The researchers of the EARLS programme are time travellers, traversing through hundreds of millions of years from Earth’s geological origins to the present, the Anthropocene. Timelines are built on scientific dating techniques and processed through Bayesian chronological modelling. Knowing the timeline of events makes it possible to consider causalities.
The ancient bedrock records information on environment during the origin of life billions of years ago. Traces of the diversification of life, natural upheavals, and extinctions have also been preserved in rocks and fossils. Specimens from the last millennia have recorded signs of life in the post-Ice Age Holocene epoch. Stable isotope concentrations in bones reveal changes even in the lifetimes of individual organisms, while tree rings describe thousands of years of climate and environmental history.
EARLS researchers decipher the evolution of our planet and its life from the period of early Earth to post glacial time. Dating of rocks, layers, fossils, and archaeological finds construct the timeline of geological, biological, and human activity, the changes of which can be reflected through climate and environmental change.
Research within EARLS helps us to understand how the evolution of nature has provided the foundations for the rise of human race and civilization and how local and global natural disasters, such as the breaking out of the river Vuoksi approximately 5,900 years ago and the long volcanic winter of the 540s, have influenced on human activity.
The Earth, Life and Times (EARLS) research programme strives to explore broad-based research questions in order to produce comprehensive multidisciplinary understanding. The idea underpinning the efforts is how the geologic, climate and environmental history of Earth is linked to the history of life. Research methods include radiocarbon determination, stable isotope analyses and elementary assays.