Mr. Davies’s Reviews > Supercontinent: Ten Billion Years in the Life of Our Planet > Status Update

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.