Geology Timeline Individual Reflection

In this project, we made a timeline to model the span of earth's history and show when and how some major events occurred on our planet. We used a strip 9.2 meters long to represent the 4.6 billion years of Earth's existence, where every million years was represented by 2 mm. The first event on our timeline, the essential kick starter, is the creation of Earth itself, which lead to the existence of everything we know of today and in life itself. Nothing as we know it would exist if this collision did not happen to form our planet. The increase of oxygen in the atmosphere during the Ordovician Period  is also an important event in Earth's history because  this laid the foundation for processes such as photosynthesis and respiration to occur within organisms. The extinction of the dinosaurs during the Mesozoic Era was a very significant event in Earth's history as well as it gave way for mammals to dominate. Humans and other mammals were able to exist because the dinosaurs weren't a looming threat for any longer.

The scale of Earth's history includes a lot of empty time periods, in the sense that there was not much life for long periods of time. Being able to see this visually represented really put so much of history into perspective for me. I was surprised that so much of our history is squished into about 1/2 of a foot on our timelines which in comparison to the existence of Earth, is barely anything! The time period in which humans have dominated the earth is so small but we have influenced and changed the world we live in so much in such an insignificant period of time. This made me think about how long we will exist. Will we be like the dinosaurs and our period of domination abruptly brought to an end?

Here is an infographic that is formatted similar to a timeline with the history of our Earth.