#geologic time

Geologic Time Chart. Guide for beginning fossil hunters. 1959.

Get a glimpse of history at our local museum. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is home to Winter Landscape with Ice Skaters by Hendrick Avercamp, a 17th-century Dutch painter known for his lively depictions of frozen scenes. At first glance, this painting might seem like a simple winter pastime, but it actually captures a moment in history shaped by the Little Ice Age—a centuries-long period of colder-than-average temperatures that transformed daily life in Northern Europe.

During the Little Ice Age, canals and rivers that rarely froze became icy highways, and winter recreation became a central part of life. Avercamp’s work reflects this reality, showing townspeople skating, socializing, and going about their routines in a world adapted to extreme cold. Without knowing the history, a viewer might see only a charming winter scene, missing the deeper story of climate and resilience hidden within the brushstrokes.

Seeing this painting in Boston makes the history even more accessible. While the Dutch of Avercamp’s time embraced the cold as a way of life, New Englanders know the challenge of harsh winters all too well. Standing before this masterpiece at the MFA, you can appreciate not only its artistry but also the way weather shapes culture—both then and now.

Chart with PhyloPic silhouettes from an essay in the upcoming comic book, Paleocene #4. These are lineages that survived the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event but died out before the Holocene Epoch (which is almost too brief to be visible here—it is a thin sliver atop the Pleistocene). Figures are not to scale, and do not line up perfectly to lineage extinction dates, just to epochs. This chart is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

For more information about the silhouettes in the chart, see: https://www.phylopic.org/.../7dc1ae186d11d8c2ad9f502fc47d...

Obviously this is not to say we don't have an idea about what earth was probably like, or that it isn't probably pretty accurate. However, we weren't there, and our perception of the past is ALWAYS colored by our experience of the present. There is not a truly neutral way to look back at the past.

Geologic time noun. The time covering the physical formation and development of the earth, esp. Prior to human history.

Big History time spiral

(to zoom in on image, click here)

The mineral is zircon, and scientists have found bits of it that formed 4.37 billion years ago, not too long after the proto-Earth's epic collision with a Mars-sized object that spawned our moon.

Tiny crystals of zircon can look like sand, or useless crud. But don't be fooled. With a radioactive clock that marks the passing of billions of years.