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Researchers Complete New Gondwana Map
An anonymous reader writes "A new computer simulated map has revealed the past position of the Australian, Antarctic and Indian tectonic plates, demonstrating how they formed the supercontinent Gondwana 165 million years ago. 'It was a simple technique, matching the geological boundaries on each plate. The geological units formed before the continents broke apart, so we used their position to put this ancient jigsaw puzzle back together again,' said Lloyd White of Royal Holloway University in a press release. 'We found that many existing studies had positioned the plates in the wrong place because the geological units did not align on each plate.'"
Aren't all the continents still connected? The only thing that has changed is where the low points are that are filled in with water.
When is google maps going to have this? I want to trace where my house was back then.
For God, a thousand years are like a day. But a year has 365 days (ignoring leap days for simplicity), so 5000 years have about 9 million days. With every day counting as 1000 years, we arrive at an age of the world of about 9 billion years. This is clearly longer than 165 million years, so everything is fine.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
1 god day is like a year man, so thats like alot of years ago
If you lived in the other supercontinent and had to crank out some code, you'd be out of luck.
When did they change it from Gondwanaland to Gondwana? Was no-one looking after the sign?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Neat article! But... um... where's the map?
God also doesn't want you using the internet on Sunday.
The God created Earth 5000 years ago. There is no evidence of Gondwana plate or even Earth 165 million years ago.
Tectonic plate theory, geophysics, botany and a host of other branches of science respectfully disagrees with you.
Skip the regergitated article and go strait to the press release to see the map, and a video (and a link to the paper if you have access or are willing to pay $30).
In searching for the actual new map of Gondwana, the researchers in the article have this video of three continents separating.
http://vimeo.com/68311221
and the reason Satan was kicked out was him screwing with the timer. Because of this, the dinosaurs and everyone had plenty of time to grow old and die, create fossils and such just to screw with our minds. There is no missing link, never was, never will be. It's just Satan screwing with our minds - For Trekies it's like "Q" playing with Picard.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
The God created Earth 5000 years ago. There is no evidence of Gondwana plate or even Earth 165 million years ago.
Tectonic plate theory, geophysics, botany and a host of other branches of science respectfully disagrees with you.
Even creationists say he's off by a thousand years...
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
So for God, errors of 364,000 parts in 365,000 are OK? You'd think with all that omniscience, he could get a detail right once in a while.
If the article is about a new map wouldn't it be a good idea to actually show the new map?
I was gonna say "pics, or it didn't happen." Video works, thanks.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Interesting article - but there's no map. Seems kind of pointless.
I am sorry you feel your god is that incompetent.
In another paper I saw that Norway+Sweden was next to Colombia and Finland next to Venezuela:
http://www.deepdyve.com/lp/elsevier/baltica-amazonia-and-the-samba-connection-1000-million-years-of-6ICpDpEcbF
The "baltica-amazonia-and-the-samba-connection" :)
This was apparently long _before_ the Gondwana.
There is more to the Earths history than many want to understand.
The reconstruction has India moving West away from Australia with the Indo-Pacific archipelago presumably part of Laurasia in a relatively static position as Australia eventually moves northward. Most authors seem to have India moving east upon breakup with Africa and then colliding with southern Asia. Africa presumably splits from South America by moving east relative to South America, so the eastward rather than westward movement of India seems to be correct.
Obviously, a lot is missing from this reconstruction most notably the position of continental margins peripheral to the map projection. The relative timing of the events from an Australian-Antarctic perspectives seems to be correct but the positioning seems centric to the limited projection used and holding Australia in fixed position is probably the culprit here since positions in the central Indian Ocean are not indicated.
None, of course paleo-dating from fossils in marine muds and radioactive dating of the series of banded sediments on the seafloor as a result of seafloor spreading in a very regular, almost linear mapping away from spreading zones that just happen to agree with each other almost perfectly.
Looks like a scene with trees, a dinosaur (or some other saur or something) and some pterosaurs in the sky. i doubt thats a legit map of gondwona
The next time I take vacation in Gondwanaland.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Ah, the hive mentality, you must be from Agile Programming. Pick a major problem, get all the scientists on Earth to work on it. Bingo, problem solved. Hey, you should tell the scientists they are doing it all wrong, I'm sure they'd listen to you.
Stop Continental Drift!
Have gnu, will travel.
Hey, you should tell the scientists they are doing it all wrong, I'm sure they'd listen to you.
The ones in cancer research are...
"His name was James Damore."
God couldn't have created Earth 5000 years ago since man didn't create God until 2000 years ago.
"The ones in cancer research are..."
...which is why Hodgkin's lymphoma has gone from a death sentence 30 years ago to the latest treatment saving 98% of the patients.
You always settle for sloppy seconds?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
And New Zealand just pops into existence at the end like some just anchored a boat and fished it up out of the sea
Recycle PCs and build a wireless community network www.hillsborough.org.nz
Pangaea is the original unified supercontinent. Animation of its breakup is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pangea_animation_03.gif
Gondwana is one of the units formed as a product of the Pangaea breakup.
This study claims heightened accuracy of the Gondwana breakup
A thousand years?!?? I wanna cause mass extinctions right now!
- Ed Gruberman
Was Here.
I don't care about the internets, why the fuck can't I have my Chik-Fil-A on Sunday when I'm hung over from drinking religiously on Saturday?
More than 30 years. I dated a Hodgkin's survivor in 1980-81, and she'd been in remission for about 5 years at that point.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Good story bro.
Mr Spock says, "The true scholar values all drafts, early and late."
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I'll freely admit that I believe in the unpopular-around-here Genesis account of a literal seven-day creation event, but nowhere in the Bible does it say something along the lines of, "And God created the continents, seven in total. Seven continents did God create, and He saw that they were good." If anything, you could probably make an argument that since the Genesis creation account only mentions one "land", that it may have been meaning a super-continent. Besides which, the Bible makes no claims that would contradict the idea of a super-continent existing prior to the Noahic Flood, and the Noahic Flood would also provide Christians with a reason for why the continents might have split, given that the Bible talks about "the springs of the great deep burst forth" and things of that sort in Genesis 7, indicating that there may have been some significant tectonic events occurring at the time of the flood.
Long story short, there may be difficulties reconciling the 165 million year age with the Genesis creation account, but there aren't any difficulties in reconciling the idea of a super-continent with the Bible.
The devil is in the details, therefore God does not support the details, because that would mean to support the devil.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Boot to the head
Pfft, details. Details are for graphics designers, not artists.
True art shines in all its beauties and flaws.
Check out my marvellous artwork right here: -+/*
I call it Mathematical Wrongness. Simple, beautiful, and would probably actually genuinely get me several grand at some pretentious art meet-up.
I mean, if people can get money for vomiting paint on a canvas, surely I can get some for making myself cry paint out my eyes to form mathematical symbols?
Where is that milk-crying magician when you need him...
Didn't he start with light?
The error is smaller if you consider that he started with creating the universe.
That he took so long is also a sign of incompetence. The Great Spaghetti Monster does it millions of times per second!
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
For God, a thousand years are like a day.
And a thousand years is like a day, so perhaps there is something more to this than a strict conversion factor?
I bet your mother is ashamed of you.
It's ironic that your mind is so frail given the mental gymnastics it goes through to justify your belief in the bible.
Even creationists say he's off by a thousand years...
He's not a 1000 years off, he's living in the middle ages.
Damn, that s a shitty article. Sourcing a poorly hand drawn illustration of a dinosaur that isn't even relevant to the discussion from Wikimedia commons?
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Learning: you're doing it wrong.
Besides that one passage in that one book, there is nothing we have discovered that supports this claim. Nothing.
And you believe in it.
Learning: you're doing it wrong.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
The theory of a 6000-year-old Earth was made by Archbishop Ussher in the 1640s, not in the Middle Ages which ended 400-500 years earlier.
It was a valid theory at the time, based on the best available evidence, but wrong. Even today there are many theories which are commonly accepted as scientifically valid, but which are most likely wrong in part or entirely. Our descendants will laughingly mock anyone who still believes them, just as some of us dare to mock today.
Who?
The point of science is not to be entertaining via novelty. Frequently new data continues to support current theories and models. Scientist don't spend every day coming up with completely new theories to test, and such effort is wasteful and unproductive. A lot of work and advancement, including completely new models, comes from careful analysis of the details of current theories and data. Sorry that science in real life doesn't match your romantic preconceptions of how things work. But science goes where the data suggests, and it is not every day that data suggests starting from scratch.
Reunite Gondwanaland! - the Pangaean Liberation Front.
mark
I have no idea if you're being specific about my belief in a super-continent or the age of the earth being younger than what most here believe, or if you're being general and attacking my belief in the Genesis creation account in whole. Depending on what "one passage" you're referring to and the extent to which you believe the evidence for Gondwana, your comment could apply equally well to any of those three.
It's pretty hard to learn anything when there are folks like you "teaching" without even providing the information necessary to understand the context of their remarks.
I'll freely admit that I believe in the unpopular-around-here Genesis account of a literal seven-day creation event, but nowhere in the Bible does it say something along the lines of, "And God created the continents, seven in total. Seven continents did God create, and He saw that they were good." If anything, you could probably make an argument that since the Genesis creation account only mentions one "land", that it may have been meaning a super-continent. Besides which, the Bible makes no claims that would contradict the idea of a super-continent existing prior to the Noahic Flood, and the Noahic Flood would also provide Christians with a reason for why the continents might have split, given that the Bible talks about "the springs of the great deep burst forth" and things of that sort in Genesis 7, indicating that there may have been some significant tectonic events occurring at the time of the flood.
Long story short, there may be difficulties reconciling the 165 million year age with the Genesis creation account, but there aren't any difficulties in reconciling the idea of a super-continent with the Bible.
Or a big Tsunami.
That's the back conversion. Duh.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The Group Of Drunks.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Actually it wasn't a theory and it wasn't based on evidence. It was derived from ancient religious belief.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
That's a mistranslation. A more correct translation is: "First, God turned on the lights." Cause when you want to do some serious work, you need to see what you're doing.
The passage being referred to is the Christian biblical creation account, taken literally, which also includes the idea of a young Earth. This much is evident from the context, and should be apparent to anyone as much as it is to me.
It's really only hard to learn anything if you're being intentionally obstinate. I feel azav provided more than enough information to understand their remarks. I understood what was being said. Am I some sort of genius? A mind-reader? No, I'm just a random guy that's not blinded by his faith.
Really, azav has a great point. Learning: you're doing it wrong. It's clear from your post that your idea of "learning" is to try against all odds to fit indisputable observations into your worldview by way of mental gymnastics of an Olympic quality. Those that don't fit get ignored, for the most part. "There may be difficulties" is an interesting way of characterizing a fact that completely falsifies your religion-inspired worldview. They're right. You are very much doing it wrong. It is ridiculous for you to respond to him with criticism that his "teaching" is insufficient when it is evident that you've already made up your mind.
The real result is here linked from the press release page. There is a citation to the refereed journal in the pressrelease.
http://vimeo.com/68311221
What the article probably argues for is that correlation of units on Antarctica, and Australia are well correlated. The number of linkages for India seem to be fewer, but other geologic features elucidate that history pretty will, It begins about 165 MYA, but this latest reconstruction dates the split of the rest as much more recent, about 35 MYA. I assule that the magnetic anomaloies in the sea floor shown in the video are well dated, but the innovation is the correlation of terraines. Before there was more uncertaintly of how the pieces we have today were connected. Now that picture might be much more constrained, as the video suggests. We will have to wait and see if the conclusions hold up. I haven't tried to get to the journal article, I expect it to be behind a paywall, and hence not available for detailed reading. All I expect to see is the abstract.
The article cited in the press release is behind a paywall, and the abstract for it isn't even available.
If research is funded by public funds, journals should make an e-copy available for free. Journals should not be able to hide research, especially that funded by a government, for profit. Even the need to find reviewers does not justify that they get to charge for access, at least ot an e-copy. IMHO.