large scale to reach a ...
After the Cretaceous, a new era of geologic time began; the Cenozoic era, which means the era of "recent life". Traditionally, the first period of the Cenozoic was called the Tertiary , [ 131 ] however recent recommendations of the International Commission on Stratigraphy discourage its use, with the correspondent time span divided between the ...
The map of North America with the Western Interior Seaway during the Campanian. The Western Interior Seaway (also called the Cretaceous Seaway, the Niobraran Sea, the North American Inland Sea, or the Western Interior Sea) was a large inland sea that split the continent of North America into two landmasses for 34 million years.
This is a list of official and unofficial names for time spans in the geologic timescale and units of chronostratigraphy. Since many of the smallest subdivisions of the geologic timescale were in the past defined on regional lithostratigraphic units, there are many alternative names that overlap.
The geologic time scale or geological time scale (GTS) is a representation of time based on the rock record of Earth. It is a system of chronological dating that uses chronostratigraphy (the process of relating strata to time) and geochronology (a scientific branch of geology that aims to determine the age of rocks).
South America became linked to North America through the Isthmus of Panama during the Pliocene, bringing a nearly complete end to South America's distinctive marsupial faunas. The formation of the Isthmus had major consequences on global temperatures, since warm equatorial ocean currents were cut off and an Atlantic cooling cycle began, with ...
c. 3 Ma – Isthmus of Panama joins North and South America. Great American Interchange. Cats, condors, raccoons and camelids move south; armadillos, hummingbirds, and opossums move north. c. 2.7 Ma – Paranthropus evolves. c. 2.6 Ma – The current ice age begins.
Geologic map of North America, color-coded by age. From most recent to oldest, age is indicated by yellow, green, blue, and red. The reds and pinks indicate rock from the Archean. Mantle convection, the process that drives plate tectonics, is a result of heat flow from the Earth's interior to the Earth's surface.