Introduction
The repercussions of glaciation during the Carboniferous and Permian periods are found in landmasses that were once united to form the geological supercontinent, Gondwana. A series of fragmentation periods divided the supercontinent, ultimately lasting 500 million years (citation). The continents that were once unified include landmasses that today form part of the southern hemisphere including Antarctica, South America, Africa, India and Australia (citation). Australia formed the north-eastern part of the coast of Gondwana lying north of Antarctica (figure). Around 250 million years ago, the Permo-Carboniferous period was one of great glaciation. (citation) Glacial activity was thought to take place primarily from mid-Carboniferous (c. 327 Ma) to the early Late Permian (c. 260 Ma). It reached a peak in global cooling and glacial activity in the late Early Permian, reaching an end in the Late Permian (citation). During this period of global cooling, Central Gondwana became covered in an ice sheet. The presence of glacial ice today, as described in (textbook), is due to h...
Australia is a land of rather extreme weather conditions and widely diverse climates that force the vegetation living there to adapt in many interesting ways. Australia is the driest continent, and biomes such as grasslands and savannas are prime sources of widespread catastrophic fires. The plants that grow in the vast arid and semi-arid regions of Australia are prone to fires simply because of the desert climates that they grow in. High temperatures combined with low fuel moisture contents, little humidity and drying winds that sweep across the landscape encourage many of the plants living in these areas to burst into flames at fairly frequent intervals. Serotinous cones, protective bark, intricate underground recovery systems, unique seed distributions and even the necessity of fire for reproduction are just some of the amazing ways that the major plant families which grow in these fire-prone areas have learned to adapt to their environments.
Ŝibrava, V., Bowmen, D.Q., and Richmond, G.M, 1986, Quaternary glaciations in the northern hemisphere; report of the International Geological Correlation Programme, Project 24 (International Union of Geological Sciences and UNESCO): Pergamon Press, Oxford, New York, 514 p.
Water is the most relied upon resource on earth and if it disappeared life could not and would not exist on this planet. So if one of our main sources of water in South Australia, The Murray Darling-Basin, becomes unusable then we would need to find the problem and do everything possible to stop it or counteract it. This report investigates on salinity in the Murray Darling-Basin, using the issue question “Is there enough being done to counteract the effects of salinity in the Murray?” as the focus. Salinity is a key significant environmental challenge which the Murray faces and if left unmanaged it could cause serious implications for water quality, plant growth, biodiversity, land productivity, infrastructure and could lead to a loss of a water source that’s critical to human needs. In this investigation five different aspects of this salinity issue are presented and these aspects include what Salinity is and how it has become an issue, what the effects are, how salinity affects the rest of Australia, what can be done and is anyone doing anything and finally what the visions are for the future of the Murray and its salinity levels.
After the Laramide orogeny things were still happening, just as always with Earth. Something is always changing even if it is not detectable day by day. Due to the Farallon Plate subducting there was a suction like effect going on because of the water that was being taken in with it (Humphreys). This would cause the North American plate to become weak and unstable, because it was being hydrated. This eventually would result in large plateaus and large amounts of uplift (Humphreys). There are many things that have been going on through out this time period but it all turns around and creates and shapes the earth into what it is today as well as what it will be in the future.
The biggest mass extinction of the past 600 million years (My), the end-Permian event (251 My ago), witnessed the loss of as much as 95% of all species on Earth. Key questions for biologists concern what combination of environmental changes could possibly have had such a devastating effect, the scale and pattern of species loss, and the nature of the recovery. New studies on dating the event, contemporary volcanic activity, and the anatomy of the environmental crisis have changed our perspectives dramatically in the past five years. Evidence on causation is equivocal, with support for either an asteroid impact or mass volcanism, but the latter seems most probable.
The Pleistocene epoch is a well-known time period thanks to the glorification of now extinct megafauna as well as the proximity to our current epoch. Through the rapid climate changes and glaciation that occurred many times during this epoch, the fauna
The Permian-Triassic extinction occurred around 252 million years ago, causing the end of about 96% of marine life and around 70% of terrestrial vertebrate life that existed at that time (Lecture 29. slide 5). Overall, the event caused 83% of all genera to go extinct. This event led to an incredibly long recovery period that took millions of years for life to regain a sense of biodiversity. While many niches in the terrestrial ecosystem were left empty, they eventually were filled by surviving creatures that adapted and evolved. The extinction event is suggested to have lasted over the course of millions of years, with different genera going extinct at different times.
Nowadays climate change is the biggest problem of the human being. It is already happening and represents one of the greatest environmental, social and economic threats facing the planet. Climate change, also known as global warming is the seasonal change for a long geological period of time in the world that is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity, altering the composition of the global atmosphere. Australia faces significant environmental and economic impacts from climate change across a number of sectors, including water security, agriculture, coastal communities, and infrastructure.
The Jurassic period was the second segment of the Mesozoic Era. It occurred from 199.6 to 145.5 millions years ago, following the Triassic Period and preceding the Cretaceous Period. During the Jurassic Period, the supercontinent Pangaea split apart. Laurentia, the northern half, made up what would eventually form North America and Eurasia. The creation of these opened basins for the central Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico. The southern half, Gondwana, drifted into an eastern segment that now forms Antarctica, Madagascar, India, and Australia, and a western portion that forms the present Africa and South America. This rifting, along with generally warmer global temperatures, allowed for diversification and dominance of the reptiles known as dinosaurs. Along with dinosaurs, several different types of life and rock formations emerged during the Jurassic period.
The Effects of Global Warming on the Great Barrier Reef Introduction Coral reefs around the world are in danger. One of the causes is global warming, which has been increasing the temperature of the ocean water, resulting in coral bleaching. This essay will focus on damage occurring to the Great Barrier Reef. What is a Coral Reef? A coral reef is a ridge formed in shallow ocean water by accumulated calcium-containing exoskeletons of coral animals, certain red algae, and mollusks.
Millions and millions of years ago the continents lay together as one super-continent known as Pangea. As time went on and the plates underneath the Earth began to separate, the continents land moved towards the poles where glaciation occurred. Glaciation is the process in which glaciers were formed during the ice age. Glaciation causes a drop in temperature which in turn causes water to freeze and form many layers of ice (http://palaeo.gly.bris.ac.uk/Palaeofiles/Permian/intro.html, 1). Due to this layering of ice that has occurred at both poles it has not been easy to discover new dinosaur fossils. However, in a press release of the National Science Foundation researchers, working in two distinct sites of Antarctica found what seem to be fossil remains of two different dinosaurs that had previously never been introduced to the world of science (http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/newsroom/pr.cfm?ni=52, 1).
The foundation of the Great Lakes began around three billion years ago, which is known as the Precambrian Era. The Precambrian Era contains numerous ecological events, which consists of volcanic activity to erosion to the mountains and hills seen today being formed. Then during the Pleistocene Epoch or known as the “Ice Age, occurred between 1.6 million and 10,000 years ago. At least four times during the Pleistocene Epoch, large masses of ice advanced and retreated over the surface of what is now North America. As the glaciers advanced, giant sheets of ice flowed across the land, leveling mountains and carving out massive ...
It is known that in the last 650,000 years there have been seven cycles of glacial advance and retreat with the last one 7,000 years ago. This was when the modern climate era started which lead to the beginning of human civilization all
Continental drift is the theory of the shifting of the positioning and look of continents in the past and their predicted look in the future. 2.5 cm a year doesn’t seem like a lot unless we calculate it in the millions or hundreds of million years, possibly even 200 million years ago, the era of Pangea. Pangea is the theory that all the 7 continents that we have classified today were joined into one supercontinent, Pangea. The main evidence for this theory of continental drift and Pangea is that almost identical animal and plant fossils, and similar rock formations, are found on different continents. The coastlines of continents even match up with a little bit of rotation and alignment. Through the years, parts of the supercontinent started to drift apart and continued drifting to turn into the continents we know
Scientists think this was thanks to the combination of a super-volcano erupting and the ice-age.