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.
* * * * * *
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
Comments appreciated
