Unpacked Content
Scientific and Engineering Practices
Constructing Explanations and Designing Solutions
Crosscutting Concepts
Patterns
Knowledge
Students know:
- Major events in Earth's history include natural and catastrophic events.
- Natural events may include formations of mountain chains, formations of ocean basins, fossilization, folding, faulting, igneous intrusion, and erosion.
- Catastrophic events may include significant volcanic eruptions or asteroid impacts,
- The geologic time scale interpreted from rock strata provides a way to organize Earth's history.
- Analyses of rock strata and the fossil record provide only relative dates, not an absolute scale.
- Rock strata are layers of rock visually distinguishable from other layers of rock.
- Rocks are the solid mineral materials forming part of the surface of the Earth and other similar planets.
- Fossils are a trace or print of the remains of a plant or animal of a past age preserved in plant or rock.
- Unless they have been disturbed by subsequent activity, newer rock layers sit on top of older rock layers, allowing for a relative ordering in time of the formation of the layers (i.e., older sedimentary rocks lie beneath younger sedimentary rocks).
- Any rocks or features that cut existing rock strata are younger than the rock strata that they cut (e.g., a younger fault cutting across older, existing rock strata).
- The fossil record can provide relative ages based on the appearance or disappearance of organisms (e.g., fossil layers that contain only extinct animal groups are usually older than fossil layers that contain animal groups that are still alive today, and layers with only microbial fossils are typical of the earliest evidence of life).
- Specific major events (e.g., extensive lava flows, volcanic eruptions, asteroid impacts) can be used to indicate periods of time that occurred before a given event from periods that occurred after it.
Skills
Students are able to:
- Articulate a statement that relates a given phenomenon to a scientific idea, including that geologic evidence can be used to identify patterns of Earth's major historical events.
- Identify and use multiple valid and reliable sources of evidence to construct an explanation identifying patterns of Earth's major historical events.
- Use reasoning to connect the evidence and support an explanation of patterns in Earth's major historical events.
Understanding
Students understand that:
- The geologic time scale interpreted from rock strata provides a way to organize Earth's history. Analyses of rock strata and the fossil record provide only relative dates, not an absolute scale.
- Using a combination of the order of rock layers, the fossil record, and evidence of major geologic events, the relative time ordering of events can be constructed as a model for Earth's history, even though the timescales involved are immensely vaster than the lifetimes of humans or the entire history of humanity.
Vocabulary
- Natural event
- Catastrophic event
- Mountain chain
- Ocean basin
- Fossilization
- Folding
- Faulting
- Igneous intrusion
- Erosion
- Volcano
- Volcanic eruption
- Asteroid impact
- Geologic time scale
- Rock
- Rock strata
- Fossil record
- Relative age
- Mineral
- Fossil
- Sedimentary rock
- Lava flow
