PBS Program Alert- Nova:Arctic Dinosaurs Dec 21 8 pm

PBS Nova ^

[CanadianPete]

Program Description

Most people imagine dinosaurs lurking in warm locales with swamps and jungles, dining on vegetation and each other. But "Arctic Dinosaurs" reveals that many species also thrived in the harsh environments of the north and south polar regions. NOVA follows two high-stakes expeditions and the paleontologists who push the limits of science to unearth 70 million-year-old fossils buried in the vast Alaskan tundra.

[CanadianPete]

Oh another thing, now that I remember. They show that due to continental drift one part of alaska was way further south but that another part of it was more or less where it is today. So the coral stuff would be from the further south part but the part that was still there had the dinosaurs apparently. I hope you will be able to watch it.

[blueplum]

before I’d blame BP, I’d look at a combination of exceptionally low sunspot activity (theoretically, we’re supposed to be at a maximum right now, not a minimum as we are), La Nina effect and the general erratic behavior of the Gulf Loop for the past several years.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76sS7bqw9Z8
and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5x8dJ57xkk

[Rebelbase]

"Paula Dean cooking Bacon Wrapped Cupcakes on the Food Network"

[Daveinyork]

But that would imply that the world is not warmer than it has ever been. Can’t have that idea getting out.

[himno hero]

no disrespect intended...I’ll call bullshit...it had to be equatorial to grow the corals.

aalso, beyond the plates shifting I’ll bet that there have been other contributing factors. Perhaps we have had other north south axis... suggesting that maybe the skin spun on the molten mas due to foreign impact as well as the continental drift.

For corals to grow most require around 80 degree water. To have that water warm to 80 then freeze, (killing the coral) is too tall a order for me to believe. Also thats a lot of water to move 90 to 120 degrees.

I might buy pieces of their argument....If I hadn’t been there, it might be different. Ise seen the ocean , mate, and walked dem shores.

I would question their editor and fact checkers to see if Team Obama and Eric Holder were involved.

[himno hero]

The coral argument might work along with a shifting.... but if you go across the Arctic over to Coral Harbour.... and I know it doesnt look like much according to the maps... for the way they taper in.... but....Ellesmere Island is clear across the Canadian Arctic. What a person should do is go for a walk along Russias Arctic coast....and hunt for coral, sunglasses and swim suits. Dunno. Maybe there is other evidence. Maybee some beer bottles.

I’ll bet on the ocean there having equatorial temps, cuzz I have touched the coral in both places.

[gleeaikin]

You state: “Birds, and reptillians, are the progeny supposedly.” In fact the dinosaurs were an offshoot of the reptilian line. Both continued to evolve and differentiate over time. For that matter, mammals separated and evolved at almost the same time as dinosours or perhaps a little earlier, although the great Permian extinction greatly weakened the mammalian line and allowed the dinosaurs to erupt on the world stage. The point is that by the time dinosaurs existed that were most likely warm blooded, many millions of years separated them from their cold blooded reptilian antecedents.

[gleeaikin]

If the show was on Cable, I would not have been able to see it. With regard to how to ping someone, all you have to do is hit the Post Reply bloc on the comment space and enter their recipient name into the TO space. Another way is to go to Private Reply and send them a message from there. I hope this helps.

[gleeaikin]

Regarding water going from 80 degrees to freezing. Aside from significant shifts in the earth’s crust, and tectonic plate movement, more sudden changes can occur because of very large boloid crashes or megavolcano events. Think the great Permian extinction or the end Cretacious event, not to mention the Toba megavolcano 74,000 years ago.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks gleeaikin!

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[SunkenCiv]

· GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother, and Ernest_at_the_Beach · · join list or digest · view topics · view or post blog · bookmark · post a topic · subscribe ·
	Antiquity Journal  & archive  Archaeologica  Archaeology  Archaeology Channel  BAR  Bronze Age Forum  Discover  Dogpile  Eurekalert  Google  LiveScience  Mirabilis.ca  Nat Geographic  PhysOrg  Science Daily  Science News  Texas AM  Yahoo  Excerpt, or Link only?	Thanks gleeaikin. Reptiles Enjoyed Warm Arctic Temperatures Averaged at Least 57 Degrees by Kenneth Chang December 18, 1998 ABC News [images here] 90 million years ago... On a frigid and barren island called Axel Heiberg in the Canadian Arctic, just 700 miles from the North Pole, scientists have dug up fossil bones of an extinct, cold-blooded reptile known as champsosaur. Like all cold-blooded reptiles, the crocodilelike champsosaurs relied on the sun to warm their bodies and could not survive freezing temperatures. Since they lived on Axel Heiberg, that implies Axel Heiberg wasn't freezing... "Ninety million years ago, we think it was similar to northern Florida or Georgia," says John Tarduno, a geologist at the University of Rochester in New York. Temperatures averaged close to 60 degrees Fahrenheit and could have consistently reached the 80s and 90s during summer. Today, snow falls on Axel Heiberg in summer, and winter temperatures routinely dip to minus 60. Although plate tectonics slowly move continents and islands, Axel Heiberg hasn't wandered far in the past 90 million years. The location appears to have been at or north of the Arctic Circle during its balmy phase... Based on the habitat requirements of similar living reptiles such as crocodiles, the researchers concluded champsosaurs needed at least an average temperature of 57 degrees Fahrenheit to survive... Analysis of the turtle fossils found on Axel Heiberg gave similar conclusions... Most paleontologists believe this period, in the middle of the dinosaur age, to be a warm one, but not that warm. The Dinosaurs Of Winter And The Polar Forests by William R. Corliss Science Frontiers No. 75 May-June 1991 In Antarctica, heaps of 3- million-year-old fossil leaves have been found within 400 kilometers of the South Pole. (Francis, Jane E.; "Arctic Eden," Natural History, 100:57, January 1991. Also: Peterson, Christian; "Leafing through Antarctica's Balmy Past," New Scientist, p. 20, February 9, 1991.) To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.
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[SunkenCiv]

First I'd like to thank Quantum and IBM for making such durable SCSI drives; next I'd like to thank magazines real and virtual for keeping their archival material available online; last but not least, I'd like to thank the Wayback Machine folks for all they do and have done.

Earth in the Balance
by Jessica Gorman
April 1, 2000

Four-and-a-half billion years ago, an asteroid slammed into earth, knocking it onto its side and touching off a crazy climate that nurtured the first living things but later triggered giant ice sheets in the tropics.

Or so suggests Gregory Jenkins, a meteorologist at Pennsylvania State University. In Earth's infancy, 3.8 million to 2.5 billion years ago, its surface was warm enough for life even though the young sun was much fainter than it is today. Jenkins found he could explain the balmy temperatures if Earth had been rotating sideways at the time. Recently, geologists have found evidence of glaciers at Earth's equator between 800 million and 540 million years ago. When Jenkins modeled what the climate would have been like during that time if Earth's axis were tilted at a steep, 70-degree angle, ice appeared at the equator.

According to the theory, Earth remained off kilter until around the beginning of the Cambrian Period, 540 million years ago, when a buildup of continents near the south pole flipped our planet to its present 23-degree tilt. The switch to a less extreme climate could explain the remarkable diversification of life at that time. "This is radically different than what most of us think about Earth," Jenkins says.

Scientific evidence supporting a Pole Shift:
Researchers Find Evidence of Polar Waffling
R. S. Co*, M. Prévot& P. Camps
Nature 374, 687-692 (20 April 1995)

Palaeomagnetic results from lava flows recording a geomagnetic polarity reversal at Steens Mountain, Oregon suggest the occurrence of brief episodes of astonishingly rapid field change of six degrees per day. The evidence is large, systematic variations in the direction of remanent magnetization as a function of the temperature of thermal demagnetization and of vertical position within a single flow, which are most simply explained by the hypothesis that the field was changing direction as the flow cooled.

Struggle Seen As Sun Switches Magnetic Field Polarity
UniSci
January 29, 2001

During solar maximum, when the Sun's activity is at a peak in its 11 year cycle, the polarity of its magnetic field changes: the north pole takes on the polarity of the south pole and vice versa. Now, for the first time ever, a spacecraft has witnessed this process from a front-row seat high above the Sun's south pole... Andre Balogh, from Imperial College, London, who is Principal Investigator for the Ulysses magnetometer, says: "In the past few months, the direction of the magnetic field observed by Ulysses fluctuated between the old and the new. Even now, there are periods when the old polarity is still present. Clearly, a struggle is going on in the Sun's magnetic field, with freshly emerging new polarity regions racing towards the polar regions, encountering the slowly decaying older polarity regions. We know that the new polarity will win through, but the battle is still on for another few months... The Sun's magnetism is very complex," adds Balogh. "Given this unique chance to sit by the ringside as the two magnetic polarities fight it out, Ulysses is once again able to make a significant step forward in our understanding of the Sun and the heliosphere."

[null and void]

No no no! The fact that there are Americans proves that Europeans and Africans must be extinct.

And BTW, since the European immigrants and the African immigrants are minor subsets of the source populations and come from different areas and have different genetics:

"The specifics [sic] are incompatible. The inability to crossbreed is an issue as well. No genetic pool to deal from. All must be inbred mutants."

Q.E.D. LSMFT!

[CanadianPete]

Well, I hope you all enjoyed it.

In case you missed it they will be re-airing it. In my area, for instance, on Thursday Dec 23 at 11:30 pm. You should check your local PBS affiliate because the re-air times aren’t always the same for different affiliates. They usually differ by a day or two.

Finally, if you don’t have an affiliate, you can watch the video online. Just goto the link for the article. It is the page for the documentary and allows online viewing.

[gleeaikin]

As a person who suffers from tobacco allergy, there is no such thing as Fine Tobacco. ;-)

[null and void]

Bummer!