Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
During the Cenozoic, mammals proliferated from a few small, simple, generalised forms into a diverse collection of terrestrial, marine, and flying animals, giving this period its other name, the Age of Mammals. The Cenozoic is just as much the age of savannas, the age of co-dependent flowering plants and insects, and the age of birds. [40]
Throughout Earth's climate history (Paleoclimate) its climate has fluctuated between two primary states: greenhouse and icehouse Earth. [1] Both climate states last for millions of years and should not be confused with the much smaller glacial and interglacial periods, which occur as alternating phases within an icehouse period (known as an ice age) and tend to last less than one million years ...
Climate changes of 535-536 (535–536 AD), sudden cooling and failure of harvests, perhaps caused by volcanic dust 900–1300 Medieval Warm Period , wet in Europe, arid in North America, may have depopulated the Great Plains of North America, associated with the Medieval renaissances in Europe
The Late Cenozoic Ice Age falls within the Cenozoic Era which started 66 million years ago. The Cenozoic Era is part of the Phanerozoic Eon which started ~538.8 million years ago. ^ a b In standard nomenclature the Pleistocene Epoch lasts from 2.58 Ma to 11.7 ka and the Holocene epoch lasts from 11.7 ka to present.
Climate history over the past 500 million years, with the last three major ice ages indicated, Andean-Saharan (450 Ma), Karoo (300 Ma) and Late Cenozoic. A less severe cold period or ice age is shown during the Jurassic-Cretaceous (150 Ma). There have been five or six major ice ages in the history of
Reconstruction of the past 5 million years of climate history, based on oxygen isotope fractionation in deep sea sediment cores (serving as a proxy for the total global mass of glacial ice sheets), fitted to a model of orbital forcing (Lisiecki and Raymo 2005) [2] and to the temperature scale derived from Vostok ice cores following Petit et al. (1999).
The oldest known eukaryotes lived around 1.4 billion years ago during the Precambrian near Beck Spring in California. These were photosynthetic organisms and produced oxygen as a byproduct of their physiology. The Beck Spring eukaryotes and other Precambrian photosynthesizers released the oxygen that now makes the planet's atmosphere breathable ...
As instrumental records only span a tiny part of Earth's history, the reconstruction of ancient climate is important to understand natural variation and the evolution of the current climate. Paleoclimatology uses a variety of proxy methods from Earth and life sciences to obtain data previously preserved within rocks , sediments , boreholes ...