The Great Dying 250 Million Years Ago

spaceref.com ^ | 29 Jan 02 | Marshall

[RightWhale]

This might be important if it leads to prepositioning of hardware in space, and if techniques for moving asteroids and comets are developed.

[KellyAdmirer]

I don't doubt the science. I just find it amusing that buckyballs have become the answer to everything these days. A big-time chemist told me a few years ago that he even thought they would be the cure for AIDS.

Fifty years ago it was uranium, one hundred it was x-rays, I wonder what it will be in 2050?

[John Jamieson]

Liberals never want to talk about the advantages of huge stresses to the enviornment. These thing are always described as disasters.

These disasters also force "survival of the fitest". Without them, earth would still a covered with much simpilier life forms. We certainly wouldn't be here. Conservatives would never have evolved.

[JmyBryan]

Leading democrats have notified the press that President Bush will make no mention of the Permian-Triassic extinction in the State of the Union address, proving once again the callous, cold-heartedness of his administration. Bill Clinton suggests convening a diverse panel of representatives to consider paying reparations to all life-forms.

[RightWhale]

the advantages of huge stresses to the enviornment

The survivors are probably more robust and varied than the ones that were wiped out. Eight species of trilobites isn't much to build an interesting biosphere.

[RightWhale]

ELE bump

[VadeRetro]

Interesting article bump.

[The Shootist]

If there was a great die it happened because of Noah's flood. To suggest anything else is blasphemous. /sarcasm

[Cincinatus]

While these results are interesting, they are far from proving an impact extinction event. In addition to fullerenes in the KT boundary layer, we have an iridium anomaly, a global clay layer (containing microtektites), shocked quartz grains within the boundary clay, an instananeous extinction event (even 100,000 years, while short geologically, seems excessively protracted for species and familial extinctions), and -- best of all -- a 300 km diameter crater in the Yucatan (Chicxulub) whose impact melts date precisely from the KT boundary time (65 million years ago).

It took the community over a decade to believe the KT extinction was impact-induced. Although the next battle will be easier, the Permo-Triassic extinction has a long way to go yet.

[RightWhale]

Noah's flood

That wasn't an ELE. Noah saved every species. God only knows why even the mosquito.

[PatrickHenry]

So that everyone will have access to the accumulated "Creationism vs. Evolution" threads which have previously appeared on FreeRepublic, plus links to hundreds of sites with a vast amount of information on this topic, here's Junior's massive work, available for all to review:
The Ultimate Creation vs. Evolution Resource [ver 14].

[DoctorMichael]

I remember some TLC show discussing this. The search is on now to find the "smoking gun".

In other words, the Chichilub crater in the Carribean (North of the Yucatan) has been discovered to have been made approximately 65 mya, SO where is the 250 mya crater?

The TLC show said that.......Some geologists think it is submerged in the South Atlantic in the area where the present day Falkland Islands (remember Maggie Thatcher's early war) are.

[RightWhale]

the Permo-Triassic extinction

The map of earth's surface looked a lot different 250 million years ago assuming the continental drift model. All the continents were joined together into one, apparently. Did something happen to cause them to start to break up and begin drifting to their present locations all over half the planet? The other half being the Pacific Ocean.

[Nebullis]

From Science at NASA The Great Dying

What the world looked like 250 million years ago.

[ArGee]

Fifty years ago it was uranium, one hundred it was x-rays, I wonder what it will be in 2050?

'Tar'

Shalom.

[RightWhale]

There's that Benjamin Franklin again, the 5th most important scientist in all history.

If Earth sprung a leak

The only flood basalt in recorded history spilled 12 cubic kilometers of lava across Iceland in 1783, releasing enough gas to cause Benjamin Franklin to write about a wierd, dense "dry fog" in Europe that contained no water. The gases, containing fluoride from the eruption, settled on the pastures in Iceland, poisoning the critical sheep herds and causing starvation that killed 20 percent of the population.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

The coal was deposited before this happened...

[Junior]

But as their methods for dating the disappearance of species has improved...

A "look at how accurate dating techniques have become in the last few years, creationists" bump.

[Cincinatus]

Did something happen to cause them to start to break up and begin drifting to their present locations all over half the planet?

Earth had a mobile crust before the PT boundary. As best we can tell, plate-like tectonism began in the Archean (early Precambrian), over 3 by ago. The continents were quite small then, and grew by accretion of terranes over the next 2.5 billion years. Pangea was only the last time that all the continental masses happened to be in close proximity. When it split, it was because of massive rifting in many locations. An impact-induced cause is neither necessary nor adequate to explain it.

[aShepard]

In a region that is now called Siberia, 1.5 million cubic kilometers of lava flowed from an awesome fissure in the crust. (For comparison, Mt. St. Helens unleashed about one cubic kilometer of lava in 1980.)

Perhaps the awesome fissure was caused by an awesome rock that slammed into the region tearing through the earths crust.