The Story of Earth

Week 10: Evolution and radiation of animals and plants (Chapters 11, 12, 13,
14)

Early Life and Snowball Earth

o Focus Questions:
What is the carbon cycle? REVIEW
What happens when a positive feedback in the carbon cycle
occurs?
Did Earth become a huge snowball?
Explosion of life in the sea, Invasion of the land
o Focus Questions:
When does complex life originate?
How quickly is biodiversity established?
How has biodiversity changed over time?
What happens that drives mass extinctions?
How did life leave the water?

Week 11: A different worldlife with dinosaurs (Chapters 15, 16)

Forests and flight

o Focus Questions:
What is biodiversity?
What is a food chain, food web and trophic level?
How is biodiversity and trophic level in the past determined?
How do plants and fungi change climate?
How are plans recorders of climate?
Dinosaurs
o Focus Questions:
When did modern forms and ecologies appear?
What is common about ecosystems through time? What is new?
How do ecological links affect evolution?

Week 12: Extinction of dinosaurs and the present day extinction event
(Chapter 17, Handouts)

The K-T extinction evidence

o Focus Questions:
What is extinction?
Why is it called the K-T extinction?
What killed the dinosaurs?
What evidence is there for all the extinction possibilities?
Present day extinctions compared to the past
o Focus Questions:
What were the five big extinctions?
Are we in the sixth massive extinction?
Why did we transition from a Greenhouse climate to an Ice
House climate?

How did open gateways via tectonics impact global climate

change?

Week 13: Climate change: Mesozoic warming, Cenozoic warming (Chapters

18, 19)

Early Cenozoic, Origin of modern animals

o Focus Questions:
Another tectonic change that caused climate change
How do animals adaption record and/or possibly cause climate
change?
Food webs I Whales
Food webs II - Horses
Origin of modern world: late Cenozoic, human origin
o Focus Questions:
How do animals adaption record and/or possibly cause climate
change?
Food webs II Horses
Food webs IIIHumans

Week 14: Holocene climate; abrupt climate change; anthropogenic forcing;

human response to climate change (Chapter 19)

Glaciation, our interglacial and Earths warming future

o Focus Questions:
How does climate change occur naturally?
What three Milankovitch cycles?
Why do they occur?
What are the timescales of Milankovitch cycles?
What impact do they have on climate?
What geologic evidence do we have for them?
Sea level change
o What records show there was a glacial age?
o How are sea level and CO2 connected?
o How does sea level change with global warming?
o What are the indicators of global warming?

Week 15: Our history and our futurethe Holocene (Chapter 20)

The Anthropocene
o What are the modern contributors to greenhouse gases?
How do they rise?
o How long do greenhouse gases persist?
o What are the indicators of global warming?
o How do we know the C is from humans?
Future of food