Typically when you look at a geologic time scale, the Precambrian is all scrunched up, so even though it accounts for about 80% of Earth’s history, you forget how significant it is in the whole scheme of things.
Putting the time scale into perspective like this just makes me marvel even more at human existence… to think how far we’ve come!
The last little tiny green bar underneath “Neogene” is the Quarternary Period, which is the last ~2.6 Ma of Earth’s history. The Quarternary is broken down into the Pleistocene and Holocene–which is the current epoch. The Holocene (11,700 years ago to present), is too insignificant to even be represented on this graphic–its box would only be 0.027 pixels tall.
*Though it’s still debated, I used 4550 Ma for the age of the Earth, since it worked best being divided into pixels. Time divisions were rounded to the nearest My. The white breaks do not factor into the length of the time scale.
Emily Zawacki, Ph.D. 