Four and a half billion years have elapsed since the formation of the Earth and in that vast amount of time, geologic and biologic forces have wrought an ever-changing landscape of shifting continents, changing climates, and species that emerge, evolve, and become extinct. This is the domain of Earth history, and its investigators use the record provided by rocks, seafloor sediments, isotopes, fossils, and the genes inherited by living organisms to unravel events in the past and the mechanisms by which they occured. Research specializations represented in the Department of Earth Sciences include Quaternary studies, biogeochemical cycles and climate change, isotope geochemistry, paleontology, sedimentology, paleoceanography, and evolutionary biology..
