Important Activities: During this unit, students will have to individually…

• Construct a scientific explanation based on evidence from rock strata for how the geologic time scale is used to organize Earth's 4.6-billion-year-old history.

• Construct a scientific explanation based on evidence for how the uneven distributions of earth's mineral, energy, and groundwater resources are the result of past and current geoscience processes.

• Analyze and interpret data on natural hazards to forecast future catastrophic events and inform the development of technologies to mitigate their effects

• Apply scientific principles to design a method for monitoring and minimizing a human impact on the environment.

Critical Concepts: During this unit, students will individually learn to…

• Model and describe the conditions and processes necessary for a fossil to form.

• Describe how fossil correlation and index fossils are used to determine rock ages.

• Write up methods used to assign relative ages of rock layers using superposition.

• Identify how relative dating differs from absolute dating.

• Illustrate how geologic time can be divided into smaller time units.

• Relate change of organisms to natural and geologic time scales.

Key Vocabulary: Know the meaning of these words to help explain critical concepts

Click here for a list of the Final Vocabulary Definitions for Mission Subterranean