The Geological Time Scale - an introduction
Prologue I have been a Teaching Assistant for the course ES412: Sedimentary Processes and Stratigraphic Principles this past semester, and I have enjoyed the experience tremendously. It was an undergraduate course designed to give a foundational understanding of sedimentology and stratigraphy to the students through both lectures and labs. For me, it was also a chance to revisit how a student begins to think like a geologist . I think perhaps this is where undergraduate teaching gets tricky - it is both an advantage to find a blank slate, and a responsibility to fill it appropriately. No single course can fill the slate completely, but one does hope to lay the proper framework and instigate the student's curiosity so he/she searches for the details themselves. One of the topics that must be invariably introduced through a course on Stratigraphy is the concept of the Geological Time Scale (GTS) - the big chart that condenses all we know about the Earth's past. A first gl