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In our planet's early history, 720 to 640 million years ago, thick sheets of ice covered the majority of the surface, as the Earth was locked in a deep freeze. But explosive underwater volcanoes changed the chemistry of the Earth's oceans and were key to breaking the planet from its icy state, according to a new study. Researchers at the University of Southampton believe underwater volcanoes helped to thaw out "Snowball Earth", and even led to runaway chemical chain reactions, which created the conditions for an explosion of life on Earth. While much of the driving forces behind glaciation during...

... The first question about life is “Is it a process or an entity, an activity or a thing?”. Is life a substance or force permeating living beings which is not present in non living entities? Or is life the activities that go on in living beings? ...

Dec 2, 2009 — Field geologists have revisited a site Darwin visited on the voyage of the Beagle, and found that he incorrectly interpreted what he found.  A large field of erratic boulders in Tierra del Fuego that have become known as “Darwin’s Boulders” were deposited by a completely different process than he thought.  The modern team, publishing in the Geological Society of America’s December issue of the GSA Today,1 noted that “Darwin’s thinking was profoundly influenced by Lyell’s obsession with large-scale, slow, vertical movements of the crust, especially as manifested in his theory of submergence and ice rafting to...

Where did the idea of “millions of years” come from? All of our media outlets push evolution and “millions of years” ideas on the public. Even children’s cartoons reflect evolutionary philosophy! In an episode of the cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants, entitled “SpongeBob B.C.,” the narrator begins: “Ah, dawn breaks over the primordial sea. It is here that millions of years ago, life began taking its first clumsy steps out of the darkness, opening its newly formed eyeballs to stare into the blinding light of intelligence.” Unfortunately, large segments of the church have swallowed the millions-of-years evolutionary history hook, line, and sinker....

...Now, fast forward to more recent times on Venus. We've begun to understand the story of its surface evolution largely due to the Magellan mission in the 1990s. The biggest surprise of Magellan was that the surface seems like it's all the same age. That's what I'm calling the second great transition. Something changed on Venus 600 or 700 million years ago to make the surface all the same age. If you use the word catastrophic it rubs some people the wrong way, but something dramatic happened on Venus which wiped out almost all signs of an older surface. The...

The exact location of the North and South Poles of the Earth's spin axis are constantly changing while the Earth's crust wobbles slightly around and over the poles in the 14 month and 6.5 year cycles of Chandler's Wobble. The eigth graphs in this story board demonstrate that peaks of seismic and volcanic activity come and go in accordance with these rhythms of Chandler's Wobble to produce the El Nino syndrome. The graphs also prove that the total amount of this activity has progressively increased during the last 50 years while the center of Chandler's Wobble has slowly drifted towards...

It might sound preposterous, like astrology, to suggest that galactic events help determine when North America is or isn't buried under immense sheets of ice taller than skyscrapers. But new research suggests the coming and going of major ice ages might result partly from our solar system's passage through immense, snakelike clouds of exploding stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Resembling the curved contrails of a whirling Fourth of July pinwheel, the Milky Way's spiral arms are clouds of stars rich in supernovas, or exploding stars. Supernovas emit showers of charged particles called cosmic rays. Theorists have proposed that when...