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Geologic Time

The Geologic Time Scale (GTS) is an arbitrary chronological arrangement or sequence of geologic events, used as a measure of the relative or absolute duration or age of any part of geologic time, and usually presented in the form of a chart showing the names of the various rock-stratigraphic, time-stratigraphic, or geologic-time units.

The table of geologic time spans presented here agrees primarily with the nomenclature, dates and standard color codes as set forth by the International Commission on Stratigraphy (https://stratigraphy.org/, see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Commission_on_Stratigraphy). This, however, only goes back as far as the age of the Earth (4.54 billion years). A proposal has been made to formally define the periods of the evolution of the Solar System before the Earth was formed going back to approximately 5 billion years. This is added into our chart as the Chaotian period.

See Geologic Time overview: https://www.mindat.org/geotime.php
Phanerozoic: https://www.mindat.org/geotime.php?t=1
And Precambrian: https://www.mindat.org/geotime.php?t=149

Also see: https://www.mindat.org/listgeoevents.php

And the timescale with dates: https://www.geosociety.org/GSA/GSA/timescale/home.aspx
Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_time_scale


List all geological events
 
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To cite: Ralph, J., Von Bargen, D., Martynov, P., Zhang, J., Que, X., Prabhu, A., Morrison, S. M., Li, W., Chen, W., & Ma, X. (2025). Mindat.org: The open access mineralogy database to accelerate data-intensive geoscience research. American Mineralogist, 110(6), 833–844. doi:10.2138/am-2024-9486.
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