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Welcome to the Studyhub.net.in Historical Geology textbook!

This textbook is intended for undergraduate courses in Earth history. It was written by Callan Bentley1,2, Karen Layou3, Russ Kohrs4, Shelley Jaye1,6, Matt Affolter5, and Brian Ricketts6. It is a work in progress.

1) Northern Virginia Community College, 2) Piedmont Virginia Community College, 3) Reynolds Community College, 4) Massanutten Regional Governor’s School, 5) Salt Lake Community College, 6) Retired

Chapters:

  • What is Historical Geology?
  • Earth as a System
  • Earth Materials – The Rock Forming Minerals
  • Earth Materials – Rocks
    Plate Tectonics
  • Geologic time
  • Evolution Part I: The Theory
  • Taphonomy: The Science of Death and Decay
  • Innovations of Life Through Time: Life Finds a Way
  • Mass extinctions
  • Stratigraphy – Reading the Pages of Earth’s History
  • Using sedimentary structures to interpret ancient environments
  • Facies
  • Paleoclimatology

Case studies:

  • The Big Bang 
  • A brief history of Earth
  • Nebular theory and the formation of the solar system
  • Earth’s oldest rocks
  • Greenstone belts: primordial tectonics
  • The fate of the plate(oceanic lithosphere) 
  • Starting tectonics and making the first continents
  • Snowball Earth glaciations
  • Endosymbiosis
  • Discovering plate tectonics
  • The Grenville Orogeny & the rifting of Rodinia
  • Sloss sequences 
  • Tippecanoe Sequence: A sequence stratigraphic view
  • The Taconian Orogeny
  • The Acadian Orogeny 
  • California’s Coast Ranges: a Mesozoic accretionary wedge complex
  • The mixed-up quartzites of Cape Agulhas
  • Palimpsest outcrops
  • Extremadura: interpreting a geological cross-section
  • Outcrop interpretation: Titus Canyon cavity
  • Diversity in the marine fossil record
  • Reptile radiation
  • Dinosaur footprints in Culpeper Basin sediments
  • Dinosaur classification
  • Dino Debates – dinosaur ecological controversies
  • Western Mesozoic orogenies
  • San Andreas Fault & the Basin and Range
  • The Parallel “Roads” of Glen Roy
  • The Channeled Scablands of eastern Washington
  • The interplay of carbon & oxygen cycles in Earth history
  • Quaternary Quandaries: defining the geologic “now” and explorations of the Anthropocene
  • Human Evolution

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Suggested citation: Bentley, C., Layou, K.M., Kohrs, R., Jaye, S., Affolter, M. and Ricketts, B. 2020. Historical Geology: A free online text “book,” https://studyhub.net.in//books/geology-books/historicalgeology/

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