Dynamic Earth Assignment

The conditions of the earth today can easily be connected to how the earth was millions of years ago.  Although just one man’s existence is irrelevant to the large scale impacts this earth has felt, there’s still reason to think about it.  With stuff like Snowball Earth, the fossils and El Niño, this stuff is worth talking about.

The earth was once a huge mass of ice millions of years ago, but eventually converted itself into an environment suitable for all sorts of life; this of course is the theory of Snowball Earth.  If it had really happened, it had to have ended right before the Cambrian Explosion, when lots of life started to happen.   Also, glaciers do exist in this world, and it’s possible that they came to be back when the supposed Snowball Earth was happening. And then there were volcanoes, which possibly contributed to ending this ice age known as Snowball Earth, with their Co2.    In addition to this idea, other hypotheses include what is called “Slushball Earth.”  What this theory is, is that there was water still in the Equator, allowing the hydrologic cycle to still happen on Earth.  Another interesting, although hard to believe hypothesis, is the High-obliquity hypothesis.  This has to do with thinking the Earth’s axis tilt was 60 degrees, thus explaining the latitudes.

 

Fossils are things that once lived, in effect saying things about how Earth was like in the past.  According to index fossils, fossils symbolizing a specific era in time, the organisms that existed in different times show some differences, therefore some sort of indication of evolution, and perhaps showing how the Earth was becoming different in those times.

And then there’s El Niño.   One example being when it was discovered by a crew on a thing known as the RV Conrad, it is a warm current that occurs in the ocean every year around December.  It is possible to associate El Niño with global warming, in that there have been more occurrences of it in the span of just a few   years.   What is also generally regarded as truth is that the only reason for the great number of El Niño is due to it being in the beginning of global warming, and they simply declined in strength as time went on.  This proves that things are happening.

So, the theory of the Earth having been a giant snowball millions of years ago, the fossils, and El Niño; what do they really say about the conditions of the Earth now, in relation to the past?  As it is only a theory, Snowball Earth can’t really show that there are things living on this planet, but it’s still believable.  Fossils, as they were once organisms, prove that life was able to exist on the planet, meaning that the Earth must have been of decent climate millions of years ago. And El Niño certainly can’t say much about the past, but it shows that global warming and climate change might be an important issue now.