DailyDirt: Reverse Engineering The Earth

from the urls-we-dug-up dept

Geology is the ultimate riddle. All we have is a snapshot in time — the earth as it stands today — but within that snapshot are the remnant clues to untangling four and a half billion years of planetary development. Every turned stone might answer a question, or it might raise some new ones, as these latest steps towards a complete understanding of our planet's geology demonstrate.

• Fossilized pebbles found in Australia might upend our timeline of how earth came to sustain life. The 2.7-billion-year-old stones show signs of oxygen in the atmosphere that wasn't supposed to show up until a few hundred-million years later when algae started pumping it out. [url]
• The shape of Hawaii and the underwater islands that share its formation has long been a source of debate, and a radical new idea seeks to explain it. Instead of relying on plate tectonics, the new model suggests it all had to do with mixing plumes of mantle. [url]
• A NASA satellite recently found something odd about the Caspian Sea: its bed is covered in mysterious scrape marks. Though it's possible the scratches are man-made, the most likely explanation is ice gouging during the sea's annual thaw. [url]

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Filed Under: caspian sea, earth, fossils, geology, hawaii, mantle, tectonics