GEOL1013 – THE EARTH

a) Briefly outline the possible effects of volcanism on climate change and biological
evolution through Earth history

A top essay should contain the following basic points as minimum, written in correct
English, in essay style (not as bullet points), totalling about 1-2 pages of hand-written text.

• Volcanic activity has an immediate cooling effect on climate due to the violent expulsion of
aerosols, in particular soot and sulphurous compounds into the stratosphere;
• Recent eruptions have caused global decreases in temperature, causing disruption and even
mass exodus and starvation;
• On a longer time-scale, eruptions may cause global warming due to the expulsion of carbon
dioxide which is a powerful greenhouse gas;
• Supervolcanoes and large igneous provinces, possibly formed by the coincidental
juxtaposition of hot spots and continental rifting, likely released huge quantities of carbon
dioxide over millions of years;
• Large igneous provinces such as the Deccan Traps of India and the Siberian Traps of Russia
cover more than a million square kilometers and erupted around the same time as the
Cretaceous-Tertiary (K/T) and Permian-Triassic mass extinctions, respectively, suggesting
that volcanically induced climate change contributed to mass extinctions;
• It seems likely that continental volcanism, i.e. during the early stages of rifting, are of more
significance than submarine volcanism because of their direct impact on atmospheric
composition, and because contact metamorphism also results in carbon dioxide release;
• Volcanic rocks are easily weathered, and so excess carbon dioxide from volcanic episodes
may have been removed by chemical weathering, leading possibly to global cooling once
eruptions had ceased.

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b). Outline the early development of plate tectonic theory from its roots in continental drift
hypotheses to its establishment as the overriding paradigm in the earth sciences

A top essay should contain the following basic points as minimum, written in correct
English, in essay style (not as bullet points), totalling about 1-2 pages of hand-written text.

• Continental drift was first postulated after similarities were noticed by renaissance map
workers between the coastlines either side of the Atlantic Ocean;
• Alfred Wegener proposed the existence of a supercontinent Pangaea during the early
twentieth century but was largely ignored due in part to the lack of a plausible mechanism for
continental drift, but was still roundly rejected even after convection had been proposed as a
possible mechanism, e.g. by Arthur Holmes;
• Wegener gathered much important evidence such as: similarity of fossil fauna and flora in
continents now separated by oceans; continuity of rock formations and structural features;
similarity of climatic changes in distant continents;
• Mid-ocean ridges had been broadly recognized already in 1855 but it was not until the later
twentieth century that they came to be mapped in detail using sonar;
• The thinness of ocean sediment in the centre of oceans argued against an ancient ocean
floor;
• The discovery that magnetic stripes (polarity reversals) are mirrored either side of mid-
ocean ridges was strong evidence that seafloor was created at mid-ocean ridges and that sea-
floor spreading occurred. The dating of these reversals allowed scientists to calculate the rate
of spreading, which was subsequently confirmed by modern satellite techniques;
• Spreading centres and plate margins were found to be loci of earthquakes and volcanism,
leading to the postulate of modern tectonics that new crust is formed at mid-ocean ridges and
subsequently destroyed at “destructive” ocean margins;
• Subduction of old ocean crust was confirmed using seismic techniques to view the
subducting plate as it descended the “Benioff zone” beneath continents and in some cases
beneath younger, or buoyant ocean crust;
• Continental drift only became widely accepted once emerging technologies could gather
enough evidence in its favour, and once plate tectonics could be established as a plausible
concept. This is a prime example of a “paradigm shift”; plate tectonics is still the
fundamental basis behind much of earth system science.

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GEOL1013 Map A

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