Timeline of geography, paleontology

• 25 - Pomponius Mela formalizes the climatic zone system
• 1569 - Gerardus Mercator issues the first Mercator projection map
• 1620 - Francis Bacon analyzes the scientific method in his Great Instauration of Learning
• 1686 - Edmund Halley presents a systematic study of the trade winds and monsoons and identifies solar heating as the cause of atmospheric motions
• 1686 - Edmund Halley establishes the relationship between barometric pressure and height above sea level
• 1716 - Edmund Halley suggests that aurorae are caused by "magnetic effluvia" moving along the Earth's magnetic field lines
• 1822 - Gideon Mantell discovers the fossilized skeleton of an iguanodon dinosaur
• 1869 - Joseph Lockyer starts the scientific journal Nature
• 1909 - Discovery of the Burgess Shale Cambrian fossil site
• 1920 - Andrew Douglass proposes dendrochronology dating
• 1920 - Milutin Milankovich proposes that long term climatic cycles may be due to changes in the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit and changes in the Earth's obliquity
• 1947 - Willard Libby introduces carbon-14 dating
• 1949 - Edward Murphy states his law
• 1974 - Donald Johanson and Tom Gray discover a 3.5 million-year-old female hominid fossil that is 40% complete and name it "Lucy"
• 1980 - Luis Alvarez, Walter Alvarez, Frank Asaro, and Helen Michel propose that a giant comet or asteroid may have struck the Earth approximately 65 million years ago thereby causing massive extinctions and enriching the iridium in the K-T layer
• 1984 - Hou Xianguang discovers the Chengjiang Cambrian fossil site