Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The geologic time scale is a way of representing deep time based on events that have occurred throughout Earth's history, a time span of about 4.54 ± 0.05 Ga (4.54 billion years). [3] It chronologically organises strata, and subsequently time, by observing fundamental changes in stratigraphy that correspond to major geological or ...
The Precambrian includes approximately 90% of geologic time. It extends from 4.6 billion years ago to the beginning of the Cambrian Period (about 539 Ma).It includes the first three of the four eons of Earth's prehistory (the Hadean, Archean and Proterozoic) and precedes the Phanerozoic eon.
Ancient history – Aggregate of past events from the beginning of recorded human history and extending as far as the Early Middle Ages or the Postclassical Era. The span of recorded history is roughly five thousand years, beginning with the earliest linguistic records in the third millennium BC in Mesopotamia and Egypt .
The history of the Earth can be organized chronologically according to the geologic time scale, which is split into intervals based on stratigraphic analysis. [2] [21] The following five timelines show the geologic time scale to scale. The first shows the entire time from the formation of the Earth to the present, but this gives little space ...
Geologic time is the timescale used to calculate dates in the planet's geologic history from its origin (currently estimated to have been some 4,600 million years ago) to the present day. Radiometric dating measures the steady decay of radioactive elements in an object to determine its age. It is used to calculate dates for the older part of ...
The term geon (for geological eon) refers to large, geologic units of time. Geologists traditionally subdivide Earth history into a hierarchy of named intervals: eons, eras, periods, etc. (e.g., the Jurassic Period of the Mesozoic Era). Historians subdivide the history of human activity into intervals that are comparatively much shorter.
1830 – Sir Charles Lyell publishes book, Principles of Geology, which describes the world as being several hundred million years old; 1837 – Louis Agassiz begins his glaciation studies which eventually demonstrate that the Earth has had at least one ice age; 1841 – August Breithaupt, Vollstandiges Handbuch der Mineralogie
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.