Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
evolution of the continents, oceans, atmosphere, and biosphere. The layers of rock at the Earth's surface contain evidence of the evolutionary processes undergone by these components of the terrestrial environment during the times at which each layer was formed. By studying this rock record from the very beginning, it is thus possible to trace their development and the resultant changes through time.
energy released from the sinking of metals, or (3) the impact of small planetary bodies (or planetesimals). The increase in temperature became sufficient to heat the entire planet. Melting at depth produced liquids that were gravitationally light and thus rose toward the surface and crystallized to form the earliest crust. Meanwhile, heavier liquids rich in iron, nickel, and perhaps sulfur separated out and sank under gravity, giving rise to the core at the centre of the growing planet; and the lightest volatile elements were able to rise and escape by outgassing, which may have been associated with surface volcanic activity, to form the secondary atmosphere and the oceans. This chemical process of melting, separation of material, and outgassing is referred to as the differentiation of the Earth. The earliest thin crust was probably unstable and so foundered and collapsed to depth. This in turn generated more gravitational energy, which enabled a thicker, more stable, longer-lasting crust to form. Once the Earth's interior (or its mantle) was hot and liquid, it would have been subjected to large-scale convection, which may have enabled oceanic crust to develop above upwelling regions. Rapid recycling of crust mantle material occurred in convection cells, and in this way the earliest terrestrial continents may have evolved during the 700-million-year gap between the formation of the Earth and the beginning of the rock record. It is known from direct observation that the surface of the Moon is covered with a multitude of meteorite craters. There are about 40 large basins attributable to meteorite impact. Known as maria, these depressions were filled in with basaltic lavas caused by the impactinduced melting of the lunar mantle. Many of these basalts have been analyzed isotopically and found to have crystallization ages of 3.9 to 4 billion years. It can be safely concluded that the Earth, with a greater attractive mass than the Moon, must have undergone more extensive meteorite bombardment. According to the English-born geologist Joseph V. Smith, a minimum of 500 to 1,000 impact basins were formed on the Earth within a period of about 100 to 200 million years prior to 3.95 billion years ago. Moreover, plausible calculations suggest that this estimate represents merely the tail end of an interval of declining meteorite bombardment and that about 20 times as many basins were formed in the preceding 300 million years. Such intense bombardment would have covered most of the Earth's surface, with the impacts causing considerable destruction of the terrestrial crust up to 3.9 billion years ago. There is, however, no direct evidence of this important phase of Earth history because rocks older than 3.9 billion years have not been preserved. An exciting discovery was made in 1983 by William Compston and his research group at the Australian National University with the aid of an ion microprobe. Compston and his associates found that a water-laid clastic sedimentary quartzite from Mount Narryer in western Australia contained detrital zircon grains that were 4.18 billion years old. In 1986 they further discovered that one zircon in a conglomerate only 60 kilometres away was 4.276 billion years old; 16 other grains were determined to be the same age or slightly younger. This is the oldest dated material on Earth. The rocks from which the zircons in the quartzites and conglomerates were derived have either disappeared or have not yet been found. The ages of these single zircon grains are significantly older than those of the oldest known intact rocks, which are granites discovered near the Great Slave Lake in northwestern Canada. The latter contain zircons that are 3.96 billion years old.
and at least 25 kilometres in extent in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. It seems likely that the excess iron in the early oceans was finally cleared out by about 1.7 billion years ago, and this decrease in the deposition of iron formations resulted in an appreciable rise in the oxygen content of the atmosphere, which in turn enabled more eolian red beds to form. Further evidence of the lack of oxygen in the early atmosphere is provided by detrital uraninite and pyrite and by paleosolsi.e., fossil soils. Detrital uraninite and pyrite are readily oxidized in the presence of oxygen and thus do not survive weathering processes during erosion, transport, and deposition in an oxygenous atmosphere. Yet, these minerals are well preserved in their original unoxidized state in conglomerates that have been dated to be more than 2.2 billion years old on several continents. Paleosols also provide valuable clues, as they were in equilibrium with the prevailing atmosphere. From analyses of early Precambrian paleosols it has been determined that the oxygen content of the atmosphere 2.2 billion years ago was one hundredth of the present atmospheric level (PAL). Fossils of eukaryotes, which are organisms that require an oxygen content of about 0.02 PAL, bear witness to the beginning of oxidative metabolism. The first microscopic eukaryotes appeared about 1.4 billion years ago. Life-forms with soft parts, such as jellyfish and worms, developed in profusion, albeit locally, toward the end of the Precambrian about 650 million years ago, and it is estimated that this corresponds to an oxygen level of 0.1 PAL. By the time land plants first appeared, roughly 400 million years ago, atmospheric oxygen levels had reached their present values.
Time scales
The geologic history of the Earth covers nearly four billion years of time. Different types of phenomena and events in widely separated parts of the world have been correlated using an internationally acceptable, standardized time scale. There are, in fact, two geologic time scales. One is relative, or chronostratigraphic, and the other is absolute, or chronometric. The chronostratigraphic scale has evolved since the mid-1800s and concerns the relative order of strata. Important events in its development were the realization by William Smith that in a horizontal sequence of sedimentary strata what is now an upper stratum was originally deposited on a lower one and the discovery by James Hutton that an unconformity (discontinuity) indicates a significant gap in time. Furthermore, the presence of fossils throughout Phanerozoic sediments has enabled paleontologists to construct a relative order of strata. As was explained earlier, at specific stratigraphic boundaries certain types of fossils either appear or disappear or both in some cases. Such biostratigraphic boundaries separate larger or smaller units of time that are defined as eons, eras, periods, epochs, and ages. The chronometric scale is of more recent origin. It was made possible by the development of mass spectrometers during the 1920s and their use in geochronological laboratories for radiometric dating (see above). The chronometric scale is based on specific units of duration and on the numerical ages that are assigned to the aforementioned chronostratigraphic boundaries. The methods used entail the isotopic analyses of whole rocks and minerals of element pairs, such as potassiumargon, rubidiumstrontium, uraniumlead, and samariumneodymium. Another radiometric time scale has been developed from the study of the magnetization of basaltic lavas of the ocean floor. As such lavas were extruded from the mid-oceanic ridges, they were alternately magnetized parallel and opposite to the present magnetic field of the Earth and are thus referred to as normal and reversed. A magnetic-polarity time scale for the stratigraphy of normal and reversed magnetic stripes can be constructed back as far as the middle of the Jurassic Period, about 170 million years ago, which is the age of the oldest extant segment of ocean floor.