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Antarctica Once Abutted Death Valley
Science News has a story of strange bedfellows. It seems that Antarctica was once adjacent to what is now the American Southwest, some 800 million years ago. Earth's continents then formed a supercontinent called Rodinia, predating Pangaea by some 550 million years. "...the ratios of neodymium isotopes in the ancient sediments in the Transantarctic Mountains are the same as those in what was then Laurentia, says Goodge. Also, the hafnium isotope ratios in the 1.44-billion-year-old zircons found in East Antarctica match those of the zircons found in the distinctive granites now found primarily in North America. Finally, the researchers note, the ratios of various isotopes and elements in a basketball-sized chunk of granite found in East Antarctica — a chunk ripped by a glacier from bedrock now smothered by thick ice, the team speculates — match those of granite found only in what was southwestern Laurentia, which today is the American Southwest."
... how do we know it was called Rodinia? Who left records?
This space available.
Something makes me want to go and re-read H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
Must be dyslexia... Goodge
Go spring or fall... crank up the Harley and pack some doob... bring a camera... stuff your ugly bitch in the seat behind you... and stay at Panamint Springs (the other places are run by contractors with federal NPS contracts).
There is NOBODY there. It's a space as big as Connecticut and you have it all to yourself and maybe a few dozen other people. After a few days you start to recognize them; you even start waving at each other when you pass. It's totally like Antarctica.
Damned landmasses, moving around all the time.
Plate techtonics are breaking up that old neighborhood of mine.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
Sure some of it was luck, but the cost of shipping a few rocks to antarctica was worth the risk that they wouldn't find and misinterpret them.
You're thinking of "aboot".
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
Well that explains the oil, go figure.
Looks my long term investements in CA are not worth what I thought they were going to be. Nobody wants beach front property when the temp is -10.
21st Century Renaissance Man
'A' boot? Actually, we Canadians usually wear those in pairs.
We all know the earth is only 6,000 years old. You and your science, pfff.
Okay, who else thought the guy's name was Google and did a double-take?
Rodinia has always been at war with Laurentia.
Totally offtopic...
I once told a long lost acquaintance that "you have that 'o' thing goin' there, dontcha?"
She was 'orrified, guvna. Really 'orrified. She only thought that Newfies really had it.
She was from Haligonia.
--
BMO - goin' aboot in a boot.
I guess their opposition to immigration isn't a recent development.
Now just how do they know what the local peoples called that previous super continent? Did they leave a written record?
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
All science is theory. Just think about how science changed in the last 500 years, even the last 10 years. It used to be that atoms were considered the smallest particle, now we know that not to be true. Just about 99% of things in science have changed. Nothing is set in stone, write a law and within 200 years you will find some exception to that rule.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Does this mean that the United States has a historical claim to Antarctica?
I was quite surprised when I learned several years ago that Pangea wasn't the only one. Could someone well-versed in geology fill us in here?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I don't think enybody ever called it "Rodinia" more likley ounga bounga
It was "named Rodinia"
G
So... that's how Hell froze over?
Maybe the Cubs won the World Series that year...
Just because you confuse "theory" (argument supported by facts) and "hypothesis" (educated guess) doesn't mean that other people are wrong and that people who do science are talking out their asses.
This is exactly like the retard^W Creationist argument that "I've never seen any animal evolve into another species" totally ignoring what is actually /meant/ by the accepted definition of "species" while the retard^W Creationist uses his own private definition of "species".
You argue without and against reason, and do not deserve reasonable argument back. To attempt to do so would be trying to drain your ocean of stupidity with a pipette.
--
BMO
I thought I read once that Antarctica was considered a desert because its precipitation levels were so low. (the snow doesn't melt, therefore it doesn't go through the water cycle and precipitate!) Or maybe that was the Arctic. Or Siberia. Hmm.
Either way, I'm not too surprised!
Scientists also discovered that the world, for one, welcomed their new Rodinia overlords.
You argue without and against reason, and do not deserve reasonable argument back. To attempt to do so would be trying to drain your ocean of stupidity with a pipette.
Well at least his ocean was created by a world flood. Just imagined if an omnipotent supernatural being flooded the planet with stupidity... The end product would be, the creationists of today. (See - if they re-translated genesis so that it was stupidity and not water, there would actually be some empirical evidence available to support such magical fable like that.)
Yes, the continents drift.. this isn't that surprising that at one they were in that configuration. Certainly not enough to warrant a Slashdot front page.
"Just imagined if an omnipotent supernatural being flooded the planet with stupidity... "
There was never any need for an omnipotent supernatural being to do that.
Man creates enough stupidity on his own.
--
BMO
Re-unite Gondwanaland!
Have gnu, will travel.
Has anyone noticed that the continents are all still connected? If you take the water out of the oceans, there is dirt there. It's not like continents are big rafts or something, when they hit each other, mountains or trenches form, they don't just float around...
that the Ancients were really from Texas?
Newtonian physics etc is very robust until you deal with very small particles or very high speeds. Einstein's stuff helps extend that. Same deal with electricity. Most of this has been fairly stable for many years.
Paleontology, climatology and geomorphology are all a lot more speculative and we can expect many of these theories to continue to change fairly rapidly as they have over the last few years.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
This matters, how, to the problems that we face at this moment in human history?
Seriously. To what end does this matter in relationship to the problems that the human race faces, today?
Anyone? Bueller?
I've got your sig, right here.
First they wanted me to believe a red rock they found there was from Mars, and now they want me to believe this? These guys are giving science a bad name. The logic of "this rock type was only found in the southwest before so therefore the two must have been together at one point" really escapes me. Why can't two instances of rock types be in different places at the same time?
It's painfully obvious that South America and Africa fit together and that Antarctica fits between them at the southernmost tip. So does Australia.
14 billion years ago, everything was right next to everything. All your ex girlfriends. All your bosses. They all shared your molecules.
Breaking news, Slashdot: continents move around.
It doesn't make any sense to my layman ears that super-continents could just randomly form when continental plates are drifting about aimlessly. Analogously, that's like the novice bouncing ball program with all balls occasionally striking the same point simultaneously.
So, what causes every continent to periodically fuse?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Antarctica made up his mind long ago. As you probably have missed completly, antarctica decided to move over to europe. It just takes time to move such masses of land. Once it connects with the coast of norway, it is legally a new citizen of europe. If you wish, you could come over for a visit then.
A few days later, the first thing the geologist sees when he reaches the area is of course this rock. He aborts his trip, comes back to the main base all excited about some revolutionary theory or other and starts writing feverishly about it. It took us a bit of courage to tell him the truth and deflate him... He was able to go back to his advanced camp, but it proves that it can be too easy to fake/mistake data in some cases.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Oh my God! We must immediately divert all of our economic resources toward fighting Global Moving, which environmental scientists say is caused by the forced exerted on the ground by accelerating cars. It is imperative for the survival of the human race that cars be outlawed! We must stop the Bush Administration from allowing cars to move the continents around for the sake of big oil and big auto.
Where is the outrage!??!?!?!?
Rodinia: Get off my landmass!
FFS Get off my lawn!
Samuel says : I've had enough of these mother******* trilobites on my mother******* lawn!
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
So a long long time ago, our galaxy WAS far, far away.
However, this doesn't work near the edge of the saucepan because the earth doesn't have a teflon circumference.
Ignoring that, you see a thick piece of custard skin. And if you turn up the heat, eventually you'll see a blop and the custard skin would be broken and the skin moved apart.
It's rather like that, but without the vanilla.
As to your last question, well, there's only so much surface on a closed sphere, so when continents move apart, at some point they will be travelling in the same direction but now moving together. And after a while, they are all in one big lump, just like custard skin. The heat doesn't travel too well through thick continental mass and builds up until "blop".
Every sane person knows that it was the FSM that created the continents with a single wave of one of his noodle appendages
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flamebait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
Motorcycle cops have no trouble being seen without making environmentally dubious modifications to their machines.
I know, changing the restriction or path of the exhaust just before it goes into the atmosphere by swapping or removing the muffler just causes the emissions on those things to skyrocket! Goddamn polluters!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Just our luck that the fundamentalist christian deniers of scientific theories like Evolution didn't hop onto the Antarctic side. Mind you, they were all busy riding dinosaurs up and down from texas to alberta so that explains why they're still here, variously annoying and amusing the hell out of us.
Salut,
Jacques
Sorry - you've just brought to mind a quote from 'Brassed Off'. Mr Chuckles the clown is entertaining a group of kids in a church hall, but he's just about had enough. He comes out with:
So God was creating man. And his little assistant came up to him and he said: "Hey, we've got all these bodies left, but we're right out of brains, we're right out of hearts and we're right out of vocal chords." And God said: "Fuck it! Sew 'em up anyway. Smack smiles on the faces and make them talk out of their arses." And lo, God created the Tory Party.
Classic.
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
umm the point of science is to change as new knowledge is discovered. That is in direct contrast to dogma's generally non-changing ways. (even though it has anyway due to scientific discoveries) Also your statement "All science is theory" is being used incorrect. You see the scientific use of the word "theory" is the same as the word "fact." To be classified as a theory, the hypotheses has to be put through rigorous tests that attempts to disprove it have failed. What you are thinking of is "hypotheses" which is an assumption either not yet fully tested or not fully tested via peer review yet. I suggest you take some actual science classes before you spew more nonsense like your post.
So this means the U.S. owns Antarctica right?!
This talk of Rodinia, and the maps they draw as a result, are all preposterous.
Neal Adams may be bad at explaining his theory, but the idea that the current continents were one large continent is much simpler and supported by increasing amounts of evidence like that from this article. It is easy to explain if the water and hydrocarbons on and inside the earth were in a gas above the surface.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kL7qDeI05U
If Antarctica has the same rock structure aa the SW USA, wouldn't there be gold and other precious metals in the rock? Also because the rock is similar in nature to the SW wouldn't gold and other precious metals removed from the SW USA over the last few hundred years, give you a pretty good idea where to find similar materials in Antarctica? ..............
Do you think anyone would be interested in an open source mining project based on the enormous amount of public information on mining in the SW that has been assembled over the last couple hundred years, or even starting a way-down-under land rights club, based on early findings?
I am posting this from Antarctica. South Pole, 90S, dead of winter.
I can assure you, there are no Harleys, cacti, zirconia or meth labs (OK, not 100% sure of the last part).
There is, however, all of the 10,000 foot thick ice that one might want.
My kingdom for a keg of microbrew IPA.
690 pages of small print on geology back to almost the beginning. I recommend it highly.