Unravelling time and the earth's biologic history are arguably geology's most important contributions to humanity. Yet, it is very difficult for humans to appreciate time beyond that of one or two generations, much less hundreds, thousands, millions and billions of years. Perhaps we can only hope that students catch glimpses of our rich geologic heritage, particularly when most of our teaching is done in a classroom and not in a field setting. While we feel it is very important for students to memorize the major components of the time scale, we take things one step further by having them create their own metaphors for geologic time. No metaphor is too silly, as long as your math is correct and your choice has meaning to you.
Any examples used in class, however, are off limits.
Units in the metaphor model can be in time, distance, volume, mass, etc. Remember, the use of time, volume, or mass in a metaphor would be just dandy. Since we are using a distance metaphor as an example here, a football field with a length of 100 yds will do just fine. The rest is up to you. Graham R. Thompson Ph.D., Jonathan Turk Ph.D., Saunders College Publishing and the University of Alaska, Department of Geology .