POPULAR MECHANICS - For the past three decades, scientists have been bad-mouthing a sizable chunk of Earth’s history (roughly 1.8 billion years ago to 800 million years ago) by giving it nicknames like the “Barren Billion,” the “Boring Billion,” or the Earth’s “Middle Ages.” At first glance, the monikers may be warranted—compared to more dynamic eons in Earth’s history, this “boring” stretch (which includes the Statherian, Mesoproterozoic, and early Tonian periods) is characterized by relatively stable tectonics, an invariable climate, and generally uneventful progress in biological evolution.
But within the past decade, studies have been challenging this dull perception.
“For a long time, the boring billion was commonly thought to be remarkably unremarkable,” Timothy Lyons, a geochemist at the University of California Riverside, told Science News in 2015. “But it’s a critical chapter in the history of life on Earth, and there are basic questions we don’t understand.”