Geology

The South American plate is the smallest of all major plates that includes the continent of South America and a large portion of the Atlantic Ocean.

Sedimentary rocks form from two key processes. First, compaction squeezes material together. Second, cementing glues the squeezed material together.

In the Proterozoic Eon, key highlights are: ozone layer thickened, an oxygen crisis, Snowball Earth and eukaryotes and multicellular organisms evolved.

If you could speed up time, you would see rocks cycling from within the planet. Like a well-oiled machine, rocks are igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic.

Chemical weathering is the process of transforming a rock’s composition through chemical reactions (by dissolving or converting them into other minerals)

Sandwiched between the North American & African Plates, the Eurasian Plate consists of parts of Europe, Russia, Asia as well as the Atlantic & Arctic Ocean.

The Mesozoic Era had a lot of “firsts”. For example, it had the first birds, first mammals, first dinosaurs and first flowering plants on Earth.

Earth’s crust is all around us. It’s the layer we live on. But did you know that Earth’s crust is composed of oceanic and continental and oceanic crust?

Earth has 12 major tectonic plate boundaries (with smaller micro plates). They interact by either diverging, converging or sliding across from each other.

Streams carrying too much sediment clogs the entrance into the basin. As sediments dump in, water flow decelerates and widens the entrance forming a delta.

Magma is liquid rock with dissolved gas at the interior of Earth. When magma reaches the surface, it’s lava. The difference for lava vs magma is location.

All planets have layers. Inside Earth, we have a crust, core and mantle. Imagine a team of drillers who set out to drill a hole to the other side of Earth.

Earth’s geological time scale is almost unimaginable to us. This is because humans lifespans are so short in comparison (in hours, days, months and years).