March 11, 2017
Soon t
o be scuba diving down in one of the greatest marine environments, we are the Bonaire ECS and our mission is to explore the incredible biological evolution of life on Earth by underwater exploration.
The first day of our ECS, we started our journey of the history of Earth at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. As we went through the Prehistoric Journey exhibition, we learned about the amazing history of and life on Earth from its formation 4.6 billion years ago.
We are creating a book of the story of life on Earth as our final project. Based on chronological order, we divided the geologic timeline into 8 segments including Archean Eon, Proterozoic Eon, Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic Eras for group work. As humans, one of the challenges for us is to comprehend this idea of presenting a history of 4.6 billion years. Therefore, to visualize this time span, we used 460 meters of string as our scale, where one meter of string represents 10 million years of geologic time, marking key developments with tape. As a result, we were amazed by the vast time span as well as the evolution of life from simple prokaryotic cells to modern day organisms. This huge time span gave us a perspective of the history of Earth but also a view of how we as humans fit into this timeline. An interesting metaphor says, if the history of Earth is represented by one calendar year, human life comes at the end of December 31st.
Besides sitting down in the classroom for research, we also went fossil hunting with a geology guru – Mr. Sam Johnson. Under his lead, we went to the Garden of the Gods, Highway 115, Lower Gold Camp Road and several other sites to look at different formations. Mr. Johnson also taught us some basic ways to date and identify rocks such as using radiometric dating or index fossils. At the end of the day, some of us were lucky and had surprised ourselves with our fossil findings.
The last day before our departure, we went for a scuba diving review session. Because our last scuba diving class was in August, this refreshed our skills and pumped more confidence into each of us. And as all of us went through the techniques with our partners successfully, we are all ready for Bonaire!
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