Geological Discoveries

 

Earth is ancient now, but all knowledge is stored up in her. She keeps a record of everything that has happened since time began. Of tune before time, she says little ~ and in a language that no one has yet understood.

Through time, her secret codes have gradually been broken. Her mud and lava is a message from the past.

Fossils Record Day Dinosaurs Died

The following are excerpts from a writing by Ben Guarino, published in The Washington Post.

Scientists Find Clues to Extinction Event in Remains of Fish: “Sixty-six million years ago, a massive asteroid crashed into a shallow sea near Mexico. The impact carved out a 145-kilometre-wide crater and flung mountains of earth into space. Earthbound debris fell to the planet in droplets of molten rock and glass. Ancient fish caught glass blobs in their gills as they swam, gape-mouthed, beneath the strange rain. Large sloshing waves threw animals onto dry land ~ then more waves buried them in silt.

Scientists working in North Dakota recently dug up fossils of these fish: They died within the first minutes or hours after the asteroid hit (according to a paper published recently in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), hence a discovery that has sparked tremendous excitement among paleontologists.

You're going back to the day that the dinosaurs died,” said Timothy Bralower, a Pennsylvania State University paleonceanographer who is studying the impact crater and was not involved with this work. That's what this is! This is the day the dinosaurs died!

Roughly 3 or 4 species perished. The killer asteroid most famously claimed the dinosaurs. But T.rex and Triceratops were joined by hoards of other living things.

Fresh water and marine creatures were victims, as were plants and micro-organisms, including 93 per cent of plankton. A lone branch of dinosaurs, the birds, lives on.

In the late 1970's, Luis and Walter Alvarez, a father and son scientist duo at California's Berkeley's University examined an unusual geologic layer between the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods. The boundary was full of the element iridium, which is rare in Earth's crust ~ but not in asteroids. Together with other paleontologists, they have found heaps of fossilized sturgeon and paddle-fish with glass spheres still in their gills. They found squid-like animals, shark teeth and the remains of predatory aquatic lizards called mosasaurs. They found dead mammals, insects, trees and a Triceratops. They found foot-long fossil feathers, dinosaur tracks and prehistoric mammal burrows. They found fossilized tree gunk called amber that had captured the glass spheres too.

In the geologic layer just above the fossil deposit, ferns now dominate the signs of a recovering ecosystem.

In the early 1990's researchers located the scar left by the asteroid ~ a crater in the Yucatan Peninsula.

About 3200 kilometres away, is Hell Creek where a hail of glass beads called tektites rained there within 15 minutes of the impact (stated by study author, Jan Smit, a paleontologist at Vrije University in Amsterdam), who also was an early discoverer of iridium.

“The fish, pressed in the mud like flowers in a diary, are remarkably well preserved. It's the equivalent of finding people in life positions, buried by ash after Pompeii,” Bralower said.

Bal Gangadhar Tilak, in his expose 'The Arctic House in the Vedas) states, “The geologist takes up the history of the earth at the point where the archaeologist leaves it ~ and carries it further back into remote antiquity.”

Devon Island: Nunavut's Mars

Published in The Canadian Press, Hina Alam reports from Vancouver:

“One of the most Mars-like environments on Earth, Devon Island in the Canadian High Arctic, is now on the map and can be explored on Google Street View.

“This largest uninhabited island on Earth is a rocky polar desert that has a surface and conditions similar to the red planet,” said Pascal Lee, chair of the Mars Institute and director of the Haughton -Mars Project , a field research project on Devon Island that's funded by NASA.

“There are not many places like this,” Lee said of the island roughly the size of Nova Scotia in Baffin Bay, Nunavut. “It's the biggest stretch of terrain that is barren...rocky...cold...and dry. So, right there, it's a big piece of real estate that has similar climate to Mars.

“Since 1997, the remote land mass has been the site of field deployments by scientists and astronauts looking to learn more about the moon and Mars. Last summer, Lee and a team of researchers set out to generate a panorama of some sites most frequented by scientists. They used Go Pro cameras to get 360-degree 'photo spheres' and smart phones to capture video footage.

“Published by Google Street View, puts the team 'on the map and shares their experience with the rest of the world,” Lee said. “The unbelievable thing is that pretty much every step you take, as soon as you are away from our camp ~ you're probably the first person to ever walk there,” he said.

“There is something amazing that still, to be able to do that ~ to see views and landscapes that from your particular perspective, no one has seen before. Nobody! The place is seeing effects of climate change,” he said.

“In the quarter of a century that Lee has been visiting the area, he's seen places that previously were covered in ice but are now barren.”

Accompanying this article is an aerial view showing the Haughton-Mars Project Research Station (HMPRS) on Devon Island, Nunavut.

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John McPhee ~ in his writing of Annals of the Former World, wrote, When the climbers of 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow on skeletons of creatures that had lived in the clear, warm ocean that India, moving north, blanked out.

Possibly as much as 20,000 feet below the sea floor, the skeletal remains had turned into rock. If by some fiat I had to restrict all the writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: “The summit of Mt. Everest is marine life free!”

Author: MBK...written April 1, 2019
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