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 } 2023-07-12. Massive lava outburst may have led to Snowball Earth. [https://www.science.org/content/article/massive-lava-outburst-may-have-led-snowball-earth] By Maia Wei-Haas, Science. Excerpt: About 717 million years ago, a climate catastrophe struck the planet, as temperatures plunged and glaciers enveloped the globe. The cause […]

Stay current for chapter 7 { Life and Climate Contents } 2023-11-08. Future Supercontinent Will Be Inhospitable for Mammals. [https://eos.org/articles/future-supercontinent-will-be-inhospitable-for-mammals] By Rebecca Owen, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: It sounds like something from an apocalyptic sci-fi movie: Continents collide and trigger volcanic turmoil. Toxic gases fill the air. The planet becomes a hot desert devoid of life…in the […]

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.  2024-03-07. Peering into the past to identify the species most at risk from climate change. [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adj5763] By Erin Saupe, Cooper Malanoski, et al, […]

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. […]