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CYCLIC TECTONICS. “The "great" unconformities of regional or continental scale (in both geography and chronology) are associated with either global changes in eustatic sea level or the supercontinent cycle, the periodic merger of all the continents into one approximately every 500 million years.” https://lnkd.in/ddDSSXe View in LinkedIn

CALCIFICATION CAMP. “That puts the relationship between the Great Unconformity and the Cambrian explosion in a much different light. The Great Unconformity may not simply be a gap in the record of early evolution of multicellular life with fossilizable hard parts. Instead, the seawater changes caused by the erosion that created the Great Unconformity may have driven the rise of biological calcification.” https://lnkd.in/dtYSB5v View in LinkedIn

ISOTOPE SUPPORT. “Support for this idea can also be found in the ratio of strontium isotopes. Strontium-87 mainly makes it into the ocean through the breakdown of continental rocks, whereas strontium-86 comes from mid-ocean ridges. The high point for strontium-87 over the past 900 million years occurred during the Cambrian, suggesting weathering peaked around then. The ratio of neodymium-143 to neodymium-144 (also known as εNd) also helps out by indicating the age of those continental rocks being weathered. Around the time that strontium-87 peaked, εNd hit a low point as continental weathering cut into older and older rocks.’ https://lnkd.in/dtYSB5v View in LinkedIn

MELTING GLACIERS. “When sea level rose (and the first Cambrian sediments were laid down on the continents) it swabbed the decks. Nothing erodes quite like the power of waves, so as the shoreline gradually moved inland to higher elevations it washed away the soil and sediment that had built up while rocks broke down. This "wave-base razor," as it’s called, cleared out the material that might have otherwise formed sedimentary rocks, and exposed massive areas of "fresh" bedrock. Between the weathering of these fresh surfaces (which weather very rapidly) and the continued breakdown of all the soil and sediment added to the oceans, concentrations of many ions in the seawater rose quickly.” https://lnkd.in/dtYSB5v View in LinkedIn

TECH EVOLUTION. "The rules of Technological evolution thus make a strong argument for accelerating evolution. Compared to the snail-paced evolution of the human species, we have to wonder if we’ll be able to manage the increasing complexity of technology or if the dystopian vision of some futurists will come true: machines will become ‘alive’ with artificial intelligence and not just roam the earth but also rule it." https://lnkd.in/dhVUUSY View in LinkedIn

NOT JUST WEATHERING. “Since the Great Unconformity is global in extent, we know continents were weathering (eroding away rocks and leaving a gap in recorded time) all around the world. This is what happens when sea level is low—weather and seasons and time break down rocks, and rivers carry sediment out to sea. What’s unusual about the Great Unconformity is how intensive and long-lasting it was.” https://lnkd.in/dtYSB5v View in LinkedIn

AI INEVITABILITY. "Despite this long record of failure, AGI must be possible. And that is because of a deep property of the laws of physics, namely the universality of computation. This entails that everything that the laws of physics require a physical object to do can, in principle, be emulated in arbitrarily fine detail by some program on a general-purpose computer, provided it is given enough time and memory." https://lnkd.in/dN7u2Qg View in LinkedIn

SEDIMENTARY ROCK DATABASE. “Shanan Peters from the University of Wisconsin and Robert Gaines of Pomona College tie these ideas together by examining the Great Unconformity a little more closely. Using a massive global database of sedimentary rocks together with geochemical records, they thought about what exactly was going on during this mostly missing chapter in Earth’s story.” https://lnkd.in/dtYSB5v View in LinkedIn

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. "I cannot think of any other significant field of knowledge in which the prevailing wisdom, not only in society at large but also among experts, is so beset with entrenched, overlapping, fundamental errors. Yet it has also been one of the most self-confident fields in prophesying that it will soon achieve the ultimate breakthrough." https://lnkd.in/dN7u2Qg View in LinkedIn

CAMBRIAN MINERALIZATION THEORY. “It’s not all enigmas and secrets. We know that the composition of seawater changed significantly during this time. The concentration of many of the common ions in seawater—like calcium and sodium—climbed upward. Because high concentrations of calcium can interfere with cellular processes, this has led some to propose that the evolution of calcium carbonate shells was simply a byproduct of the cells' efforts to clear out calcium.” https://lnkd.in/dtYSB5v View in LinkedIn