Category: Uncategorized

GLOBALLY VARIABLE. “Keller and his team think that the glaciers of Snowball Earth wiped clean all other impact craters, scraping a bit off the top of Sudbury and Vredefort, too. By their calculations, an average of between 1.8 and 3 vertical miles (3 and 5 km) of crust were scraped away by Snowball Earth's ice sheets over 64 million years. In some spots, Keller said, the loss was greater, and in others, no crust was lost at all.” https://lnkd.in/ds7GcBF View in LinkedIn

CRATER EROSION. “Around 700 million years ago, they found, the Earth's impact craters were wiped nearly clean. Only two huge craters, the Sudbury basin in Canada and the Vredefort crater in South Africa, predate Snowball Earth — and those craters were staggeringly enormous, originally measuring 93 miles (150 km) and 185 miles (300 km) across, respectively. They've been eroded to a fraction of their original size. [Crash! 10 Biggest Impact Craters on Earth].” https://lnkd.in/ds7GcBF View in LinkedIn

UPTICK IN SEDIMENTATION. “Then there’s the huge uptick in sedimentation rates at the start of the Cambrian. All the new sediment required plenty of space to fall into, something that would have only been possible if massive levels of erosion took place beforehand.” https://lnkd.in/ds7GcBF View in LinkedIn

METEORITE THEORY. “For one thing, “around 600 to 700 million years ago, Earth loses its craters,” notes study coauthor Bill Bottke, a planetary scientist and asteroid expert at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Some ancient craters still exist on stable continental cores named cratons, but they are few and far between. (Recently, a city-size impact crater was found under the ice in Greenland.).” https://lnkd.in/ds7GcBF View in LinkedIn

OBSERVATION. "We observed NLP in the culture of every healthy human serum tested (n = 20), an observation in line with another study that reported that 90–100% of animal sera from cattle, goats, cats, and dogs gave similar nanoparticles. Thus, NLP formation would appear to be unrelated to pathogenesis." (NLP = Nanobacteria-like-particles). https://lnkd.in/dvNtRzz View in LinkedIn

CONFLUENCE OF FACTORS. “If validated, the implications of this story could be enormously significant. After all, this study points out that complex life first emerged when Snowball Earth’s monstrous mealtime came to an end. Glaciers would have carved out fjord-like shallow marine areas, which could have been havens for life as the planet warmed back up. This colossal crustal consumption may have also coincided with major geochemical and environmental changes that were potentially beneficial to biological evolution.” https://lnkd.in/dDSckgW View in LinkedIn

ANALOGS. "Surprisingly, some of the CaCO3 structures were remarkably similar to cells undergoing binary fission and budding. Symmetrical division forms with an internal septum were frequently observed as well as structures resembling divisions occurring simultaneously in vesicular forms." https://lnkd.in/dvNtRzz View in LinkedIn

GRADUAL ACCEPTANCE. “Effectively, in many locations, Earth buried the evidence of about a fifth of its geological history, the team argues today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The notion is elegant but provocative, and the authors themselves predict that some geoscientists will express skepticism. The idea that Earth was a giant frigid “snowball” around 700 million years ago is being increasingly accepted by the scientific community.” https://lnkd.in/dDSckgW View in LinkedIn

EARLY DAYS. "It is still unclear whether they represent novel life forms, overlooked nanometer-size bacteria, or some other primitive self-replicating microorganisms." https://lnkd.in/dvNtRzz View in LinkedIn

IGNORED HYPOTHESIS. “Though I’ve read numerous articles struggling to explain away the Cambrian explosion, I’d never heard of anyone arguing that the alleged Precambrian ancestors to the Cambrian animals were missing because the strata containing their fossils had been completely eroded from the face of the earth in such a “Great Unconformity.” But after hearing this objection, I did some research. I discovered a single place where this argument has been made: It was over 100 years ago by Charles Doolittle Walcott, the famous geologist who discovered the Burgess Shale. Apparently the argument was never adopted by subsequent geologists, for good reasons.” https://lnkd.in/dF5HJJK View in LinkedIn