Earth’s Layered Structure

Unravel
Earth’s Her-story
•Age Relationships Among Rocks
•Relative Dating
•Gaps in the Rock Record
•Fossil Clues
•Absolute Dating
Age Relationships
Among Rocks
How do we tell
geologic time?
Law of Superposition
“Sedimentary layers are
deposited in a time sequence,
with the oldest on the bottom
and the youngest on the top.”

Youngest

Oldest
Avicenna Nicolas Steno
 Fossil Correlation

Uses fossils to identify,

reconstruct, and match complex or
widely separated beds
William Smith
in sedimentary sequence
Crosscutting Relationship

A rock or fault is younger than any

rock/fault through which it cuts

James Hutton
 Uniformitarianism

"The Present
is
the Key
to the Past"
 I’m Ana Yo, it’s Nick.
I’m Ana It’s me, Didi,
Rose, and What’s up!?
Marie, and a happy 13 yr
I’m 16, too.
I’m 16. old girl.
We just had
our I’m 10
birthday. years old,
dude.

I’m turning
17 this Hey guys,
summer. want to play
Goo-goo, baseball?
ga ga.
glur
gooagu!

Ronald
 Relative Dating
Places events in their proper
sequence or order
Geologic
Column
Gaps in the Rock
Record
 Unconformities
• Surfaces that separate a series of rock layers

TYPES

Angular
Disconformity Nonconformity
Unconformity
 Disconformity
1 Sea level drops and erosion occurs

3 New sediments
Sedimentary Sea level
Beds rises

4
Nonconformity

Rock cools and uplifted

Erosion occurs

Sea level rises

and sediments
accumulate
 Angular Unconformity
1

Folding and uplift

Erosion Sea level rises

3
occurs and sediments
deposited

4
 Geologic History
Beds

Beds

Folded Beds
Granite
Pluton

Gneiss and Schist

Basalt
Dike (basement)
Fossil Clues
Fossil Clues
Types of Fossil Preservation

a. Petrified b. Mold & Cast

c. Carbon Impressions
d. Resin Fossils
Extinction

Fossilized
leg of a
dinosaur.
Index Fossils
Ammonoids

Ammonites

Ceratites

Goniatites
Facies fossils
 Absolute Dating
• A method that determines the actual
length of time between events.
 Radiometric Dating
• Method of using the decay of
radioactive elements to determine the
absolute age of rocks
• Half-life – the amount of time needed
for one-half of the atoms of an element
to decay
• Daughter elements – new elements
formed during the decay
 Radiometric Dating
• Radiocarbon dating – wherein the
approximate time an organism died is
found by comparing the amount of
carbon-14 in the fossil remains with the
amount of carbon-14 in the same
amount of living matter.
Radiocarbon dating
 The possession of
knowledge does not kill
the sense of wonder and
mystery. There is always
more mystery.…