Life's Origins & Fossils
This experiment simulated early Earth's atmosphere with electrical sparks to show organic molecules can form from inorganic gases.
What is the Urey-Miller experiment?
This type of volcano is built from low-viscosity basaltic lava and produces gentle lava flows rather than explosive eruptions.
What is a shield volcano?
This climate oscillation, involving El Niño and La Niña phases, drives the fluctuation between droughts and floods in Australia.
What is ENSO (the El Niño–Southern Oscillation)?
This term describes using more of a resource than can be naturally replaced.
What is overharvesting?
How many half lives have passed if there is 12.5% of the radioisotope left?
What is 3 Half Lives?
This group of fossils, appearing before the Cambrian, is the earliest clear evidence of multicellular animal life
What is Ediacaran fauna?
This volcanic mudflow is made of water mixed with volcanic ash and debris.
What is a lahar?
This tree-ring dating method reveals year-to-year variations in rainfall and temperature.
What is dendrochronology?
This Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land management practice helps preserve ecosystems by reducing fuel loads and promoting biodiversity.
What is cultural burning?
This term describes a gap in the rock record representing missing time, often caused by erosion or non-deposition.
What is an unconformity?
A good index fossil must be widespread and abundant, but also restricted to this kind of time span.
What is a short, well-defined span of geological time?
This fast-moving, extremely hot mixture of gas, ash and rock fragments is produced by explosive eruptions
What is a pyroclastic flow?
According to recent global emissions data, this country now accounts for about a quarter of the world's greenhouse gas emissions
What is China?
This term describes meeting present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own.
What is sustainability?
What are the two ways you can date rocks?
What is absolute and relative dating?
The correct order these plants appeared on land is Bryophytes, then Ferns, then Gymnosperms, then this flowering group.
What are Angiosperms?
Locations in the interior of a continental plate, far from any plate boundary, are least likely to experience this hazard.
What is an earthquake?
As global temperatures rise, species generally shift toward higher latitudes or this other geographic feature.
What are higher elevations?
Water pollution alters the chemical and physical properties of aquatic habitats, reducing this.
What is biodiversity?
This iron-rich rock formation was created when oxygen from early photosynthetic organisms reacted with dissolved iron in the oceans.
What are banded iron formations (BIFs)?
This hypothesis proposes that life's building blocks arrived on Earth via meteorites or comets.
What is panspermia?
High-silica, viscous magma that traps gas until pressure builds and releases violently causes this type of eruption.
What is an explosive eruption?
Ice cores, human instrumental records and tree rings are all evidence used to infer this kind of (not ancient) global temperature change
What is recent climate change?
Studies suggest low-impact methods used by this group of Australians can reduce carbon emissions and support biodiversity, compared to modern intensive farming.
What are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples (Indigenous agricultural methods)?
This principle states that in an undisturbed rock sequence, the oldest layers are found at the bottom.
What is the law of superposition?