Posted on 07/16/2008 11:35:55 AM PDT by decimon
PARIS (AFP) - Ninety-three million years ago, Earth was a reshuffled jigsaw of continents, a hothouse where the average temperature was nearly twice that of today.
Palm trees grew in what would be Alaska, large reptiles roamed in northern Canada and the ice-free Arctic Ocean warmed to the equivalent of a tepid swimming pool.
So our planet was balmy -- but hardly a biological paradise, for it was whacked by a mass die-out. The depths of the ocean suddenly became starved of oxygen, wiping out swathes of marine life.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Ping
I think the volcanos were giant hemorrhoids...
More so if you were a dinosaur.
Too bad congress wasn't around to pass some laws to prevent the devastation.
/sarcasm
That would be dino-sore...
Why would eels want to prevent what allowed them?
So the Earth’s temp was twice the average temps of today, and Mars was probably the temp of Earth now. So why was it so much hotter? Is the sun dying out (slowly of course) or are we moving away from it?
Twice on which scale? The global average temperature is 58.1°F, 14.5°C or about 288 K. Which do you double? Would it be 116.2°F (average, $(#(#*( that is hot), 29°C (pretty hot, maybe Alaska would be nice), or 576 K (lead would probably melt in the daytime and refreeze at night). Kelvin is the only one of those scales in which you can really talk about doubling the temperature because its zero point is absolute zero.
Press idiots.
Some Preparation-Hugh might help.
93 million years ago Alaska was equatorial, not because of continental drift, which isn’t happening, but because of pole flip. The pole, either north or south, hard to tell, was in what is now the Amazon.
If it’s not to series, I suppose-itory...
Well, double is 100% hotter. How would you express temperatures 1% hotter than today's average? Are you saying that can't be expressed?
Most physical quantities use a scale where zero means "none of what you are measuring", so any multiplication makes sense because saying something like "twice as long" would be the same physical length whether you used meters, inches, miles or cubits. Fahrenheit and Celsius don't start counting from a real zero point, therefore multiplication or percentage changes don't make any sense in them. You can only do that in a scale where zero means zero like in Kelvin. (or at least that's what I had beaten into me in a few physics and thermodynamics classes).
Ouch! That made my brain hurt. How can you apply that much angular momentum change to the Earth to get it to spin around Brazil without turning it into a new astreroid belt? And where does that amount of force come from?
The planet is not stable. This is also not unusual in the solar system. Every once in a while a planet shifts around until it is more comfortable. Earth is looking a little uncomfortable right now come to think of it.
This theory lacks craterbility.
I won't be found to judge crater.
One...two...three...
One...two...three...
You lost me. I guess you need another Dancing Partner?
The Force is with you.
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