The Devonian Era

The Jurassic Period is a time period were new dinosaurs were being discovered and found. It was about 199.6 to 145.5 million years ago. Some of the species that were found in the Jurassic Period are the Stegosaurus, Ceratosaurus, Brachiosaurus, and Allosaurus. Each dinosaur had their own characteristics for survival.

The creation of the Ring of Fire is very interesting too, it is the result of plate tectonics. These are huge slabs of Earth’s crust that fit together like the pieces of a puzzle. These plates can collide, stay apart, or move up right next to each other. The convergent plate boundaries are formed by plates colliding into each other. The heavier plates slide under the lighter plates causing a deep trench in the ocean floor, as we talked about earlier. If you went down into the ocean you’d be able to see a bunch of trenches in the ocean floor running parallel to corresponding volcanic arcs like the Ring of Fire. This allows islands and continental mountain ranges to be created. A divergent boundary is formed by

The Cambrian Period marks the beginning of the Paleozoic Era. This period gets its name from a place in Wales where the first examples of this type of ancient life was found. The period lasted for nearly 53 million years, from about 543 million years ago until 490 million years ago. The Cambrian Period marks an important point in the history of life on earth; it is the time when most of the major groups of animals first appear in the fossil record. This event is sometimes called the "Cambrian Explosion", because of the relatively short time over which this diversity of forms appears. It was once thought that the Cambrian rocks contained the

The Cretaceous Period had a similar climate to the Jurassic, warm. The geography, however, was changed a drastic amount from the previous period. The Earth had very high sea levels at this time due to the lack of polar ice caps. The supercontinents Laurasia and Gondwana were breaking apart into the continents that are the same in the present day. Although the continents were the same, they did not yet look exactly the same. The continents will be further shaped by volcanic activity and tectonic plate activity. The shaping of the modern era was under way.

The western Cordilleran orogenic belt had been depicted as a passive margin after Neoproterozoic to Early Cambrian rifting. Afterwards, the passive margin converted to an active margin most probably about Late Devonian to Late Cretaceous through the subduction of the exotic allochthons beneath the North American plate. The late Jurassic to Cretaceous subduction of (Sevier and Laramide Orogeny) representing as a period of the back thrust, intraplate thrusting, behind a magmatic arc on the upper plate near or on its westernmost margin from the latest

Plate tectonics is the scientific theory that attempts to explain the movements of the Earth's lithosphere that have formed the landscape features we see across the globe today” (Briney). Geology defines “plate” as a large slab of solid rock, and “tectonics” is part of the Greek root word for “to build.” Together the words define how the Earth’s surface is built up of moving plates. The theory of plate tectonics dictates that individual plates, broken down into large and small sections of rock, form Earth’s lithosphere. These fragmented bodies of rock move along each other atop the Earth’s liquid lower mantle to create the plate boundaries that have shaped Earth’s landscape. Plate tectonics originated from meteorologist Alfred Wegener’s theory, developed in the early 20th century. In 1912, he realized that the east coast of South America and the west coast of Africa appeared to piece together like a jigsaw puzzle. He further examined the globe and deduced that all of Earth’s continents could somehow be assembled together and proposed the idea that the continents had once been linked in a single supercontinent called Pangaea. To explain today’s position of the continents, Wegener theorized that they began to drift apart approximately 300 million years ago. This theory

The Taconic orogeny is evidenced in the Hudson Valley. This orogeny has formed by the convergence of the Laurentia and the Shelburne arc. The Taconic orogeny has led to the formation of sedimentary rocks that can be classified into autochthonous and allochthonous, whereas the Normanskill formation is autochthonous, and five distinctive thrust slices from the low Taconic sequence are allochthonous. Another feature is the Cortland Complex, which is a late Ordovician magmatic intrusion formed by norite, gabbro, hornblende norite, monzodiorite, diorite, hornblende pyroxenite, and peridotite. The sedimentary rocks in the Dutchess county and Westchester counties, New York, have suffered metamorphism due to convergence activities as well as magma

The Appalachian Mountains were formed an estimated 480 million years ago, being one of the first plate collisions constructing the supercontinent Pangea. During the Paleozoic Era, the region was submerged, layers of sediment and carbonate rock began to form on top of the already submerging sea bottom. In the Ordovician Period, the Appalachian passive margin evolved into a plate boundary when another plate collided with and sank the North American plate, creating the Appalachians. The Mountains continued to form as volcanoes grew, plate collisions, all while the supercontinent formed. Pangea began its separation 220 million years ago, halting the creation of many mountain ranges. The Appalachian Mountains had almost flattened completely out,

These Paleozoic rocks are steeply plunging sandstones and siltstones, with a little event of limestone at Lilydale - the Early Devonian Lilydale Limestone. The Silurian rocks were stored in profound water, while the Devonian rocks, which are exceptionally fossiliferous, appear to have been stored in shallower water. These Silurian and Devonian rocks were folded into a progression of anticlines

Deposition of sediments began in the basin during the Cambrian era, but subsidence and basin filling occurred the most during the Ordovician,

The New Madrid Seismic Zone is also known as the New Madrid Fault Line. A fault is a thin zone of crushed rock that separates the Earth’s crust. Whenever an earthquake takes place, it occurs on one of the faults. Then the rock on one of the sides slips with respect to the other. The fault line is made up of reactivated faults. The reactivated faults formed when North America began to separate. Faults were formed next to rift and igneous rocks were formed from the magma that was pushed up to the surface (Wapedia (2010). The rift was covered with younger sediments. The sediments that covered the rift included Mesozoic and Cenozoic sedimentary rocks of the Mississippi embayment. Large amounts of the sediment was loosely consolidated, soft and sandy as a result of the ground shaking, ground deformation, slides, slumps, and liquefaction. A mass of intrusive igneous rock (also known as pluton, mass of igneous rock and a deep reservoir of magma)

The Permian Time frame was the last time of the Paleozoic Time. Enduring from 299 million to 251 million years back, it took after the Carboniferous Time frame and went before the Triassic Time frame. By the early Permian, the two-extraordinary mainland’s of the Paleozoic, Gondwana and Euramerica, had crashed to frame the supercontinent Pangaea. Pangaea was formed like a thickened letter "C." The best bend of the "C" comprised of landmasses that would later wind up present-day Europe and Asia.

The Permian-Triassic boundary, at the start of the Mesozoic, is defined relative to a particular section of sediment in Meishan, China, where a type of extinct, eel-like creature known as a conodont first appeared, according to the International commission on stratigraphy. Life and climate The Mesozoic Era he Mesozoic Era began roughly around the time of the end-Permian extinction, which wiped out 96 percent of marine life and 70 percent of all terrestrial species on the planet. Life slowly rebounded, eventually giving way to a flourishing diversity of animals, from massive lizards to monstrous dinosaurs.

The Cambrian era which can also be known as the Paleozoic era was a result of the period known as “Snowball Earth” that took place over 700 million years ago. The earth had frozen over for more than 200 million years, covering the entire surface with ice a mile long thick in length, killing off all species except for tiny micro organisms, but finally the ice layer on the earth exploded. The layer exploded from the volcanic activity deep beneath the icy surface, but when it finally did explode, it caused an eruption of an enormous amount of carbon dioxide, creating what they call a “green house” effect. Creating the water to become generously oxygenated for life to begin again on earth, but this time, only in the water.

Jurassic is a period of time with Dinosaurs, rodents and birds. There were also island seas consisting of sharks, sea monsters and blood-red planktons. The existing plants in that period were cycads, ferns and conifers. The Mesozoic era was about 245 million years ago to 65 years ago, so it almost lasted about 180 years in total. The Mesozoic era is divided into three periods of Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous. Mesozoic era means middle animals and it is the era, which the word’s fauna has changed from what is in the Paleozoic era and the most famous organisms of this era are dinosaurs. In the Mesozoic era, the extinction of more than 90 percent of species in the earth was observed and the reason behind it was mostly volcanic eruptions and climate changes. On the other hand, this era had massive changes that represented ecological niches and rise to new creatures such as rodent-size mammals and first dinosaurs. In Triassic, which was the first period of Mesozoic, the mammals and first dinosaurs existed. Later than that, the second period was Jurassic, which giant shaped dinosaurs and other kinds of dinosaurs were developed. Besides that the first flowering plants and primitive birds, with long teeth appeared in that era as well.