I might if it were really good.
Here is the current species, the lettered olive. They get up to 3'' long and are native to our southeast beaches.
Posted on 08/17/2005 10:12:07 AM PDT by nickcarraway
Fossil Frank has a hypothesis - inspired by certain shells taken from deep in a limestone quarry abutting the Everglades - that a great tsunami hit Florida about two million years ago. It happened in the evening - and he can prove it. More of this later.
Before Frank Perillo became Fossil Frank he was an unhappy mechanic. He hated every day he lay on his back in Ketcham's garage.
Winter days were worst, because his hands turned to meat from the cold and the lacquer thinners he used to wash himself. When he jacked up cars, the ice on the bottom of them melted and dripped onto him like cold rain.
Ketcham's was a Chrysler shop in Fishkill, upstate New York, and in 1958 Frank rebuilt 275 transmissions there.
Fossil Frank recalled this, one recent morning, with amazement but no pride. ''Thirty years, I wasted,'' he said. ``I wasted my life.''
He realizes now - 67, retired in Miami - that he should have been fossil-hunting in Florida all that time.
Consider, as Frank does in his frequent presentations at the Miami Museum of Science, the variety of animal denizens since the peninsula emerged from the oceans 35 million years ago: ``Titanus walleri - a 12-foot bird with a beak that could slice through bone. Giant sloth, 20 feet tall on its hind legs. Tiny horses with toes. Megalodon, ancestor of today's great white shark - 100 feet long!''
On this morning he was looking for a giant olive shell, remainder of a species of univalve gastropod that died off three million to six million years ago. He was on the edge of the South-East Coast Quarry, a 1,200-acre limestone quarry on Tamiami Trail and 137th Avenue that belongs to Rinker Materials Corp.
He was accompanied by Chris Roth, the quarry supervisor, and Vicky Tomas, director of Miami-Dade Limestone Products Association, a mining industry group.
Frank believes that the SEC quarry - many miles away from the ocean's present-day shores - digs into the edge of a long-dead coral reef. Some of the quarry's pits are 95 feet deep. It is an excellent place to fossil-hunt and, as far as Frank knows, the only place in the world where a giant olive can be found.
This shell - up to eight inches long, dwarfing modern-day Olividae - is oblong, speckled and quite smooth, as if one flap has spiraled around itself.
All this was news to Chris. ''To be honest,'' he said, ``I've been in this industry 25 years and the only thing I know about rocks is how to crush them.''
The hunting party began near a water-filled pit Chris identified as Lake Number Four. Thirty-foot piles of white stone had been dug out of it, and a crane groaningly added to one of the piles. Cranes and lakes receded indefinitely to the north. White rock and melaleuca trees filled in every other direction. It was astonishingly bright and savagely hot.
''You never know where you're going to find a really good olive,'' Frank said, walking very slowly with his head down, blinking frequently in the brightness.
It was hard going. Every so often Vicky brought over a Busycon contrarium or Arcinella cornuta, and Frank tried to muster excitement - ''Oh yeah, you put some baby oil on that, it'll shine right up!'' - but after an hour he had not found one giant olive. ''This is a lot of Miocene-type rock,'' he said. ``This is chalk. Most of your fossils aren't going to be very nice.''
Frank has, after three years of fossil-hunting at the SEC quarry, found just a few dozen shells and fossils worthy of being entered into his collection of several thousand. Some those he bought; most he found. They fill the walls and closets of his apartment.
But certain of those finds have led to his hypothesis, which he introduced on the drive over to the north side of Lake Number Three: ``I've got a bunch of shells at home to prove it, and nobody can deny it.''
He has found a number of intact bivalves, some with holes drilled in them.
``Well, they shouldn't be that way! When a bivalve dies, the muscle goes limp. That's why, when you're on the beach, you see only half a clamshell, or half a muscle. They were buried instantly, under so much dirt that they couldn't open. And the holes - it was moonshells that did that, and they only feed at night. Now, I could see, if there were mountains and volcanoes in Florida, there'd be landslides, but it's flat as a pancake. So, I've narrowed it down to the tsunami.''
It was a fascinating hypothesis, and a thrilling climb atop millions of years of geological time, but it was getting on toward lunchtime. The sun had cornea-burning intensity; dizziness threatened with every step.
It was a bit of a relief when Vicky called ''Frank! Frank!'' and fast-walked over with what might be the smallest giant olive shell in the history of the world.
Bush's Fault!
I might if it were really good.
Here is the current species, the lettered olive. They get up to 3'' long and are native to our southeast beaches.
The Tsunami was for real and is well documented in the Bahamas
There is a program on Discovery Channel describing wave action created by land slides. There was a mountainslide on one of the Canary islands that produced the wave that made great landscape changes on tese islands just off the Florida coast. It is reasonable that some indication also exists in Florida. My recall says the Bahama event wwas not as old as that described in this thread.
The ominous thing is that the volcano producing the slide will slide again. The volcqanologist in UK and the wave scientests in Switzerland predict large damage and huge loss of life in the Bahamas and Florida.
I've worked as a soil scientist on the Coastal Plain now for 17 years, and I have seen abundant evidence in Cretacious-age sediments of at least one, and perhaps several, very large tsunamis hitting the area that is now South Carolina. (In those days North America was in an equatorial latitude). I've also seen some indirect evidence which leads me to suspect a few of them happened at intervals in the late Tertiary/early Quaternary periods. I think catastrophic Tsunamis happen more often than we realize (although still infrequently enough that it's unlikely that we will witness one.)
New Warning: U.S. Gulf Coast Faces High Tsunami Risk.
Also this LINK within the article.
Fishkill isn't really upstate NY (not that there's anything wrong with upstate).
Yes, that's kind of weird.
Actually, it's not surprizing. Almost everyone in the country seems to think everything north of Westchester is upstate; those of us in the disputed region tend to think differently.
Note: this topic was posted 8/17/2005.
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I’ve read somewhere that the greatest risk for a Tsunami for the NC/VA coasts would be if the edge of the very steep underwater ‘shelf’ off the coast collapses out in the ocean. It would create a massive killer wave, and there would be almost no warning at all. I suppose the movement of land would be detected by seismic equipment, but by the time word got out, the beaches would already be receding.
Would be interesting if the water went into the Chesapeake just right, and did a ‘funnel-shot’ right up the Potomac. I’d imagine that cities constructed on top of low lying swamps along the river would be in grave danger. ;^) Not that I’d ever wish for such a thing.... (cough....cough)
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