The ice ages’ effects on geography
2024-11-27 13:56 One should not overestimate how much geography has changed during the human era.  The largest differences are caused by the ice ages.  The three last in particular I find interesting.  Not only were they particularly cold.
The origin of humanity
2024-09-27 14:40 I know people don’t like being grouped with monkeys.  However, purely biologically we are.  Our genus (Homo) have only had one species (Homo sapiens) since at least the end of the last ice age.
Famous prehistoric mammals
2024-09-09 13:04 After the Cretaceous–Paleogene mass-extinction it took 15 million years for the world to recover.  Mammals and birds then evolved to take over the role of the dinosaurs.  Towards the end whales arose too take over after the plesiosaurs.
On the Cretaceous–Paleogene mass-extinction
2024-09-02 12:16 The world looked a bit differently 66 million years ago.  Pangaea had splintered into Africa, Antarctica, Australia, Eurasia, North America and South America.  Antarctica was connected to Australia, and Eurasia to North America.
On the Permian-Triassic mass extinction
2024-08-12 12:53 At the end of the Permian Pangaea was born.  Africa, Antarctica, Australia, South America and South Asia had long held together.  It is probably rather obvious how Africa and South America were stuck together.
Life before the dinosaurs
2024-08-07 16:56 Many imagine the early Earth as covered in molten rock.  Fact is the Earth’s crust solidified within a hundred million year after the birth of the Moon.  200 million years later the Earth was almost completely covered by seas.
The basics of geology
2024-06-23 17:03 Uniformitarianism is based on the idea of geology being explainable in terms of directly observable processes.  Certainly, processes can take place at different paces.  But this is still the same processes at different orders of magnitude.
The primeval myth
2024-06-13 13:53 I state points in prehistoric times for a good reason.  There is a myth of a vague “primeval time” when everything one knows about lived at the same time.  Then I mean different animals, larger than current ones and more or less strange.
Has the world ever frozen over?
2024-06-05 13:16 There is a hypothesis that the Earth at one or several points would have been entirely covered by ice.  This is called Snowball Earth and is a controversial idea.  All the suggested points have their own problems.
Icehouse Earth and ice ages
2024-05-31 13:02 The climate during the last 550 million years is rather well-documented.  There have been several periods of tens of millions of years without any ice sheets.  The greenhouse effect was then considerably stronger than it is today.