14 Facts About Ordovician

Ordovician is a geologic period and system, the second of six periods of the Paleozoic Era.

Ordovician, named after the Welsh tribe of the Ordovices, was defined by Charles Lapworth in 1879 to resolve a dispute between followers of Adam Sedgwick and Roderick Murchison, who were placing the same rock beds in North Wales in the Cambrian and Silurian systems, respectively.

The Ordovician received international approval in 1960, when it was adopted as an official period of the Paleozoic Era by the International Geological Congress.

The corresponding rocks of the Ordovician System are referred to as coming from the Lower, Middle, or Upper part of the column.

Ordovician meteor event is a proposed shower of meteors that occurred during the Middle Ordovician Epoch, about 467.

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Ordovician was a time of calcite sea geochemistry in which low-magnesium calcite was the primary inorganic marine precipitate of calcium carbonate.

Early Ordovician climate was very hot, with intense greenhouse conditions giving way to a more temperate climate in the Middle Ordovician.

The Ordovician saw the highest sea levels of the Paleozoic, and the low relief of the continents led to many shelf deposits being formed under hundreds of metres of water.

The sea level rose more or less continuously throughout the Early Ordovician, leveling off somewhat during the middle of the period.

Ordovician geography had its effect on the diversity of fauna.

In North America and Europe, the Ordovician was a time of shallow continental seas rich in life.

Trilobites in the Ordovician were very different from their predecessors in the Cambrian.

Ordovician came to a close in a series of extinction events that, taken together, comprise the second largest of the five major extinction events in Earth's history in terms of percentage of genera that became extinct.

Recent work considering the sequence stratigraphy of the Late Ordovician argues that the mass extinction was a single protracted episode lasting several hundred thousand years, with abrupt changes in water depth and sedimentation rate producing two pulses of last occurrences of species.