Ge

End of the drying of the oceans: all the water that was on the surface has filtered into the subsurface and into the mantle which is no longer hot enough to re-emit it to the surface in the form of vapor. Even life in the

The supercontinent Pangea Ultima is formed from the union of Austro-Antarctica-Eurasia and America; the hypothesis is by Christopher Scotese

The supercontinent Austro-Antarctica-Eurasia is formed from the union of Austro-Eurasia and Antarctica

The supercontinent Austro-Eurasia is formed from the union of Eurasia and Australia

The supercontinent Eurasia is formed from the union of Africa, Europe and Asia

Publication in Nature: the remains of the planetoid Theia have been found deep in the Earth’s mantle. This is therefore the same area where Helium 3 comes from. Scientists have therefore found the remains of the planetoid Theia, which collided with the Earth 4 and

paper in Nature reports the detection of a surprising amount, for Earth, of Helium-3, a rare form of helium that is famous for its relative abundance on the lunar surface and its usefulness in powering high-efficiency, neutron-sparsing nuclear fusion reactors. It was found to be

Tonga Islands. Violent eruption of the volcano on the island Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai, 65 km north of the main island of the archipelago, Tongatapu. It is the most violent eruption in recent decades, globally. It causes tsunamis of a couple of meters on several coasts

Big Island, Hawaii. Kilauea’s eruption, which began 35 years earlier, in January 1983, suddenly ends.

Evidence for meteorite impact as cause of P-Tr extinction 250 million years ago is found; one proof is the “extraterrestrial” proportion of Helium and Argon in air bubbles in rocks of that era found in China, Hungary, Japan; other proof concerns the geologically brief nature

Launch of the Shuttle mission STS-99, which begins 11 days of SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) mapping of 80% of the Earth’s surface. The Space Shuttle Endeavour maps 80% of the Earth’s surface with synthetic aperture radar. The radar is a technological jewel, the result of

The two Americans David Raup and Jack Sepkoski, by graphing the number of families of marine animals over millions of years, discover the 5 great mass extinctions (439, 367, 245, 208, 65 million years ago)

Evidence Found for Crater in Yucatan Responsible for Dinosaur Extinction

British Antarctic Survey reveals ozone hole with 30-year record

Big Island, Hawaii. Kilauea eruption begins. It will continue for 35 years without interruption, ending suddenly in September 2018.

Geologist Walter Alvarez and famous quantum physicist Luis Alvarez publish the article “Extraterrestrial Cause for the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction”, or the discovery of the reason for the extinction of the dinosaurs, attributed to the impact of a meteorite, evidence emerging from samples found in Gubbio.

George Gaylord Simpson, the most famous paleontologist of this period, publishes an article in which he argues that the end-Cretaceous extinction (of dinosaurs for example) must be considered a long and continuous process. The same year, geologist Walter Alvarez, and the famous quantum physicist Luis

casual conversation between father and son, Luis and Walter Alvarez, a physicist and a geologist, leads to the discovery of the KT event or the Chixulub meteorite impact 65 million years ago; Walter Alvaresz had in fact discovered a layer of Iridium (of probable extraterrestrial

Geologist Walter Alvarez gets a job at Berkeley, where his father, the famous quantum physicist Luis Alvarez, also works. Luis Alvarez, who, in addition to having made a fundamental contribution to the invention of the atomic bomb and particle accelerators, also revealed, through muon detectors,

Crustal drilling begins in Oklahoma; the hole is called GHK/Lone Star’s Bertha Rogers 1-27 and will reach 9,583m before encountering a layer of molten sulfur

George Kukla of Columbia University, studying glacial deposits in the countries of the Soviet bloc, comes to the conclusion, in a letter to President Nixon, that the next ice age could arrive much sooner than expected, due to the possible slowing of the Gulf Stream.

Derweze (or Darvaza), Turkmenistan (USSR). Soviet geologists digging an oil well cause a collapse in the ground with a diameter of about 70m, from which gaseous methane comes out. In an attempt to consume the poisonous gas, they set it on fire. After half a

Drilling of the Earth’s crust has begun on the Kola Peninsula; the hole is called Kola SG-3 Zapolyarny and will reach 12,262 m in 1989, without reaching the Earth’s fluid mantle; however, it will encounter a deep layer of fractured and water-saturated rock at a

Tranquility Base, Sea of Tranquility, Moon. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin collect on the lunar soil, among many rock samples, also (Fe2+, Mg) Ti2 O5. The mineral will be previously unknown, and will be called Armalcolite, from the initials of Armstrong, Aldrin, Collins (who was

The Plate Tectonics Theory is Born

Congress cancels the Mohole project, which sought to drill a hole from a vessel into the thin crust of the Pacific Ocean off Mexico for 5,000 meters; the depth reached was instead only 180 meters (over 4,000 meters of ocean!)

Royal Society approves idea of Earth’s crust mobility

Centralia, Pennsylvania. The underground coal seam catches fire and burns slowly. After half a century, the fire has not been put out and the entire area has been virtually abandoned.

Bob Christiansen of the US Geological Survey understands that the entire Yellowstone National Park is the caldera (65km in diameter!) of a volcano, which is fed by a superplume 200km below, a magma chamber 72km in diameter and 13km thick; the pressure exerted by the

large impact structure was discovered in Yucatan; it was the 65 million year old Chixulub crater, but initially the discovery went completely unnoticed and it was rediscovered in 1981 after the Alvarezes had already hypothesized a 65 million year old impact somewhere on Earth.

The American Mohole program (named after the Croatian scientist Andrija Mohorovicic, who discovered the existence of the boundary between the crust and the mantle at about 35 km below Europe) was developed, without success, which, through deep drilling, searches for the beginning of the mantle

Crustal samples from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge show progressively greater age as one moves away from the ridge

At Hebgen Lake, near Yellowstone, an entire side of the mountain collapses (80 million tons of rock), 28 campers are killed

In one of his last acts before his death, Albert Einstein wrote a short but intense preface to the book “Earth’s Shifting Crust: a Key to some Basic Problems of Earth Science” by Charles Hapgood, in which he harshly criticized the theory of continental drift.

EC Bullard of Cambridge University, hypothesizes that the differential rotation of the planet’s core and outer part acts like a giant electric motor, forming the Earth’s magnetic field.

The English geologist Arthur Holmes, in his book “Principle of Physical Geology”, is the first to understand that the radioactive decay of the interior of the planet can produce convection.

Milutin Milankovic writes an important scientific book on the ice ages caused by the change of the Earth’s axis, which arose from articles he had written in the 1930s. He delivers the manuscript, which will have great influence although not immediately, to a publishing house

Danish geologist Inge Lehmann while examining the readings of a seismometer after an earthquake in New Zealand discovers that the Earth’s core is divided into a solid, inner part and a liquid, outer part, and the origin of the Earth’s magnetic field.

The Russian-German meteorologist Wladimir Koppen hypothesizes that the cause of the ice ages is to be found not in the harsh winters but in the cool summers.

English mathematician Harold Jeffreys confirms the hypothesis of Irish geologist RD Oldham who years earlier had noticed that some shock waves from an earthquake in Guatemala had penetrated the planet to a certain depth and then bounced back to the surface. Jeffreys confirms that the

German meteorologist Alfred Wegener realizes that the profiles of Brazil and Africa coincide and concludes that the continents must have moved, and that there was once a megacontinent that he calls Pangaea.

Dating rocks with radioactive isotopes

German meteorologist Alfred Wegner explains the complementarity of the continents on both sides of the Atlantic with continental drift; he is greeted with extreme skepticism

Croatian geologist Andrija Mohorovicic, while examining the readings of a seismometer after an earthquake in Zagreb, notices that some shock waves have penetrated the planet to a certain (shallow) depth and then bounced back to the surface, and thus discovers the existence of the Earth’s

American geologist Frank Bursley Taylor decides to investigate the reason for the similarity in shape of the coasts of South America and Africa

Bertram Boltwood combines information on uranium half-lives and lead abundances in uranium to estimate the age of the Earth at 2.2 billion years

Irish geologist RD Oldham, while examining the readings of a seismometer after an earthquake in Guatemala, notices that some shock waves have penetrated the planet to a certain depth and then bounced back to the surface, and thus discovers the existence of the Earth’s core.

Lord Kelvin recalculates the age of the planet Earth, including the (preponderant) heat source due to the decay of the radioactive elements included in it (previously unknown). The new calculation extends the age of the Earth from a few thousand years to several hundred million

Scottish physicist James Croll suggests that the mass extinctions that have occurred with periodicity of about 100,000 years are due to the change in the amount of solar radiation due to extraterrestrial causes.

James Croll of Anderson University in Glasgow, in the Philosophical Magazine theorizes that variations in the Earth’s orbit could be the cause of the ice ages

Humphrey Davy discovers aluminum (the fourth most common element in the Earth’s crust)

Louis Agassiz proposes the theory of ice ages

The American John Cleves Symmes, proposes the Hollow Earth Theory, that is, that the planet is a hollow sphere with 4 concentric spheres inside, with enormous holes at the poles of a width of 1400 km. Several expeditions to the poles will be planned in

Henry Cavendish determines the mass of the Earth: 6.6E24Kg

Scientific Geology Begins with Hutton’s Theory of the Earth

A meteorite crashes in Albareto, Modena; the object will be fragmented and sold to various collectors and museums; a small fragment the size of a fist is still preserved at the Department of Geological Sciences of Modena

Jean Etienne Guettard prepares the first real geological maps

Little Ice Age: 1-2 degrees cooler on average worldwide due to decreased solar activity;

Francis Bacon notes that the continents appear to fit together on both sides of the Atlantic; it will take nearly 300 years for an explanation

Global Warming Episode: There are Cattle Farms in Greenland and Wine Grapes are Grown in England

A brief episode of extreme cold occurs for several years in China, North America and Europe

Current process of desertification of Sahara ends

In a few centuries, the Sahara transformed from a prairie with monsoons to a sandy desert (the monsoons disappeared due to the shift in perihelion)

The waters of the Mediterranean, following the end of the Wurz glaciation, rise until they overcome the natural barrier of the Bosphorus and flow into the freshwater lake represented by the Black Sea basin; the waterfall continues for about a century and perhaps gives rise

The current process of desertification of the Sahara begins: from a prosperous savanna with gazelles, giraffes, zebras, elephants and cattle, in little more than a thousand years, it becomes an arid desert. Humans must find an alternative to hunting, and cattle breeding is a valid

Holocene (Cenozoic period, Quaternary era)

Last glaciation (Wurz), completely ended only after 8000 BC

Brief glacial episode known as the Younger Dryas

The southern end of the glacier that covers much of North America reaches Staten Island (just south of Manhattan). The movement of the ice carves the landscape down to the bedrock, still visible for example in Central Park. The subsequent retreat of the ice will

At the height of the Ice Age, a huge landslide in the Mediterranean released huge quantities of methane, probably over 500 million tons, which doubled the methane in the atmosphere in a very short time, causing a sudden greenhouse effect.

Peak of the Wurm Glaciation

Eruption of Mount Toba volcano in Sumatra; lasts 6 years and causes an ice age episode that lasts centuries; this event may have brought the human race to the brink of extinction, reducing the entire human population on Earth to a few thousand individuals; this

The Sangamon Interglacial Period ends, a period of approximately 1,000 years of relative climate stability, not unlike what we are experiencing now, over the past 12,000 years.

Global warming

Sangamon interglacial period, a period of approximately 12,000 years of relative climatic stability, not unlike what we are experiencing now, over the last 12,000 years.

Wurm Glaciation

Global warming

Global warming

Riss Glaciations

Glaciations