Sediments and Rock Layers
Rocks dropped to the ocean bottom from icebergs.
What are dropstones?
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?
Both evolution of shells, teeth, and bones, and an increase in the diversity of life.
What are two causes of the Cambrian Explosion?
The first "big" animals (metazoans) - fossils are in the Neoproterozoic.
What are Ediacarans?
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?
Layers of bacteria and sediment. The earliest fossils.
What are stromatolites?
The sedimentary environment that produces breccia.
What is an alluvial fan?
The MesoProterozoic supercontinent, assembled 1.3 – 1.0 Byr. ago.
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 first transgression of the Paleozoic Era, in the Cambrian Period.
What was the Sauk Transgression?
Bacteria and archaea are these.
What are prokaryotes?
Sediments with random size chunks that are made by glaciers. Evidence for the "Snowball Earth" episodes.
What are tillites?
Sturtian and Marinoan in the Neoproterozoic.
What were two Snowball Earth episodes?
When marine animals (biosphere) uses dissolved minerals (from the lithosphere) in the ocean (hydrosphere).
What is biomineralization?
Evidence for plate tectonics is found in inclusions in these 3 billion year old minerals.
What are diamonds?
Mutually beneficial cooperation between two prokaryotes.
What is endosymbiosis?
Layer of sandstone under a layer of shale under 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?
This organism produced oxygen and cleaned the iron out of the oceans producing BIFs.
What are cyanobacteria?
These are early, Archean mini continents.
What are cratons?
The earliest prokaryote fossils.
What is the Dresser Formation and the Strelley Pool fossils?