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Showing results for tags 'Geology'.
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Eon > Era > Period (unless you're talking about my ex's) > Epoch We're currently in: The Phanerozoic Eon (the past 541-million years) - this is the Eon in which abundant plant and animal life exists. The Cenozoic Era (the past 65-million years) - this is the Era in which mammals are abundant, started when a mass extinction occurred. The Quaternary Period (the past 3-million years) - this is the Period featuring modern animal life and significant climate change including continental ice sheets. The Holocene Epoch (the past 12-thousand years) - this is the Epoch that includes the current "warm period" which began after the last Ice Age. Note that there is no evidence, one way or the other, to either support or refute the Holocene Epoch being a "resting period" between Ice Ages, or a permanent end to the previous Ice Age. All of the above is what you'll read in textbooks. --- Now, however: "The Anthropocene - Hard Evidence for a Human-Driven Earth" on sciencedaily.com You've probably never heard of the Anthropocene, and that's because it's a newly discovered geological Epoch that *we're in right now* - in other words, the Holocene Epoch might be over. The characteristics of the Anthropocene Epoch, which seems to have started after World War II, are the preponderance of materials such as aluminum, concrete, plastic, fly ash, and nuclear fallout. For the sake of your great-grandchildren, you can hope that the worst-case scenario won't happen, but it's already happening. At this point, I'd like nothing more than to offer you a solution, so here goes: Pray, and hope there's a God, because if there isn't, we're fucked. I'm going to back up this website onto external storage, and pay someone to shoot it into outer space. -
"Reminder: Humanity Has Made The Moon into a Garbage Pile, Wants To Keep Doing It" by Tim Herrera on washingtonpost.com The one, three-word question: Does anybody care? If we could take the entirety of human waste (including radioactive waste) generated throughout history, and successfully launch it to the Moon, would it matter? There must come a point where the universe is considered "a bunch of mass," and that both we and our garbage are nothing more than subatomic specks, eventually to be annihilated by the Sun exploding. Does polluting the Moon reach that point, or is there some degree of urgency that I'm not seeing? I suppose that, for people who hope to colonize the Moon in the future, this might be something more than an academic issue, but I'm not in that camp just yet. Bonus! Here is the first picture ever taken of the Earth from the Moon, on Aug 23, 1966, by the Lunar Orbiter I, as the grapes were ripening in the second-most successful Bordeaux vintage of the decade: What makes this seemingly uninteresting picture so philosophically fascinating is that, at the time it was taken, the photograph contained every single known thing ever to have lived. I'm assuming that the actual photo didn't clip off the top part of Earth, and that no skeletons or ashes had previously been shot into space; I'm also discounting any microscopic particles on the orbiter, and noting that most of everything is blocked either by darkness, or by the Earth itself. Am I missing anything, other than, say, sanity, or a brain that's larger than a walnut?
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A tired, hungry nucleus floated up to a group of cyanobacteria, and wearily asked: "You carry oats?" The leader of the gang moved forward, and replied, haughtily: "We're pros." (*) I'm reviewing a book ("Life" by Richard Fortey) that's discussing the time in our Earth's history when there was abundant life in the seas, but virtually none on land. The exact eon, era, period, epoch, or age isn't important, and you don't need to know anything about paleontology to answer; the basis for my question consists of two things: 1) nothing had yet crawled out of the seas, and 2) the greening of the earth had not yet occurred, so there was essentially no plant life on land. Okay, so picture the author going back in time, and standing on the seashore, where vast numbers of little squiggly things are swimming around, but behind him is a lifeless, barren, reddish-brown, mass of land with no sounds coming from it whatsoever - no birds chirping, no grass growing - just rock and soil that is completely devoid of life - for all practical purposes, not even bacteria was there, except incidental deposits from rainwater. This passage, on page 138, is what I have a question about (only the Bold part; the rest is there for context): "During the Cambrian, one-third of the world was devoid of life. The barren area was the land surface away from the sea. There may well have been bright stains of bacteria around springs, and covering such rocks as were washed regularly by showers. But the landscape would have been devoid of any softening tones of green. It would have seemed, to our eyes, naked and harsh. Nothing would have been there to consolidate loose soils, to absorb the worst of the weather, so that every rainstorm would have prompted a small flood, and stones and pebbles cascaded down slopes and tumbled freely into the choked beds of rivers." Why would there have been floods every time it rained? I understand that trees and grass and plants absorb rainwater, but why couldn't the rains just drop down to the water table? I don't think the Earth was a solid slab of stone; there must have been plenty of loose soil which is extremely permeable. That having been said, this author is very smart and detail-oriented (he's former President of the Geological Society of London!), so I doubt he's wrong: What am I missing? I wrote Professor Fortey and asked him, and with his permission, I'll pass along his response - in the meantime, if anyone could help, I'd appreciate it. Cheers, Rocks (*) As for McGuffins, you'll just have to read one of the Alfred Hitchcock threads.
