EARTH SYSTEM SCIENCE
INTERNET EXERCISE #1
Welcome to Earth System Science at the University of Arkansas! Some of you may be very familiar with the Internet and the world of Cyberspace. Here in Cyberspace there is no gender, no race, no age, no infirmity - here in Cyberspace humankind achieves true equality!
For your first exercise of the semester, you will visit two of the finest virtual museums that I have found on the WWW. Like "hard" museums, these virtual museums are places where treasures of antiquity are preserved and displayed in order to better understand our own origins. The two museums selected for this particular exercise are wonderful locations to learn about the history of our planet, Earth, and ponder the evolution of Earth Systems through the eons. I invite you to spend as much time as you like exploring the various exhibit halls of the two museums. There is a staggering quantity of knowledge packaged in these two sites.
As you wander through these Halls of Time, try to place Earth history in a context that is meaningful to you. I am intrigued by two facets of Earth history which seem to be recurring themes: those events which seem to recur periodically through geologic time (such as mass extinctions or mountain building events) and those events which are singular occurrences but which forever alter the course of Earth's evolution (such as the introduction of molecular oxygen into Earth's atmosphere).
Can you think of other recurring events in Earth's history? Can you think of other singular events in Earth's history?
Click on the buttons below to visit the University of California (Berkeley) Museum of Paleontology and the Hooper Virtual Natural History Museum, a cooperative website of the Department of Earth Sciences (Carleton University) and the Department of Geological Sciences (University of Ottawa) in Ottawa, Canada.
| University of California Museum of Paleontology |  |
| Hooper Virtual Natural History Museum | |