History of the earth... again. :)

Status
Not open for further replies.
Victoria

Victoria

New Member
Oct 31, 2002
11,103
3,547
0
London
State / Prov
Ontario
North America's oldest conifer tree and some ancient scorpion parts are among the fossil treasures found in a newly discovered cave in Illinois.

The new discovery also unearthed fossils of plants that may be new to science and revealed evidence of prehistoric forest fires.

Scientists date the specimens to nearly 315 million years ago, according to initial findings presented last month at the regional meeting of the Geological Society of America in Lawrence, Kan.

"I've never seen anything like this before," said Roy Plotnick, a paleontologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago who discovered the cave with students on a field trip to a site two hours outside of Chicago. "The limestone that forms the cave is 450 million years old, but that's not the interesting part of the cave. The preservation inside the cave is what's fascinating."

What is of interest to Plotnick and his colleagues are the well-preserved bits of plants and insects that have been cushioned in the cave and protected from the elements.

Much of the biological treasure is preserved as charcoal, which researchers assume is a sign that the ancient trees were burned in fires.

"This is a glimpse into a new window to the past," said Royal Holloway University of London paleobotonist Andrew Scott, who is researching samples from the cave.

Additional details of the most fascinating discoveries in the cave include:


Needles of a conifer tree, 2 million years older than any conifer previously described
Nearly pristine plant spores of lycopods, the main coal-forming plants of the period
Evidence of a general drying trend in the area.

The cave, which geologists estimate runs underground for miles, could provide scientists with years of research material.

Plotnick's cave is one of two recent sightings of ancient plants in Illinois. A coal mine near Danville, detailed in the May issue of the journal Geology, houses a 300-million-year-old fossilized forest. While the mine is filled with evidence of ancient wetlands, the cave also holds biological deposits from dryer environments that appear to be about 3 million years older than the plant fossils found in the mine.

"Their discovery, and ours, show how much there still is to find in supposedly well-known places like Illinois," Plotnick told LiveScience.
 
All inventions are pretty much made by human kind Tom. Carbon dating is one of those really cool things.

I like the site below... how stuff works.

V

You probably have seen or read news stories about fascinating ancient artifacts. At an archaeological dig, a piece of wooden tool is unearthed and the archaeologist finds it to be 5,000 years old. A child mummy is found high in the Andes and the archaeologist says the child lived more than 2,000 years ago. How do scientists know how old an object or human remains are? What methods do they use and how do these methods work? In this article, we will examine the methods by which scientists use radioactivity to determine the age of objects, most notably carbon-14 dating.
Carbon-14 dating is a way of determining the age of certain archeological artifacts of a biological origin up to about 50,000 years old. It is used in dating things such as bone, cloth, wood and plant fibers that were created in the relatively recent past by human activities.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/carbon-14.htm
 
My favourite is

my favourite is "light years" the distance light travels in one year.

The Milky Way is 100 million light years wide, by 20 million light years deep.
 
Tom Carlson said:
Carbon dating has always seemed like "man's invention" and I wonder how accurate it is. Can't deny the findings, just question the dating.
Click to expand...
In truth, carbon dating is a very poor judge of the age of a specimen. Too many variables that cannot be accounted for.

Testing the same item several times will typically return results tens of thousands of years apart. Scientists will often pick the result that best fits their theory of where the item fits in the historical picture - picking the evidence to fit the theory :)

http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/faq/dating.asp
http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/3059
 
As it seems to be a belief thing I'll leave it alone.

V
 
It's a refusal to belief thing :)

Since taking the evidence at face value would lead to intelligent design, and that is not acceptable, the facts must be forced to fit into the ever-shifting theory (completely unsupported) of evolution.

Ryan
 
Ryan, I respect your opinion and your beliefs. I also respect mine. :) So I agree to disagree on this point.

V
 
Infinite said:
It's a refusal to belief thing :)

Since taking the evidence at face value would lead to intelligent design, and that is not acceptable, the facts must be forced to fit into the ever-shifting theory (completely unsupported) of evolution.

Ryan
Click to expand...
Evolution happens...but I don't believe things can simply "begin" by evolution. Something has to be "created" before it can "evolve".
 
mark smith said:
Evolution happens...but I don't believe things can simply "begin" by evolution. Something has to be "created" before it can "evolve".
Click to expand...

The cornerstone of life was created...from THERE, it evolved.
 
Victoria said:
Ryan, I respect your opinion and your beliefs. I also respect mine. :) So I agree to disagree on this point.

V
Click to expand...
:iwuvyou::> You know I love you, V, right? :>:hug:
 
MUUUUUAAAAAAHHHHHH AND MANY HUGS. And I love you and yours... and the respect we have. :)

V
 
And as an aside... I'm reading Deception Point by Dan Brown these days. Interesting. :)

V
 
Me too Doug, but I'm impressed by the depth of his research... it's fun to read his stuff.

Apparently they're making a movie of Angels and Demons next... Tom Hanks will be in it of course. :)

I had the fabulous illustrated version of the Da Vinci Code. Very cool to read as I had seen so many of the things pictured in the book. Put a whole new twist on what had intrigued me before the book.

So many things to learn...

V
 
It's entertaining fiction ... just don't buy into his stuff as fact.

I haven't read any critiques on Angels & Demons or Deception Point, but the glaring departures from reality in DaVinci Code were well documented by secular and religious critics.

I tried to watch the DaVinci Code movie, but my flight was too short. It's on my list of popular books to read, but haven't gotten to it yet.

Ryan
 
I guess that's why his books are on on the "fiction" lists. ;)

Even Mr. Brown was taken aback by the kafuffel by the religious leaders and not so religious leaders, about his book... as he said, "IT'S FICTION".

So, I guess it must be, if the lists and the author say it is.

For me the best fiction is written around a kernel of truth. I enjoy being taken along for the ride as the author moves the story along. Both Alana and I enjoyed Da Vinci, (book and movie) because, as mentioned above we have been to the places he writes about.

I guess if the main characters in the hypothesis had been named Bob and Joan, there wouldn't have been an issue... and it would have been boring.

V
 
Victoria said:
I guess that's why his books are on on the "fiction" lists. ;)

I guess if the main characters in the hypothesis had been named Bob and Joan, there wouldn't have been an issue... and it would have been boring.

V
Click to expand...

lol - So true :)
 
More cool stuff. I love Live Science...

V


This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

"This is not my day job." So begins Michel Barsoum as he recounts his foray into the mysteries of the Great Pyramids of Egypt. As a well respected researcher in the field of ceramics, Barsoum never expected his career to take him down a path of history, archaeology, and "political" science, with materials research mixed in.

As a distinguished professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Drexel University, his daily routine consists mainly of teaching students about ceramics, or performing research on a new class of materials, the so-called MAX Phases, that he and his colleagues discovered in the 1990s. These modern ceramics are machinable, thermal-shock resistant, and are better conductors of heat and electricity than many metals-making them potential candidates for use in nuclear power plants, the automotive industry, jet engines, and a range of other high-demand systems.

Then Barsoum received an unexpected phone call from Michael Carrell, a friend of a retired colleague of Barsoum, who called to chat with the Egyptian-born Barsoum about how much he knew of the mysteries surrounding the building of the Great Pyramids of Giza, the only remaining of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

The widely accepted theory-that the pyramids were crafted of carved-out giant limestone blocks that workers carried up ramps-had not only not been embraced by everyone, but as important had quite a number of holes.

Burst out laughing

According to the caller, the mysteries had actually been solved by Joseph Davidovits, Director of the Geopolymer Institute in St. Quentin, France, more than two decades ago. Davidovits claimed that the stones of the pyramids were actually made of a very early form of concrete created using a mixture of limestone, clay, lime, and water.

"It was at this point in the conversation that I burst out laughing," says Barsoum. If the pyramids were indeed cast, he says, someone should have proven it beyond a doubt by now, in this day and age, with just a few hours of electron microscopy.

It turned out that nobody had completely proven the theory...yet.

"What started as a two-hour project turned into a five-year odyssey that I undertook with one of my graduate students, Adrish Ganguly, and a colleague in France, Gilles Hug," Barsoum says.

A year and a half later, after extensive scanning electron microscope (SEM) observations and other testing, Barsoum and his research group finally began to draw some conclusions about the pyramids. They found that the tiniest structures within the inner and outer casing stones were indeed consistent with a reconstituted limestone. The cement binding the limestone aggregate was either silicon dioxide (the building block of quartz) or a calcium and magnesium-rich silicate mineral.

The stones also had a high water content-unusual for the normally dry, natural limestone found on the Giza plateau-and the cementing phases, in both the inner and outer casing stones, were amorphous, in other words, their atoms were not arranged in a regular and periodic array. Sedimentary rocks such as limestone are seldom, if ever, amorphous.

The sample chemistries the researchers found do not exist anywhere in nature. "Therefore," says Barsoum, "it's very improbable that the outer and inner casing stones that we examined were chiseled from a natural limestone block."

More startlingly, Barsoum and another of his graduate students, Aaron Sakulich, recently discovered the presence of silicon dioxide nanoscale spheres (with diameters only billionths of a meter across) in one of the samples. This discovery further confirms that these blocks are not natural limestone.

Generations misled

At the end of their most recent paper reporting these findings, the researchers reflect that it is "ironic, sublime and truly humbling" that this 4,500-year-old limestone is so true to the original that it has misled generations of Egyptologists and geologists and, "because the ancient Egyptians were the original-albeit unknowing-nanotechnologists."

As if the scientific evidence isn't enough, Barsoum has pointed out a number of common sense reasons why the pyramids were not likely constructed entirely of chiseled limestone blocks.

Egyptologists are consistently confronted by unanswered questions: How is it possible that some of the blocks are so perfectly matched that not even a human hair can be inserted between them? Why, despite the existence of millions of tons of stone, carved presumably with copper chisels, has not one copper chisel ever been found on the Giza Plateau?

Although Barsoum's research has not answered all of these questions, his work provides insight into some of the key questions. For example, it is now more likely than not that the tops of the pyramids are cast, as it would have been increasingly difficult to drag the stones to the summit.

Also, casting would explain why some of the stones fit so closely together. Still, as with all great mysteries, not every aspect of the pyramids can be explained. How the Egyptians hoisted 70-ton granite slabs halfway up the great pyramid remains as mysterious as ever.

Why do the results of Barsoum's research matter most today? Two words: earth cements.

"How energy intensive and/or complicated can a 4,500 year old technology really be? The answer to both questions is not very," Barsoum explains. "The basic raw materials used for this early form of concrete-limestone, lime, and diatomaceous earth-can be found virtually anywhere in the world," he adds. "Replicating this method of construction would be cost effective, long lasting, and much more environmentally friendly than the current building material of choice: Portland cement that alone pumps roughly 6 billion tons of CO2 annually into the atmosphere when it's manufactured."

"Ironically," says Barsoum, "this study of 4,500 year old rocks is not about the past, but about the future."
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom
Back