Geologic Time and the Geologic

Time Scale
Lecture 1
Geological time units are the lingua franca
of earth sciences: they are a terminological
convenience, a vernacular of any geological
conversation, and a prerequisite of geo-
scientific writing found throughout in earth
science dictionaries and textbooks.

Kowalewski et al. 2011

 Units of Time
• Time Units Used in Everyday Life
• Seconds
– Minutes
• Hours
–Days
»Weeks
• Months
• Years
• Centuries
• Millennia
 Units of Time -- Geologic
• Stage 100,000 to 1,00,000 years
• Age (1,000,000 to 10,000,000 million years)
• Epoch (10 to 20 million)
• Period (23 to 80 million)
• Era (65 to 300 million)
• Eon (more than 500 million [>0.5 billion])
• Supereons (Billons of years)
 Some other units
• Mega Annum
– Abbreviated Ma
– 1 Ma = 1 million years
• Giga Annum
– Abbreviated Ga
– 1 Ga = 1 billion years
 Examples of Events in Deep Time
• 4,400,000 years ago
– Oldest fossils (so far) of hominid lineage

• 50,000,000 years ago

– Beginning of collision of India with Asia (start building the
Himalaya)

• 65,000,000 years ago

– Extinction of the dinosaurs

• 180,000,000 years ago

– Beginning of opening of the Atlantic Ocean
 Large Numbers
• What is a million? 1,000,000

• 1,000,000 $1 bills (@ 4" per 1,000)

= a stack 330' (110 yards) tall
• What is a billion? 1,000,000,000
 If years were seconds
Years Ago
1994 20 You would be 20 seconds old
1979 35 I would be 35 seconds old
1903 111 First Airplane. 1 min., 51 sec. old
1775 239 Amer. Rev. begins 3 min, 59 sec. ago
1492 522 Columbus Sails 8 min, 42 sec. ago
44 BC 2058 Julius Caesar killed 34 min, 18 secs ago
15000 Maximum ice advance 4h, 10 min ago
The Evolution of the Geologic Time Scale

GSA 2012
 Geologic Time Scale
• The Modern Version is very different from the
earliest versions
• Modern version basically put together through
the efforts of a committee of Geologists: The
International Commission of Stratigraphy
http://www.stratigraphy.org/
 Geologic Time Scale
• Developed in a piecemeal
fashion by multiple
geologists utilizing rocks
from several continents (but
mainly from the UK)

Levin, 2009
 The Principles Used to Build the Time
Scale
• Steno’s Principles
• Niels Stensen {Latinized name: Nicolas Steno)
– Danish Physician employed by the Grand Duke of
Tuscany, Ferdinand II
– 1638-1687
– Published in 1669: De solido intra solidum
naturaliter contento dissertationis prodromus
(Preliminary discourse to a dissertation on a solid
body naturally contained within a solid)
For More on his life:
http://palaeo.gly.bris.ac.uk/palaeofiles/history/steno.xhtml and
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/steno.html
 Steno’s Principles
• Principle of Lateral Horizontality
– Sediments are laid down in horizontal layers. If the layers
are not horizontal, then they have been altered some time
after deposition!
• Principle of Original Lateral Continuity
– Layers of sediment extend out in all directions as a
horizontal layer until they either thin to zero or terminate
against the edges of the basin of deposition.
• Principle of Superposition
– In a stack of layers, the oldest is on the bottom and the
layers become progressively younger through the stack
(unless some deformation has flipped them over).
Deposition of
sediment from a
fluid (water, wind
or ice)

Forms continuous
sedimentary layers
that stretch out
laterally in all
directions

Stanley, 2009
Levin, 2009
 Principle of Inclusions
• Steno also articulated an early version of the
Principle of Inclusions
• Any rock fragment or fossil found within a rock
is older than the host rock.
60
Triassic Rift Sediment
50
n = 160
40

30

20

10

27
 Host Sediment

0 Time
(Ma)

Minimum Host Maximum Host Youngest Detrital

Sediment Age Sediment Age Zircon Age

Host Sediment Ages Independent

of Detrital Zircon Data
32
Principle of Fossil Correlation
William Smith (1769-1838)

• One of the Fathers of Modern

Geology
•Surveyor, Canal Builder and
Geologic Mapper
•One of several early workers to
develop the idea that rocks from one
location could be correlated to other
rocks based on their fossil content.
•Principle of Fossil Correlation
Smith’s Masterpiece: The
First Geologic Map of
England and Wales.

The World’s first Geologic

Map completed in 1815.
 Time Units vs. Time-Rock Units
Time Units Time-Rock Units
• Eon • Eonothem
– Era – Erathem
• Period • System
– Epoch – Series
» Age » Stage

Rocks deposited during the Cambrian Period are part of the Cambrian System.
The Paleozoic Era, “Ancient Life”

Courtesy of Wikipedia.org
Cambrian
Ordovician

Silurian

Devonian

Levin, 2009
 Many of the Paleozoic
Units derive their Names
from the pre-Roman
Inhabitants of Wales and
England.

celticbritain.net

Artistic Rendering of what Silures

Tribesmen may have looked like,
based on Tacitus’s descriptions
Courtesy of Wikipedia.org
 The Cambrian System
• Named for Cambria, the Latin name for Wales
• Named by Adam Sedgwick (1785 -1873) for
sparsely fossiliferous rocks from Wales in 1835
– Charles Darwin was one of Sedgwick’s students

For more information on Adam Sedgwick:

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/sedgwick.html
Cambrian Fauna

Levin, 2009
Ordovician –Permian Faunas

Levin, 2009
 The Ordovician and Silurian Systems
• The Silurian was defined by another of
Sedgwick’s students: Sir Roderick Impey
Murchison (1785-1871)
•Named for rocks in southern Wales after the
Latin name of the early inhabitats of the region,
the Silures
•In 1835, Murchison and Sedgwick published: On
the Silurian and Cambrian Systems, Exhibiting the
Order in Which the Older Sedimentary Strata
Succeed Each Other in England and Wales.

For more information about Roderick Murchison:

http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/~alroy/lefa/Murchison.html
 The Ordovician System
• The Ordovician was named by Charles Lapworth
in 1879 after arguments broke out between
Sedgwick and Murchison over the boundaries
(and even the validity of each other’s Periods).
• Lapworth took the Upper part of Sedgwick’s
Cambrian plus the Lower Part of Murchison’s
Silurian and defined these units as the
Ordovician.
• Based on: After discovery of fossils that could
correlate the Ordovician to rocks across North
America and Europe
 Charles Lapworth
•1842-1920

Courtesy of Wikipedia.org
 The Devonian System
• Proposed in 1839 by Sedgwick and Murchison
for rocks that outcrop near Devonshire,
England
• Based on the fossil assemblage which differed
from the underlying Silurian Rocks
 The Carboniferous System
• Term developed by William Conybeare and William Phillips in
1822 for coal-bearing rocks in north-central England.
• Remember that Coal is mostly Carbon – hence the name
Carboniferous
• In Europe the Carboniferous is divided into 2 subperiods – the
Lower Carboniferous (coal-poor) and Upper Carboniferous
(coal-rich)
• In North America, Lower Carboniferous rocks outcrop along
the Mississippi River – and the Lower Carboniferous is called
the Mississippian. Upper Carboniferous rocks were found in
Pennsylvania where they are full of coal seams – these Upper
Carboniferous in North America was called the Pennsylvanian.
• This dichotomy in terminology has persisted ever since!
 The Permian System
• Murchison traveled through Czarist Russia in
the 1840s and described rocks that contained
fossils similar to the Silurian, Devonian and
Carboniferous rocks of the United Kingdom.
• Above the Carboniferous rocks were layers
that Murchison recognized as a new system of
rocks
• He named this period after Permia, an ancient
Russian Kingdom.
Post-Paleozoic Faunas
The Mesozoic Era, “Middle Life”

Coccolithophore

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/
 The Triassic System
• Defined by Friedrich von Alberti in 1834 for
rocks found throughout Germany and
Northwestern Europe
• These rocks typically consist of red beds, chalk
and black shale (Tri means three).

Courtesy of Wikipedia.org
 The Jurassic System
• Term attributed to Alexander von Humboldt
(1769-1859) who studied rocks found in the
Jura Mountains (a portion of the Alps between
France and Switzerland).

Courtesy of Wikipedia.org
 The Cretaceous System
• Defined by Jean Baptiste Julien
d'Omalius d'Halloy (1783-1875)
for chalks found across France,
Belgium and Holland. The White
Cliffs of Dover were later
correlated to these rocks.
• Creta – Latin for chalk.
Abbreviated K, after the German
word for chalk, Kreide.

Courtesy of Wikipedia.org
The Cenozoic Era, “Recent Life”

Courtesy of Wikipedia.org
 Cenozoic: Modern Time Scale
• Broken into three periods:
– The Paleogene System (includes the Paleocene,
Eocene, and Oligocene)
– The Neogene System (includes the Miocene and
Pliocene)
– The Quaternary System (the Pleistocene and
Holocene)
• Older Versions of the Time Scale called the
combination of the Paleogene and Neogene
the Tertiary.
 Precambrian Eon
• An informal term – essentially all time prior to
the Cambrian
• The first reference to the Precambrian that I
could find was Charles Darwin’s On the Origin
of Species, where he discusses the lack of a
Precambrian fossil record in the context of his
theory of evolution.
 Arthur Holmes
1890-1965
In 1913 at the age of 22, he
published “The Age of the
Earth” where he developed
one of the earliest Geologic For more information on Arthur Holmes:
Time Scales http://www.gsahist.org/gsat/gt02mar17_16.pdf
Courtesy of Wikipedia.org Gradstein et al. 2004
Variance in the boundaries of the
Paleozoic Periods over the last 75
years.

Gradstein et al. 2004

Precambrian Periods (save for the Ediacaran) are not formally recognized yet!
Lower boundary
uncertain due to poor
record and questions as
to what signifies the
presence of life.

Kowalewski et al. 2011

 Geological Time Scale
Eon Era Period Epoch Age (Ma)

What parts of Holocene 0.01

Cenozoic
Quaternary
Pleistocene 1.8
Pliocene 5

Tertiary
Neogene Miocene 24
Oligocene 34

the timescale
Paleogene
Eocene 55
Paleocene
65
Cretaceous

Mesozoic
144

Phanerozoic
do you need Jurassic
Triassic
206

250

to memorize? Permian 290

Carboniferous
Pennsylvanian

Paleozoic
323

Mississippian
354
Devonian
Eons, Eras, and Periods and 417
Silurian
their time boundaries. 443
Ordovician
490
For the Cenozoic, know the Cambrian
545
Epochs. Archean Proterozoic
(Precambrian)
Cryptozoic

2500