Antarctica reveals lost world frozen 14 million years ago

14 million years ago

Researchers discovered mosses, beetles and midges that died and have remained in a natural deep-freeze for an incredible 14 million years.

The discovery shows that the continent was plunged into permanent cold in a relatively brief 200,000-year period.

Ah stuff surviving for fourteen million years - kool!

14 milloin years ago antartica went in the freeze huh?

I wonder what was the trigger for the glaciation,? vulcanism?, an impact event?, a dimming of the sun, a cyclic variation of the earths orbit? All of the above?

200k years seems like a long time, the northern ice caps had come and gone many times over in that time period.

if it was only 200k years.. that kind of ruins the time scale for
pangea right?..

if I remember right.. they said pangea was 200million years ago..

reply to post by Hanslune


POPPYCOCK!!! The world is only 8,000 years old! Repent...

That's cool. I wonder if the world was once a totally different place then.

reply to post by mental modulator


I thought it was 4000 years & dinosaur bones were put here to test our faith.


Interesting story though.

reply to post by mental modulator

Okay, what exactly do you mean by this?

I hope not literally what you said 'cause the world's over BILLIONS of years old.

Originally posted by KATSUO
if it was only 200k years.. that kind of ruins the time scale for
pangea right?..

if I remember right.. they said pangea was 200million years ago..

What does pangea have to do with the question at hand?
When it was part of pangea (250mya) it was in the same location as it is now, and everything else moved away, by 40 million years ago.

Originally posted by punkinworks

Originally posted by KATSUO
if it was only 200k years.. that kind of ruins the time scale for
pangea right?..

if I remember right.. they said pangea was 200million years ago..

What does pangea have to do with the question at hand?
When it was part of pangea (250mya) it was in the same location as it is now, and everything else moved away, by 40 million years ago.

:-/ .. not really.. it was ALOT closer to the equater..






now



[edit on 8/8/2008 by KATSUO]

Some suggest pole shifting etc. I have to wonder how many millions worth of years in these ice packs and glaciers that are currently melting suggests something far worse than an average cyclical event. I also wonder how many larger preserved animals and reptiles are also in this ice.
Since glaciers probably move toward the sea; wouldn't some of the oldest ice already melted?

Polar shift? Probably the cause of "Global Warming/Climate Change", still as long as Govts can screw us for more "Green Taxes" the more they will keep quiet about it.

news.nationalgeographic.com...

reply to post by KATSUO



From Wikipedia,

Antarctica has been near or at the South Pole since the formation of Pangaea about 280 Ma.

Any way, still what does pangea have to do with antartica 14 million years ago?


[edit on 8-8-2008 by punkinworks]


Mod Note: Excessive Quoting – Please Review This Link

[edit on 10-8-2008 by Jbird]

lol.. ok..

your obviously not even reading your own copy and paste..

Antarctica has been NEAR or at the South Pole..

and how does it not.. do you think that grass grass is growing UNDER the ice..

Antarctica being warm enough to support grass.. bugs and gawd knows what else..
has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with Antarctica shifting positions in the past
??????????????????


ahhh.. nevermind.. your right.. im wrong..

I bow to your superiority..

that better? :-/
dont bother replying directly to me.. lol...
I take full advantage of the ignore button..


[edit on 8/9/2008 by KATSUO]

reply to post by KATSUO


No superiority here

the wiki article is somewhat ambiguous, it does state tha pangea straddled the equator, but the only averagely located at the equator. The piece of it that we now know as Antartica was always located at the extreme sothern end.

In fact this almost pole to pole arraingment of the early continental land mass had a major effect on the history of ligfe on this planet.

For most of its 4+ billion years the earth has been a frozen snow ball.

Several factors have kept it from being such over the past several million years.
The earths orbit around the sun varys from circular to elliptical, on something like a twenty something million year cycle, when its is circular the average distance from the sun is greater than it is with the elliptical orbit.
When it is round the tends towards freezing, as there marginal warming as it aproaches perigee.
It is also thought that as the solar system orbits the galactic center that it occasionaly passes through regions of dust and gas tha block some of the suns output from reaching the earth.

People tend to confuse the earths axis of rotaion with it's magnetic poles, the two are not mutually inclusive.
People also tend to confuse magnetic pole re-alignments with a flip of the earths axis of rotation.
These two have nothing to do with each other, the alignment of the earths axis of rotation has not changed much since the the planet first formed.
Major events( large impacts, huge earthquakes and such) have left their mark on it, in the form of a wobble of the axis of rotation. Or in the case of the '04 indonesia earth quake, a miniscule lessening of the wobble, and shortening of the rotational speed of the earth, the days have gotten longer by a few millionths of a second.

This wobble is the last remnant of the collion that formed the moon, and what gives us our seasons.
There is also yhe missbelief that the poles = cold, although this has been true for much of earths history, it has not always been so.
At times during an explicityly eliptical orbit, with a high solar output and major vulcanism(large CO2 output) the earth becomes a festering swamp with the poles reaching tropical conditions. The temperature changes, and not the location of the axis of rotation. The location of the continents changes, but not the axis of rotation.

You know while pondering my responses I have had some what of an epiphany,in any rotating mass or group of masses the obect will rotate around the "center of mass". Now if you have random concentrations of mass on the surface of a semi-elastic mass, two things will happen ,the the axis of rotation will precess, wobble, and or, the masses will migrate around till they acheive equillibrium at that point the axis of rotation should not precess, from internal input any longer. Classic dynamic physics.

Sound familliar?

Originally posted by punkinworks
For most of its 4+ billion years the earth has been a frozen snow ball.

You might want to recheck your figures. "Iceball Earth" existed only briefly (relatively speaking) and the ice ages were shorter than the warm periods. The Cretaceous (warmer than present Earth) lasted almost 200 million years.

The earths orbit around the sun varys from circular to elliptical, on something like a twenty something million year cycle, when its is circular the average distance from the sun is greater than it is with the elliptical orbit.

You're thinking of the Milankovic cycles, right?

It is also thought that as the solar system orbits the galactic center that it occasionaly passes through regions of dust and gas tha block some of the suns output from reaching the earth.

Ah... reference??

There is also yhe missbelief that the poles = cold, although this has been true for much of earths history, it has not always been so.
At times during an explicityly eliptical orbit, with a high solar output and major vulcanism(large CO2 output) the earth becomes a festering swamp with the poles reaching tropical conditions.

Hey, those are our dinos you're talking about! (the lab I volunteer for is researching Alaskan/polar dinosaurs). "Festering?" Aw, c'mon! They are "Interesting" swamps and stuff!

Now if you have random concentrations of mass on the surface of a semi-elastic mass, two things will happen ,the the axis of rotation will precess, wobble, and or, the masses will migrate around till they acheive equillibrium at that point the axis of rotation should not precess, from internal input any longer. Classic dynamic physics.

Sound familliar?

Yes. It's taught in geology and physics courses. However, as we both know there's a lot more going on than just that (vulcanism, hot spots, etc, etc, etc... and then the creating of lakes via dams which has changed the rotation slightly.

reply to post by Byrd




Byrd;

You might want to recheck your figures. "Iceball Earth" existed only briefly (relatively speaking) and the ice ages were shorter than the warm periods. The Cretaceous (warmer than present Earth) lasted almost 200 million years.

Yes in the last 500-700 million years the earth has been warm, but that is only an 1/8th of the erths history.
I was referencing a graph of average world wide temp since the earth formed. It was in an article I read in the journal "nature" about 7-8 years ago.
I always thought that the earth was usually warm but, the data these researchers had gathered clearly showed the the earths average temp well below the the freezing point of water.
To counter those 200 million years of temperate to tropical conditions in the cretateous are offset by a billion and half or more years frozen, in very early days.
earth has only been warm enough to support advanced life on land for 10% of its total history.
Well make that 18% ish, if you take the figure of 500 million years ago for life to take hold on land.
The first billion year years of life could very well have plugged along under a cap of ice.
Our planet is on the edge when it comes to what we call a habitable zone.

Just the slight shift in position relative to the sun, between winter and summer, causes where I live to go from an a daily summer high of 100 degrees, to a daily high in the winter of 40.
And yes you are correct on the Milankovich cycle, and my time scale for it was off, there must be some other cycle that is in the 20ish million years, cause it is stuck in my head.



As far as the gas and dust I was referencing a very doom and gloom article in Sci Am from a few years ago.
There are regions of gas and dust, that is undeniable. There earth orbits around the galaxy, so it stands to reason that at some point our solar system will pass through one.
This astronomer was saying that the earths has been travelling through a clear area for quite some time tens of millions of years.
He postulates that were are about to pass into a "dark region".
According to him there is a dark region in the direction of the earths travel.
They cant tell how far away it is or how soon we will reach it, but it is there.
He called it one of the biggest things nodoby is interested in.


Your dinos, coool
Maybe not festering at the poles, but the earth certainly was a festering swamp at the tropics.
And yes, biological speeking festering is best, frozen is dead.
In yet another article about past climate variations the author



And yes there are so many things tht affect the earths rotation and how its crust moves around.
Gravitational tidal forces, heat from the core and so on.