As I continue to write about listening to The Goldilocks Planet, now is a good time to discuss Earth’s geologic eons, eras, periods, and epochs.  Please see the U.S.G.S.  Divisions of Geologic Time” to help.  These markers from one time to the next tell quite a story.  Except for some ancient zircons from the Hadean, we don’t have much ancient strata to study until the Archean eon began.  “[These] fossilized landscapes…may be found in the hearts of the most ancient continents, in Greenland, Canada, and Australia.  They are the remains of shallow sea floors, lakes, and rivers, between 3 and 3.8 billion years old.”  Earth had water!

We also had life on Earth by that time, and that caused a problem called the Great Oxygenation Event.  As I stated in part 1, our planet’s climate occurs because of the interactions of biology, geology, and astronomy.  Here are just a few examples:  Carbon gets buried as trees die & gradually turn to coal cooling the planet, huge volcanic eruptions release carbon dioxide making the planet hotter, a meteor crashes into the Yucatan killing the non-avian dinosaurs & cooling the planet, the uplift of the Himalayas causes the planet to cool, 100,000 year long Milankovitch cycles cause climate change throughout the planet, and now humans are releasing huge amounts of carbon by using coal and other fossil fuels.

Don’t take my word for this, read/listen to the book to learn more.

I’ve recently finished listening to “The Goldilocks Planet : the four billion story of Earth’s climate.”

It’s a complicated book, so I’m splitting this into two posts.

Earth is in the “Goldilocks zone” of our solar system, but so are Venus & Mars.  Sadly, Mars was too small causing it’s metallic core to become cold thus ending the magnetosphere of that planet.  Venus is roughly the same size as Earth, but it too had problems.  “At some point during it’s history the temperature rose high enough for water vapor to leak into it’s upper atmosphere where the solar wind carried it away.”  This loss of water caused carbon dioxide levels to rise in the atmosphere because it couldn’t be washed away in acid-rain thus trapping heat.

Earth might have had the same fate as Mars, being too small, were it not for an early impact with the Mars sized planet Theia.  That cataclysm caused us to get our Moon, and it is also considered to be the beginning of our climate story here on Earth.  Why?  Because that impact “defined the spin & tilt of the Earth,” and set up of our Earth / Moon system.  As the Earth cooled so began the 1 billion year long Hadean eon.

Our planet’s climate occurs because of the interactions of biology, geology, and astronomy, and we will discuss that in my next post about this book.