Geology 103 Exam 1 Study Guide Key
1. By 10,000 years ago, humans had reached all the major land masses, except Antarctica and islands like New Zealand and Hawaii.
2. By the year 1800, there were 1 billion people on Earth.
3. All of these factors contributed to massive population growth:
a. Industrial Revolution
b. Germ Theory of Disease
c. Green Revolution
4. A Malthusian catastrophe is a return to subsistence level conditions as a result of population growth outpacing agricultural production.
5. U.S. population is 397 million people, ranking 3rd in the world.
6. Age structure for third-world nations typically has an age profile that is skewed toward young.
7. Africa exhibits 80% of AIDS worldwide and 60% of new cases.
8. Without phosphorous fertilizers, the Earth will only be able to support 1-2 billion people.
9. Educate and raise the status of women in order to decrease growth rate of the population.
10. About 0.0015% of water on planet is uncontaminated.
11. All species undergo: growth, stability, and decline
12. The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker may have been filmed in the Cache River forest of Arkansas.
13. Secondary extinction is when a population goes extinct from the loss of the species on which it relies.
14. A community consists of all populations, and an ecosystem consists of all communities.
15. The fundamental problem with monocultures is that they are very susceptible to disease.
16. The two fundamental processes found in all communities are energy flow and matter cycling.
17. Approximately 80%-95% of energy is lost between each level of the biomass pyramid.
18. Cycle’s pathways, rate of cycles, and human disturbances all significantly alter biogeochemical cycle.
19. The current accepted hypothesis of how solar systems can me made is the Nebular Hypothesis.
20. The compositional groups that make up the solar system are rocks, gases, and ices.
21. Stromatolites are fossils of the earliest life form on Earth proving that there was life on Earth 3.5 billion years ago.
22. The first life form on Earth was cyanobacteria, blue/green algae.
23. Since the origin of life, there have been approximately 2 billion species on Earth.
24. Adaptive radiation describes the diversification of species originating from a common ancestor.
25. Genetic drift occurs when one species is separated from itself and the two change so much, genetically, that they are no longer able to breed with themselves because they are too different. (i.e. honeycreepers on the island of Hawaii)
26. We live in a time in Earth’s history when biodiversity is at or near an all-time peak.
27. A biome is a climatically and geographically defined area of ecologically similar climatic conditions such as communities. (i.e. tropical forests, savannas, deserts, taiga, etc.)
28. Tropical forests contain ~50% of world’s species while occupying only ~7% of land surface.
29. There is almost 2% of the