Author: Zach

Staying current for Chapter 9 { Life and Climate Contents } 2023-04-26. Do Volcanoes Add More Carbon Than They Take Away?. [https://eos.org/research-spotlights/do-volcanoes-add-more-carbon-than-they-take-away] By Saima May Sidik, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: In a new study, Zhong et al. discovered that a volcano in northeast China emits a small net amount of carbon each year. Over geological timescales, that could have […]

Staying current for Chapter 8 See non-chronological resources (bottom of this page) { Life and Climate Contents } 2024-11-25. Large Igneous Provinces May Have Leaked Cryptic Carbon. By Skyler Ware, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Massive volcanic eruptions have reshaped Earth and its climate at several points in history. New research suggests that long after these surface eruptions […]

Stay current for chapter 7 { Life and Climate Contents } 2024-11-07. A New View of Deep Earth’s Carbon Emissions. By Saima May Sidik, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: From time to time, when Earth’s tectonic plates shift, the planet emits a long, slow belch of carbon dioxide. In a new modeling study, Müller et al. show how this gas […]

Stay current for chapter 6 { Life and Climate Contents } Understanding Evolution – a one-stop source for information on evolution.2019-11-14. Alien genes from bacteria helped plants conquer the land. By Elizabeth Pennisi, Science Magazine.  2024-11-13. Best evidence yet that “Snowball Earth” saw ice cover the entire globe. By Evrim Yazgin, COSMOS. Excerpt: More than 700 million years […]

Stay current for chapter 5 { Life and Climate Contents } 2021-09-03. Longer Days Likely Boosted Earth’s Early Oxygen. Source: By Damond Benningfield, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Microbial mats in a Lake Huron sinkhole, combined with modeling work, suggest that the changing length of Earth’s day could have played a key role in oxygenating the atmosphere.… [https://eos.org/articles/longer-days-likely-boosted-earths-early-oxygen] […]

Stay current for chapter 4 { Life and Climate Contents } 2024-07-12. Our last common ancestor lived 4.2 billion years ago—perhaps hundreds of millions of years earlier than thought. By ROBERT F. SERVICE, Science. Excerpt: The last ancestor shared by all living organisms was a microbe that lived 4.2 billion years ago, had a fairly […]

Stay current for chapter 3 { Life and Climate Contents } 2009 June 7. Early rocks to reveal their ages. By Jennifer Carpenter, BBC News. Excerpt: A new technique has been helping scientists piece together how the Earth’s continents were arranged 2.5 billion years ago. The novel method allows scientists to recover rare minerals from rocks. By […]

Staying current with chapter 2 { Life and Climate Contents } 2016-05-09. Earth’s ancient atmosphere was half as thick as it is today. By Roland Pease, Science. Excerpt: …very little is known about how thick Earth’s ancient atmosphere once was. Now, a new study suggests that Earth’s atmosphere 2.7 billion years ago was between a quarter to […]

Chapter 13 { Life and Climate Contents } In Life and Climate we have seen how Earth’s changing climate and evolving life forms have influenced each other over the past 4.6 billion years of our planet’s history. In the first part of this chapter we briefly review highlights of this fascinating story. In the last […]

Chapter 12 { Life and Climate Contents } I. New Ways of Living and Thinking Although anatomically modern human beings had evolved by 100,000 years ago, there is little evidence that they lived and behaved differently from Homo erectus. However, evidence shows that major changes were beginning to get under way about 50,000 years ago. […]