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STRATIGRAPHY
Lesson 1 - Page 6

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Stratigraphy is important to understand events that happened over time and over a large area, However, to interpret these events you require slices of rocks through time commonly referred to as or cores. Ships can core rock layers from the ocean bottom. Cores would be taken at intervals that can help us correlate and interpret how the rocks were laid down.

In the figure of cores, each core represents a slice of the Earth. In "A," the green shells are the oldest and the blue seastars are the youngest. You can see that as you go from cores A to D the fauna adds snails to the region. A stratigrapher would determine what caused this sequence of events. Stratigraphers also look at the rocks, the fossils, and other evidence to make these conclusions. 


Ship taking a core


Cores

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