1. Friday November 18, 2011 (Quiz 11)

2. The Launch Pad Friday, 11/18/11 No Bell Ringer Today

3. Assignment Currently Open Summative or Formative Date Issued Date Due Date Into Grade Speed Last Day Project – Moon Features F110/1810/21 Video WS – Fearless Planet – Earth Story F211/311/1011/1611/18 Quiz 10S111/10 11/1112/2 Activity – The Geologic Time Scale “Cheat Sheet” F411/1111/15 Lab – The Geologic Time Scale F511/1511/18

4. Announcements I will not be available today after school. Have a safe and happy Thanksgiving holiday!

5. Latest News The biggest volcanic eruptions of the past half eon had seemed a likely culprit in the greatest mass extinction Earth has seen. Now the closest look yet at events 252 million years ago is linking those eruptions even more closely not only to the biotic cataclysm in the sea but also to the mass extinction on land. An international group of scientists led by paleontologist Shu-zhong Shen of Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology in China intensively sampled the fossil record, they report today in Science. They examined nine rock outcrops across South China, not just the couple of sites most closely sampled in the past. Each sampling site spanned the mass extinction 252 million years ago at the end of the Permian period. The sites included records from the sea, where fully 90% of species disappeared, as well as from the land. "What's striking is how fast the extinction was," says paleontologist Douglas Erwin of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., a co- author on the paper. The event had been seen as lasting half a million years, but the new dating limits it to no more than 200,000 years and quite possibly less than 100,000 years, Erwin says. "We're paleontologists studying events 250 million years ago," he adds, so "a hundred thousand years sounds like overnight to us."

6. Quiz 11 When you finish your Quiz, please resume work on your Lab.

7. Lab The Geologic Time Scale