Status Updates From Supercontinent: Ten Billion...

Lucretius says Earth is young because no poets recorded before Homer —
John Joly retorts — “Wemove in a greater history, the landmarks of which are not the birth and death of kings and poets, but of species, genera, orders … We are … in possession today or some of those lost Iliads and Odysseys for which Lucretius looked in vain”

Douglas Adams parable of the puddle

Albrecht Durer’s Melancholia — metaphor for human scientific inquiry

Natural selection is often thought of as what ‘changes’ organisms, but this is only true if the environment is changing, disturbing the equilibrium. Under stable conditions, natural selection is a Shri fly conservative force that keeps things they way they are and makes sure that things that aren’t broke DON’t get fixed.

Shift to rise in complex animals post-Rodinia — tracking clock of “junk DNA” [inactive, unexpressed DNA]

“On the supercontinent of science, everything must fit together.”

Ongoing conflict around “snowball earth” hypothesis vs. “slush ball Earth” vs. thin-ice equator earth — biologists Vs. Geologists

Why “snowball earth” cycles? — unique among supercontinents, Rodinia seems to have straddled the Equator — never has the coincidence of low greenhouse gases, weak Sun and tropical concentration of landmasses come about again.

Supercontinents are arid because moisture cannot reach their interior … After supercontinent fragmentation, more rain tends to fall on more land, and Rick weathering speeds up … as more rocks were weathered, even more carbine dioxide was removed from the atmosphere and delivered to the seas …

Hypotheses that early oxygenation “sinks” into mineral deposits (like iron) and they, in turn, affect deeper, core earth

Once oxygen sinks are “full,” oxygen begins accumulating in atmosphere

Theory that Early organisms could have migrated into the ocean floor … This was the beginning of the so-called ‘deep biosphere,’ the mass of microbes that diets silently and invisibly in the pore spaces of the watt’s lithosphere, but whose total mass even today outweighs all living things in the planet’ surface.

Not, what is life? But; what does life do?

Waterfall lowers gravitational energy, warm springs lower thermal energy — and Life is a chemical system that drains and dissipates chemical energy.

Orogeny— Jemison 5th ? Book series

Rewind to Edmond Halley vs. the “more dangerous (and much older) idea: that the world was eternal.

—> working to discover age of earth
—v Vs. both Xtiam dogma and Aristotelian ahistoric Earth

Too much biography for me — BUT then he shares John Holly’s sonnet of “special feeling for the immensity of geological time”

You have to choose your radioactive element carefully, because … radioactive ones run down at different rates. You have to choose one that runs for the sort of timespan you wish to measure.

169 — Carbon-14, half-life 5500 years, good for once-living things
But geologists … ?

Pangaea was the first lost supercontinent that actually EXISTED to be imagined by the human mind. In one sense, it is still and always will be a fantasy; but one constrained by uniformitarianism — not Lyellian, but one that truly takes full account of the importance of the rare event I’m geological time. Thus the human imagination is held within the fruitful confines of method …

Permian extinction event — 250 million years ago — Pangea, low oxygen, 40-Celsius heat

This principle is called isostasy —> continental rocks “float” higher in the denser rocks of the mantle than do the basalt rocks if the ocean crust.

So geologists are still struggling with two types of change : gradual, repetitive Lyelllian ones that go in cycles, and secular — one might even say ‘Seussian’ — changes: progressive, revolutionary once-and-for-all changes after which there is no going back. The history of the Earth is made of both.