Geol 60 Lecture Notes Prof. A.

Peleo-Alampay
Not for recopy or uploading into the web; for 1st Sem., 2014-2015 class use only
• What is Historical Geology?
•
• History is the study of the past - what has already happened.

• Humans have left written records

• Written records of human history: stone tablets with cuneiform writing from
Sumeria (Iraq); ~6,000 years old
• Mesopotamia is the name used for the area watered by the Euphrates and Tigris
and its tributaries, roughly comprising modern Iraq and part of Syria.
• Cave paintings depicting animals and human activity: 10,000-40,000 BC
• Lascaux, France
• They were created during the Upper Palaeolithic period (40,000 to 10,000 BC),
and the best were done by what we call the Magdalenians (from the name of a
site), peoples who flourished in Europe from 18,000 to 10,000 BC.

• The age of the earth has been established as 4.6 BILLION years!
• Recorded human history is only .004% of earth history => a large chunk of earth
history was neither witnessed nor described by humans
• This vast stretch of time is the domain of the science of Historical Geology.

Historical Geology & Scientific Revolution

Historical Geology answers basic questions about:

• Human origins
• Origin of our world
• How we came to be what we are today
For thousands of years: religion & mythology provided the answers.

Before the Renaissance:

• western scholars believed that the Earth was the center of the universe
• the Earth & everything on it was created to support humankind
• from the Judeo-Christian Bible and Greek philosophers like Aristotle
During the Renaissance:
• Development of new technology and new philosophy of knowledge led to a
scientific revolution.
• Skeptical investigation of existing truths concerning the natural world
• Sequence of discoveries that radically changed humanity’s sense of our position
in the Universe
Astronomy
• Humans are not the center of the universe.
• 1600s: Copernicus placed the Sun in the center instead of the Earth
• Galileo: Earth was just one of many planets orbiting the Sun in the vastness of
space.
Geology
• 1700s: showed that history was not only prehistoric but prehuman
• Digging for roads, canals and mines: revealed fossils of extinct animals
• Human evidence was absent from all but the topmost layers
Evolution
• 1800s: Charles Darwin removed humans from the biological center of the
universe
• New species arose naturally from pre-existing species through time (fossils)
Geol 60 Lecture Notes Prof. A. Peleo-Alampay
Not for recopy or uploading into the web; for 1st Sem., 2014-2015 class use only
• Humans were not different from other animals in how they came to exist on Earth
• All life was related by a common ancestry
Two of the three fundamental intellectual revolutions in science were caused by the birth
and development of historical geology!

Deep Time
• How much history does Historical Geology encompass?
• Estimates of the age of the Earth

The Age of the Earth

Early Estimates
• Until late 18th century: based on the Bible
• From Genesis, Old Testament
• Adding up ages of successive generations = 6,000 years

Buffon (1760): one of the first to question the literal significance of the 6 days of creation;
said that the earth was older
• Used heated steel spheres to simulate earth’s cooling rate
• Cooling of the early molten earth took 6 epochs = 75,000 years

The saltiness of the oceans (Joly, 1899)

• Assumptions:
a. Total salt in ocean ÷ annual addition of salt from rivers = age of the ocean
b. Rate of addition has not changed
c. Ocean has same age as Earth
d. All the salt placed into the ocean stays there, dissolved in water
Resulting age: about 100 million years
• Problems:
a. Much of salt in rivers is recycled salt from erosion of older marine sediments with
trapped salt water in pore spaces
b. Rates of erosion have varied widely through time
c. Salt in seawater is trapped below seafloor, in ocean sediments
d. Ocean sediments are scraped off and/or subducted at trenches

The internal heat of the Earth (Lord Kelvin, 1846)

• Assumptions:
a. Earth started out molten and has cooled ever since
b. No renewable sources (e.g., chemical) of heat within Earth
c. Temperature of about 90˚C/km
d. Cooling is by conduction
Resulting age was about 20-30 million years
• Problems:
a. Chamberlin challenge (1899): earth started out as a cold body and must have
heated up after its initial formation
b. Temperature gradient 3x too high; present estimates are at 30˚C/km

The rate of deposition of sediments (early 19 th century)

• Total thickness of sediment for each subdivision of fossil-containing part of the
stratigraphic column (about 150,000 m)
• Assume an average rate of deposition (about 30 cm/1000 yrs)
• Resulting age from Cambrian until now: about 500 million yrs
Geol 60 Lecture Notes Prof. A. Peleo-Alampay
Not for recopy or uploading into the web; for 1st Sem., 2014-2015 class use only

The Age of the Earth

• End of the 20th century: Pb dating of meteorites and moon rocks revealed that
the earth is 4.6 billion years old (formation of the solar system)
• All prehuman history is deep time - the realm of historical geology.
• Compare earth history to a 12-month calendar
Jan 1 – earth’s bday = 4.5 BY
Nov 15 – first recognizable animal fossils (600-700 mya)
Dec 25 – extinction of dinosaurs (65 mya)
Dec 31 11:00pm – early humans appeared (1.5-2 mya)
Dec 31 last few seconds –recorded human history (Christ was born = 5,000 yrs ago)