week 9

 1. The big question addressed in the lab, and a description of what you did.

This week in the lab we started talking about the timeline of when things started to live on earth. Our big question was, what are the significant events in the history of the earth and when do they appear in our timeline? To answer this question we took events of when things started to appear on earth, e.g., humans and dinosaurs, and placed them on a timeline to show when we thought they appeared. We then learned about when all of these things would have appeared on earth. We did this by looking at earth’s history as a clock and using earthviewer. 


2. A description of what you learned in Thursday's lecture. 

Exam this week.


3. Answer questions about the weekly textbook reading:

  1. What did you learn?

At the beginning of the textbook it talks about geologic time and it breaks down every part of when things arrive on earth. It starts with the earth forming and then finishes when homo sapiens arrive. Then it goes into talking about the snowball earth that happened between 580 and 750 million years ago. This was caused by a chain of events called a positive feedback loop. 

  1. What was most helpful?

There is a part in the textbook, “Origins of life on Earth: Bacteria, Plants, and Animals”, where everything is written out and explained from when the earth was formed all the way to when homo sapiens began to appear. This was helpful for me because the clock image was a little bit confused and there was a lot going on but being able to just have it written out was super helpful. The textbook goes on to talk about pangaea and plate tectonics. Plate tectonics is the theory that earth’s crust is divided into many pieces called tectonic plates. After that we learned about continental drifts. This is the theory that Earth’s land was originally one big continent that slowly drifted apart to what we have now. 

  1. What do you need more information on?

I am a little confused about positive feedback loops and where they start and end. 

  1. What questions/concerns/comments do you have?

When looking at the positive feedback loop image, what starts the loop? Cooling? 

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