Geology Class Takes the Field

RFH 2010, Featured Articles, Colgate News

Fri, Sep 17, 2010

Students turn football field into geologic timeline

Students from Colgate's Geology 215 class met with Professor Constance Soja recently for a special lab in an unlikely place: Andy Kerr Stadium.

They left the classroom for a lesson in "Gridiron Geologic Time". Students created a graphic representation of geologic time, true to scale, on Colgate's football field, placing flags as symbols of important geologic events along the 100-yard gridiron.

In order to shrink 4.5 billon years of Earth time into 100 yards, the group determined that one yard on the field would represent 45 million years, and one inch, 1.25 million years. Using this scale, the students reviewed a list of nearly 30 geologic events and calculated their distances from the north goal line, which marked the origin of Earth.

Soja gave each student two flags to place on the football field inside of bottles. Karen Bascom '12 received "O2 and O3" (the accumulation of oxygen and ozone in the atmosphere) and "prokaryotes" (simple cells), which occurred 4 billion and 3.5 billion years ago, respectively.

After placing the first flag on the white side line, near the north end zone's 11 yard line, and the second near the 22 yard line, Bascom walked toward the other end zone, where she passed flags marked "algae," "insects," and finally, at approximately 99.94 yards (2 inches from the goal line), "first hominid."

The visual treat of the lab was standing on the top row of the bleachers and looking down at the flags.

The Earth's earliest events, marked by green flags, were spread out mostly on the north side of the field, and then yellow, orange, and red flags clumped closer together near the south end zone. The red flags marked events that occurred within the last 40,000 years -- or 2 inches -- such as the birth of art and the Declaration of Independence.

"Standing at the top of the field and seeing how long until anything we are familiar with comes onto the scene is really surprising," Brittany Hanrahan '11 said.

Source: Colgate

Please login to post your comments.