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The shifting face of a 200-million-year-old mystery
BBC ^ | October 13, 2011 | Jason Palmer

Posted on 10/14/2011 6:33:24 AM PDT by decimon

Five times in the last half a billion years, tremendous, global-scale extinctions have wiped out a significant fraction of life on Earth - and each of them presents a grand puzzle.

The most recent and the most familiar is the extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs - between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods, about 65 million years ago.

But before that, 205 million years ago, was the "End-Triassic Event" - it set the stage for the Jurassic Period, which saw the rise to prominence of the dinosaurs.

Just what happened that killed off half the species on the planet, though, remains a mystery.

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Once upon a time, Paul Olsen of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory was one of the few people who believed that a giant impact of an object from space started the extinction, much like the impact that many people believe caused the demise of the dinosaurs.

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But science has moved on. Other workers in the field have found in that same period, enormous lava flows from a flurry of volcanic activity in the then-developing Atlantic Ocean also occurred at exactly the same time.

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(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...


TOPICS: History; Science
KEYWORDS: catastrophism; continentaldrift; godsgravesglyphs; jurassic; paulolsen; platetectonics; triassic
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To: decimon

I suppose it could therefore be argued that climate change caused by the entrapment of greenhouse gases is actually simply restoring the order to what the Earth should has always been - a growing band of uninhabitable land alone the equator, with increasingly violent storms in the rest of the world.

That is, if one were going to posit the existence of man-affected climate change.

But since that can never be done, it is far smarter to simply say that this man’s work is pure bunkum. Man’s behavior cannot affect the Earth’s atmosphere. Not only that, but there is no evidence that 1.) there was a huge extermination of aboriginal peoples as a result of Europe’s colonization of the Americas; 2.) that the peoples were responsible for the clearing of millions of acres of the North and South American continents; 3.) that forests such as the Amazonian are actually only 400 years old or so.

He better have some amazing evidence to back up all that conjecture.


21 posted on 10/14/2011 8:41:35 PM PDT by worst-case scenario (Striving to reach the light)
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To: ConservativeChris
Look up OOPARTS. Out Of Place ARTifactS. Kinda freaky.

That's one helluva fascinating subject. One of my favorites. For me, these out of place artifacts prove that we've barely scratched the surface of man's true history on this planet.

22 posted on 10/14/2011 8:42:35 PM PDT by Windflier (To anger a conservative, tell him a lie. To anger a liberal, tell him the truth.)
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To: worst-case scenario

Eh, wrong thread! Sorry!


23 posted on 10/14/2011 8:43:21 PM PDT by worst-case scenario (Striving to reach the light)
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To: ConservativeChris

There is a lot more to the history of the world than we are told.


24 posted on 10/14/2011 9:56:12 PM PDT by zeugma (Those of us who work for a living are outnumbered by those who vote for a living.)
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To: WoofDog123

Ooops, probably this one:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1197396/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/1248406/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1641966/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/1643681/posts


25 posted on 10/15/2011 4:48:00 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (It's never a bad time to FReep this link -- https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/)
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To: Salamander

The premise of this is shifting face, and you shift with your foot, so I think you’re in the clear. ;’)


26 posted on 10/15/2011 5:10:09 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (It's never a bad time to FReep this link -- https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/)
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To: SunkenCiv

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1641966/posts this one, yes, the first link of yours is a very recent impact.


27 posted on 10/15/2011 8:24:20 AM PDT by WoofDog123
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