Initial Publication Date: March 7, 2007

Instructions for Writing Key Questions about the Early Earth

Mineral springs in Yellowstone National Park
NPS photo by J. Schmidt

In preparing for the workshop, we have decided to focus our efforts using the idea of key questions about the Early Earth. Key questions are the ones that you think are important to address in your teaching. We would like to use key questions to organize the knowledge and resources we will collectively gain through the workshop process. We envision a collection of website pages each addressing a key question, summarizing the current scientific understanding, and providing references, links to relevant datasets, and links to teaching activities addressing this question. We will have an example page for you soon, but in the meantime, this page on Yellowstone volcanism gives a glimpse of the direction we are heading.

To move forward in this direction, we have asked each workshop participant to submit a key question as part of the registration for the workshop. To gauge our initial understanding of the answers to these questions, please also provide an answer to your question. This should reflect your current understanding, need not be complete and should not involve research on your part. These answers will help the presenters know their audience better and our evaluator to understand what we learn at the workshop. The most important thing here is to get good questions, so please don't revise your question to make it easier for you to answer.


Example Questions

How have changes in two important environmental variables, temperature and salinity, influenced the evolution of microbes in the Precambrian ocean?

What was the nature of the pre-biotic terrestrial atmosphere?

When and how did continental crust form?

What evidence supports models that call for a) early extraction of all the crust from the mantle, b) long-term growth, or c) episodic periods of crustal growth? Did most of the crust form by the end of the Late Archean? Has there been a secular change in the composition of the Archean crust compared with the Phanerozoic crust?

What do we know about the origin of life on Earth?