Sediments and Rock Layers
Tillites, varves, and dropstones.
What are rock types deposited during cold climates?
The gas that caused Banded Iron Formations to form.
What is oxygen?
The two Earth systems that interact when volcanoes erupt carbon dioxide, which can warm the climate.
What are the geosphere and atmosphere?
Evolution of shells, teeth, and bones, along with an increase in the diversity of life.
What are two causes of the Cambrian Explosion?
Fossilized tracks, trails, burrows, nests, and dung.
What are trace fossils?
The sedimentary rock that is deposited in a river environment.
What is conglomerate?
A complex cell with a nucleus and organelles that have their own DNA.
What is a eukaryote?
Long-term weather for the planet. Example: increasing global temperatures over many decades.
What is climate?
It would one day be called North America.
What was Laurentia?
The coolest Paleozoic animals. Over 15,000 species, and some could curl up for defense.
What are trilobites?
The sedimentary environment that produces breccia.
What is an alluvial fan?
The Meso-Proterozoic supercontinent.
What is Rodinia?
Ice reflects sunlight, which cools the climate, which leads to more ice, which cools the climate more…..and on and on.
What is a positive feedback loop?
The second transgression of the Paleozoic Era, in the Ordovician Period.
What was the Tippecanoe Transgression?
When the eurypterids started walking on land.
What in the Ordovician Period?
Rounding and sorting.
What happens to sediments as they are transported away from their source?
Sturtian (~717 myr. ago) and Marinoan (~650 myr. ago).
What were two Snowball Earth episodes?
When marine animals (biosphere) uses dissolved minerals (from the lithosphere) in the ocean (hydrosphere).
What is biomineralization?
In the Cambrian Period, the coast of Laurentia was not near a plate boundary and had few earthquakes and lots of sediments.
What is a passive margin?
Trilobites and radiodonts are members of this phylum.
What are arthropods?
Layer of sandstone, then a layer of shale, then a layer of limestone.
What are the rocks deposited in a marine transgression?
Rocks formed on land that show evidence of abundant free oxygen in the atmosphere.
What are continental red beds?
Sediments with random size chunks that are made by glaciers. Evidence for the "Snowball Earth" episodes.
What are tillites? (even near the Proterozoic equator)
The location in modern Canada where many Cambrian fossils are found, including soft-body animals.
What is the Burgess Shale?
The first one happened at the end of the Ordovician Period, in 2 pulses that killed off many species worldwide.
What is a mass extinction?