Slashdot Mirror
World's Largest Fossil Forest, and One of the Oldest
solitas writes in with news from last week of the discovery of a fossilized forest in Illinois. The forest was found in the ceiling of a working coal mine, 250 feet below the surface. It was drowned 300 million years ago in an earthquake, its discoverers speculate — here is a graphic of its formation. Geologists are excited because the huge fossilized forest, over 25 square miles in extent, preserves trees and other plants upright, as they grew.
The graphic doesn't show the most interesting discovery, because trees should still be standing upright underground.
Anyway, did the ground below just sank/moved suddenly (25 square miles no less)? And the entire area was sitting on a big slap of rock?
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
Seriously, that graphic link sucked.
Resizing the browser is not cool.
It's 6000, tops.
Damn, I was hoping for oil.
"It was drowned 300 million years ago in an earthquake, its discoverers speculate" They only just found this thing and they're giving it's life story. In other news: Archaeologists found a small piece of pottery near the site, they believe it to have been a pre-historic settlement. They have managed to reconstruct their entire society.... here's an artists impression. http://www.speedygrl.com/Racer/wallpaper/flintston es.jpg
http://my.telegraph.co.uk/dublinclontarf
Explaining jokes on the internet is like competing in the special olympics...only retards do it.
(Note: This old chesnut is recycled from the archives of This old chesnut. But then again, that's what makes them old chestnuts.)
I swear, I had to read that 3 times before I stopped seeing "fossilized fuel forest."
http://images.stltoday.com/stltoday/multimedia/fos sil.jpgDirect link to non resizing graphic.
The accompanying graphic is surreal for a moment, until you connect the dots. Hehem: "Illinois is near the equator."
For a moment, you think, like Pluto not being a planet any longer, someone has changed the rules of the game. Did we throw Mercator maps out the window? Are we using real maps now, that show the world as it is, and it's not really a globe at all? What is Illinois, really? And why is it at the equator?
-----
(Yes, continental drift. I know. But surreal, for that moment. And therefore fun.)
The second sentence from the article:
The four-square-mile fossil forest the largest find ever is just south of Danville in Vermilion County, Ill., in the 300-million-year-old Herrin coal bed, a 6-foot-thick strip mined by a subsidiary of St. Louis-based Peabody Coal.
Let's assume the Earth is only a few thousand years old. Where did the oil come from? Was it created in the ground with the rest of the Earth? If so, is there a way to predict where it might be found? Or perhaps it really did form from plants and dinosaurs, but about 10,000 times faster than any chemist believes it could? Any way you look at it, a young Earth and a Flood would imply some very interesting scientific questions to ask, some interesting (and potentially extremely valuable) research programs to start. How come nobody's actually pursuing such research programs?
Why don't fundamentalists put together an investment fund, where people pay in and the stake is used as venture capital for things like oil and mineral rights? If "Flood geology" is really a better theory, then it should make better predictions about where raw materials are than standard geology does. The profits from such a venture could pay for a lot of evangelism. Why isn't anyone doing this?
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
If "Flood geology" is really a better theory, then it should make better predictions about where raw materials are than standard geology does. The profits from such a venture could pay for a lot of evangelism. Why isn't anyone doing this?
Because God put the 'fossil' fuels there as a temptation and the objective for any good Christian is to do without 'fossil' fuels?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
The parent is just your standard lecture on how the Bible isn't as stupid as is implied by some jokester (the gp), it has nothing to do with this article.
Besides saying crap like "Nothing in the Bible suggests racism," or "people used to live sometimes *much* more than the 30-40 years," the first of which is just blatantly false and the second of which is completely unsupported outside the oral traditions of the Jews, recorded later as the Bible, the whole post is rather pointless. If he were selling something besides Christianity everyone would assume he's getting paid.
I say all this 'as a Christian,' which apparently at least the PP should find conveys some validity.
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
Hi,
One of the authors here (Scott Elrick - geologist from the Illinois State Geological Survey). I would be happy to answer questions from folks... or at least try!
I can start by giving a basic overview of the discovery, what we found, and how it is important (to paleobotanists that is).
The location of the fossils is just to the south and west of Danville, IL, itself about 30 miles to the east of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (say hi to HAL when you come to visit). The forest was found directly above the Herrin coal seam in the Riola and Vermillion Grove coal mines, owned by Black Beauty coal (a subsidiary of Peabody Energy). The mines cover approximately 15 square miles and the study area was about 4 square miles... actually 1000 hectares. (I'm rounding up the square miles)
Okay, so what's so cool? If you are a geologist and read the headlines that have been popping up about the story, you may have scoffed and shook your head saying, "What do they mean largest fossil forest? A coal seam is nothing but the fossil remnants of a fossil forest. And a coal seam like the Colchester coal extended from Pennsylvania all the way to Oklahoma!" And you are correct! (This is my first exposure to the modern day media... and its been an eye opener! Give them credit, they do a pretty god job overall)
What is 'largest' about this fossil forest story is that it is the largest STUDY of a mostly entact fossil forest. Specifically one that is looking at the ecology of that forest. The largest study before this that looked at the overall ecology was about 25 hectares.. say about 1/10th of a square mile. So this study is an order of magnitude greater. The meat of the matter here is that we had an opportunity to examine a fossil forest at just a wonderfully huge scale and as a result were able to see subtle changes in the make-up of the forest as we walked the multiple miles of passageways in the mine.
The analogy is that previous studies were like blindfolded people examining an elephant. Each person has a wonderfully detailed and accurate description of his or her patch of the elephant, and when they compare notes a decent group consensus exists as to what the elephant probably looks like... but nobody has a chance to see the whole elephant. Our study is where we get to step back from the elephant a bit and take a pretty good peak under the blindfold at the whole animal. (I wont go so far as to say we are able to clearly see the whole thing as that is stretching the analogy. The point being it is an important and exciting step forward, but not necessarily a monstrous revelation!)
A couple of things to highlight.
First, the part that I find the coolest about work like this. In much of geologic science (field aspects more so), geologists look at vast spreads of time in small geographic slices. For example, standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon and peering across to the other side, your eye takes in millions of years of geologic time... but you are only able to see a thin 'slice' of each unit in profile. What does a particular rock unit look like 500 feet into the side of the canyon walls? The only way to find out is to drill a hole and take a core sample.
Geologic research, or in this case paleontological research, in an underground mine such as these coal mines is orthogonal to the norm above! At these mines, looking up at preserved trees and ferns in the mine ceiling, we were looking at single slice of time, a T(0) event, over a huge (relatively speaking) geographic area. That means that we were able to get a snapshot in time look at the forrest landscape of 300 million years ago. It's the 'worms eye' view of a fossil forest.
I should point out that the 'discovery' of this fossil forest was a gradual process. One of the responsibilities of the Illinois State Geological Survey is to try to understand the geology of the state of Illinois... and for us in the coal section that means coworker John Nelson and I (also one of the aut
I always wonder why the world hates America and then I understand it all when I read crap like this. You have your religious freedom and freedom of speech; and you use them to arrogantly make jokes while others who aren't so fortunate die for what they believe in. And you don't even have the common courage to put your name on it. I urge you to think long and hard about yourself.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Aw crap, an actual expert showed up ...
/.
:D
*sigh* CmdrTaco, close the doors, put up the sign, slashdot is now officially closed.
CleverNickName, time to end the charade... everyone deserves to know you're actually William (fucking) Shatner just pretending to be WW. Please let Wil out of your basement, his mother misses him.
Would all editors who are actually bots step forward? We have a betting pool going.
Rob, it's time to admit you never actually got married, and are still a virgin. Yes, yes, most of us bought it with the "Will you marry me" post, but after last years "OMG Ponies!"... well, let's just say that ruined any image of you as a heterosexual male.
Thanks everyone, for many fine years of uninformed and biased internet discussion. I know it was only a matter of time till an actual expert showed up, but still, I'm a little sad to see it all end. I'm not sure how I'll get my next chapter of the scientology books... but at least now I can safely view "the poisoned post" without forever losing my mod rights.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
RIP
(Netcraft confirms it)
1997 - 2007
(PS: Thanks for the excellent, informative post, and congratulations on your find!)
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
They have to jumble it up so they can quote-mine any sentence made by any science-type person, at any time, on any subject, out of context to show their audience, "Look how silly scientists are! They think they're smarter than God!" They can't make a case without caricaturing science, because they have no case of their own, and science works so well (as they plainly see, looking around them). So they're stuck with misrepresentation--i.e. bearing false witness.
Well, when I saw the original post, I quickly determined it to be one of two things: 1) A goofball like the one that posted the GPL, or 2) a Christian spreading around the kind of crap that makes people like you hate Christianity. Either way, I wanted to set the record straight.
There are a great many mistruths that abound about Christianity; assumptions by people who've never really read the Bible and want to denegrate it read snippets out of context and share it with the world because, if they actually read it like they where meant to, they'd feel guilty about the things they do to other people.
The Bible is, in fact, mono-racist; references to Isreal are about the people with a relationship to God, not a scrap of terra firma that inspires great pain these days. At the well....seems like it was in Matthew, a Samarian woman sat with Christ, just days before his crucifixion. He said "Soon no one will make sacrifices in those temples." He also said, "You will destroy this temple (me) and I will raise it back up again in 3 days".
God isn't a God, unless he's here for everyone. Why would he care, Jew versus Greek, slave versus free? These are minor differences, many we assign ourselves.
Leviticus 26 has the patent for the Promised Land; it also tells the Jews how to live there, and flourish. It also says "Ignore my laws, and the land will vomit you out [like the Caananites before you]." Another old-testament scripture warns of there being 490 years of living there before judgement is given them, and they were brutally savaged, about 2/3 of them. THIS is the tribulation spoken of in Revelation, not some future time.
Christians mean well, but moving as many Jews as possible back there, with the intent of setting up altars for animal sacrifices again (and having 2/3 of them killed) is just not how the Bible reads. Why would Christ die on the cross, in complete redemption of our sins, and then have those that ignore his sacrifice start with animals again? It's just wrong.
The Jews had 490 ("7*70") years in which to live in the Promised Land, with a chance to keep the Mosaic law, and they didn't. Jews, like the rest of the world, need to find Him.
What's sad is that the Muslims are not permitted to address their God at all; perhaps in fear that they might actually find the real one. There's just these millions of people, living in misery, by the sword, who'll never know the articulate genious of a loving God. And how so many people simply ignore Him completely and throw stones at those who know Him.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
Well, I hate to continue this offtopic discussion, but suffice to say that I do NOT hate Christians, Christianity, etc. I happen to be Christian, as I noted (though I understand the mocking quotes might have made it seem untrue). I just don't see how anyone can think the Moabites, just to pick a random name out of my head, are not treated in a racist way in the Bible. God's always telling the Israelites to go and kill the other races, talking about how unclean they are, etc. There's a reason the Old Testament God is thought of in terms of fire and brimstone.
I find your biblical interpretations completely unconvincing, and your pointless anti-Islam comment, well, pointless. Anyhow, that's all I have to say on the topic, time to go eat dinner
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
Anti-Islam? That's not a charge I'd have guessed would be leveled. Unlike most Christians, I'm anti-zionist; that's an Arab viewpoint.
Yeah, it kinda looked like what I see so much here, any time I try to chime in on secularist programming gone awry. "Hate" was a little strong, and I'm sorry...I couldn't think of the next level below it.
Now sure, there's times where the Jews were directed to kill other races; one that comes to mind was one where genocide was called for. In that case, the parents of that clan were killing (sacrificing) and then EATING their own children. But things were different under Mosaic law.
By non-racist, I mean in it's redemption. Nothing in there for example, says that dark-skinned peoples need to be punished. Age-old thoughts that 'the mark of Caanan' means negro is just ill-guided. But there's been a lot of this sort of thing from Christianity.
Capernicus is a good example; for the 'crime' of suggesting the Earth isn't the center of the universe (though it certainly seems to be the center of attention) he spent the last 8 years of his life confined to his house. That was just dumb.
Similarly, thinking that the world is only 6,000 years old from a crude, literal reading of Genesis and Numbers (without in-depth understanding of the books and the style of the text) is so easily defeated by commonly available evidence. But Christians seem slow to correct themselves. My original post was intended to illuminate that the 6,000 figure is wrong, and we should stop saying it.
Anti-Islam? I thought that realizing the culture of hate, preventing them by law to find redemption was one of the saddest things in the world. I'm no more anti-Islam than I'm anti JW or Mormon. Like so many times, it's not the people, but the organizational limitations. I'm for *everyone* finding their maker...not just people whose language I share...
[And yeah, off-topic, now...let's let it go.]
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
How about if we just give you Chicago. It's pretty well its own little state anyway, that and I'm tired of paying taxes to support one city.
Easter was not stolen from the fertility / spring festivals of pagans. It was a takeover of Passover.
Will state or federal geological survey or a university take over the coal mine ? Or will mining operations continue ?
this is an important find, even someone not affiliated with archeology, geology, prehistory and whatnot can tell that. if coal mining operation destroys stuff, it wont be good.
Read radical news here
...radioisotopic dating without bringing up belief systems!
no;-)
"You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think!"
unfortunately, this phrase is now inoperative in the post-imus era;-}
> It was drowned 300 million years ago in an earthquake, its discoverers speculate
Speculate away, idjits. The Bible tells us the Earth is only about 6000 years old.
Ahh ok... so its hip to attack Christians for there beliefs... and how 'irrational' it is to believe in such things...
... Oh and I'm sure you're aware that global warming is now the new Christianity... you have a deity, the earth or "mother gaia"; you have sin, your very existence as a human being; you have repentance (so long as you pay your fair share), carbon offsets; and you have your messiah... Algore ... now how funny and ridiculous is that? (Nevermind that he buys carbon offsets from himself, and has an electric bill bigger than what most people owe on their cars or homes per year.)
Hmmm.. then by that reckoning, global warming is just as much a myth as that of Christianity. Interesting.. they're idiots for their beliefs, just as much as those who believe in the quasimodo science which has absolutely NO basis in proven facts whatsoever... pure theory with no proof.. peddled by those with more interest in peddling a political agenda and seeing their names in the paper or on TV ("Dr." Heidi Cullen anyone?) and even more hilarious is people out there raking in HUGE amounts of money 'sounding the alarm'. ROFL
I think it was Global Warming that killed the forest... and it must've been those mean nasty republican Christians too!! Yea That's It!!
You might remember the Carboniferous era as a "swampy time of giant dragonflies and tree ferns"...
Following the "graphic of its formation" link will auto resize your browser. why do webmasters still do this kind of crap?!
> Why do Christians say that like it's a badge of honour?
Because they know that you expect them to be irrational, and wish to present a logical argument about why you're mistaken for thinking that and they may further wish to give a rational defense for their faith.
You, however, apparently believe that anyone who disagrees with you is necessarily irrational, even though you accomplish this by automatically excluding anything from being considered as evidence if it does not conform to standards seemingly formulated with the primary goal of excluding anything you do not wish to believe.
Never mind the universe having a beginning and an end. Never mind atheists being forced into metaphysical parity by having to posit an apparently all-powerful, eternal entity that mindlessly, endlessly constructs every possible universe out of very special quantum nothingness. Never mind the documentation for miracles at Lourdes ("But what if it's Zeus or Buddha or someone trying to *trick* us into believing in God?" / "Well, maybe you should go along with it if it's what they want?" represents just about the highest level of argument I've heard to counter that one).
In short, it would seem that you never have to consider the evidence if you formulate your "empiricism" to exclude any given possibility a priori. Thus, I've heard from more than one atheist that if they found incontrovertible evidence of God, they would have to assume that they were crazy.
Will those of you who think that you know what you are doing, get out of the way of those of us who know what we are doi
I live in Alberta, Canada. Our province is loaded with oil and natural gas deposits. I have heard from people that work in the field that when they are drilling, and come across something spectacular like a petrified forest, everyone gets the rest of the day off while they call in a bunch of explosives experts to take care of the "problem" so they don't have any delays. Shareholders must prevail over everything afterall...