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Ma means "million years ago". The natural history of Earth concerns the development of planet Earth from its formation to the present day. [1] [2] Nearly all branches of natural science have contributed to understanding of the main events of Earth's past, characterized by constant geological change and biological evolution.
Geologic time shown in a diagram called a geological clock, showing the relative lengths of the eons of Earth's history and noting major events. The geological history of the Earth follows the major geological events in Earth's past based on the geological time scale, a system of chronological measurement based on the study of the planet's rock ...
Dresbachian extinction event 485.4: Cambrian–Ordovician extinction event: 450–440: Ordovician–Silurian extinction event, in two bursts, after cooling perhaps caused by tectonic plate movement 450: Andean-Saharan glaciation: 360–260: Karoo Ice Age: 305: Cooler climate causes Carboniferous rainforest collapse: 251.9: Permian–Triassic ...
The Great Oxidation Event (GOE) or Great Oxygenation Event, also called the Oxygen Catastrophe, Oxygen Revolution, Oxygen Crisis or Oxygen Holocaust, [2] was a time interval during the Earth's Paleoproterozoic era when the Earth's atmosphere and shallow seas first experienced a rise in the concentration of free oxygen. [3]
In geology, catastrophism is the theory that the Earth has largely been shaped by sudden, short-lived, violent events, possibly worldwide in scope. [1] This contrasts with uniformitarianism (sometimes called gradualism ), according to which slow incremental changes, such as erosion , brought about all the Earth's geological features.
The history of life on Earth traces the processes by which living and extinct organisms evolved, from the earliest emergence of life to the present day. Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago (abbreviated as Ga, for gigaannum) and evidence suggests that life emerged prior to 3.7 Ga. [1] [2] [3] The similarities among all known present-day species indicate that they have diverged through the ...
An abrupt climate change occurs when the climate system is forced to transition at a rate that is determined by the climate system energy-balance. The transition rate is more rapid than the rate of change of the external forcing, [1] though it may include sudden forcing events such as meteorite impacts. [2]
Extinction events can be tracked by several methods, including geological change, ecological impact, extinction vs. origination rates, and most commonly diversity loss among taxonomic units. Most early papers used families as the unit of taxonomy, based on compendiums of marine animal families by Sepkoski (1982, 1992).