ARGH!?!?!?!
Why are they dribbling out this info????
I found 3 MORE faces by merely looking at this picture!(I was just looking for ski tracks among the pine trees when I came across them!)
Posted on 03/25/2002 2:42:10 PM PST by vannrox
No, I am joking about the Holiday Inn, but the limit of my geology knowledge is one class that I took for fun a couple of years ago. I did, however, have a good grasp for the concepts. I hope though that if I accidentally mislead you that there will be a real geologist along to smack me upside the head.
Anyway, if I follow the story correctly, the scientists are not claiming that the dated rocks were those that impacted the moon (as you said, that would be foolish). I believe they are following the theory that the moon "seas" were created by collisions big enough to create a break in the moons crust through which magma flowed and then solidified, creating newer, darker rock on the surface. Since the moon mission that gathered the rocks landed in one of these areas, that would be the type of rocks they would be collecting. Also, since there is apparently no plate tectonic activity on the moon, the only way for new rock to be formed would be through these collisions. Note that according to the article, other scientists make a point that the rock samples were not collected from enough sites to warrant a generalization of there having been one huge cataclysmic event.
Back to the isotopes (and keep in mind that my example isotope, though a common one, may not have been the one the scientists were measuring). Potassium is a very common element in igneous rocks (a common example is potassium feldspar - the creamy pink mineral found in some granite). Argon, on the other hand is a noble gas, rarely forming any compounds. So, I am thinking that most of any argon in the magma at the time of rock formation would escaped as gas. So, the argon found in the rock samples would have been created by the radioactive decay of the K-40 after the rock had solidified and would be trapped in the rock structure.
That is about all I can come up with. Hopefully this helps somewhat. If not, I hope a geologist will wander by and enlighten us.
Keep an eye on Mount Malapert. It's on the moon at latitude 86 south and has sunlight almost all the time. Also, it is in walking range of possible water deposits [ice] in the deep craters that never get sunlight. And, it has a view of the entire earthdisc all the time. Expect the Chinese to set up shop there beginning in 2010.
(I was just looking for ski tracks among the pine trees when I came across them!)
![](http://mem.tcon.net/users/5012/7632/faces.gif")
Why not?
After all, the Bible tells us that the moon was created much later than the earth's rocks, seas, and first life.
Everyplace has this many meteorites, its just you can't see the them.
Usually, those walking that area in Antartica get 1 -2 meteorite rocks per 4 square miles ... most of course, are common generic stony. Only a few (less than twenty) are clearly from Martian "splashes" that actually threw Martian rock high enough to go into orbit and eventually pass into the earth's atmosphere.
Nice sketch of Herschel in Parallax, the Race to Measure the Cosmos.
The book cloys due to too many personal anecdotes by the author, but worth reading.
To be fair about it, some people claim that JPL is to blaim and that NASA is more or less innocent. The claim is that a money struggle is involved, and that JPL funding is mainly if not entirely based on unmanned exploration, which would come to a sudden and drastic halt if the political class finally were to twake up to the reality that a city had been discovered on Mars while people were talking about microbes. There would never be another unmanned Mars probe; they'd all be manned.
My own view is that cities are interesting, and germs are not. I can find germs in my toilet; I don't feel any particular need to fund space explorations to look for germs. Thus, it pretty much pisses me off to keep on reading about searches for microbes while evidence of a city having been found is ignored.
Nope. Vulcan was a hypothetical planet closer to the Sun than Mercury. There were even some claimed observations, but none was verified and the "planet" was never seen again.
The (imaginary) counter-Earth (in Earth's orbit but precisely opposite) has no name, as far as I know. Maybe "counter-Earth", or "Balonia" or something.
And "Nemesis" is a hypothetical star which periodically perturbs the cometary belt and causes an increase in cometary debris hitting Earth. It has never been observed.
--Boris
Ah ha! That was the piece of information I was missing. Being a gas, one can assume a static date based on the idea that the gas would not be in the rock at the time it was formed.
This doesn't help date when a rock (or planet) later was broken up into smaller rocks, but it sure looks like it could be used to date the original formation.
Thanks for the answers and the patience.
just a bttt for a moldy old topic.
Mystery Spot On Jupiter Baffles Astronomers
10/23/03
Posted on 10/23/2003 5:41:53 PM PDT by Davea
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1006938/posts
39 posted on 10/23/2003 6:44:20 PM PDT by Swordmaker
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1006938/posts?page=39#39
Read later, gracias.
At that time there wasn't enough on the Earth to drive extinct!
It's too long ago.
From: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/nemesis_010320-1.html
Muller's Nemesis theory -- that our Sun has a companion star responsible for recurring episodes of wholesale death and destruction here on Earth -- seems to reemerge periodically like microbes after a mass extinction.
That's what they told me 3 years ago.
Welcome to a Lazarus Thread...
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