Short answers, pulled from the story.
Theophrastus wrote the treatise On Stones, which stands as the earliest known systematic study of the physical material of the Earth. He lived between 372 and 287 BCE and cataloged the properties of minerals and rocks with scientific curiosity.
The word geology was first used by Ulisse Aldrovandi in 1603 and later introduced as a fixed term by Horace-Bénédict de Saussure in 1779. The term is derived from the Greek words for earth and speech.
The three major types of rock in the rock cycle are igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic. Igneous rocks solidify from melt, sedimentary rocks form from weathered and eroded sediments, and metamorphic rocks result from heat and pressure changing mineral content.
The theory of plate tectonics was discovered in the 1960s and explains that the Earth's lithosphere is separated into tectonic plates that move across the asthenosphere. It provides a mechanism for continental drift, the formation of mountains, and the occurrence of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
The geological time scale encompasses the history of the Earth, which formed at 4.54 billion years ago at the beginning of the Hadean eon. The scale is bracketed by the dates of the first Solar System material at 4.567 billion years ago and the present day in the Holocene epoch.