Sirius Passet, Greenland and the Cambrian Explosion

• Published in: Geology Today
• Main Author: Brooks, Kent
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Wiley 2012
• Subjects: Greenland; Sirius
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2451.2012.00842.x; https://api.wiley.com/onlinelibrary/tdm/v1/articles/10.1111%2Fj.1365-2451.2012.00842.x; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1365-2451.2012.00842.x

Throughout Earth history there have been many important milestones: e.g. the emergence of life, the rise of oxygen in the atmosphere, snowball Earth events. One of these major events was the emergence of multicellular life, which, as we are all told in Palaeontology lectures, took place in the Cambrian, when a sudden flowering of life forms emerged, including all of the major groups we have today: the ‘Cambrian explosion’. Two great questions emerge: what happened before this (a problem which worried Darwin as it seemed to threaten his thesis of steady evolution) and how, in detail did this ‘explosion’ take place?