Great Old TV Episodes...from Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey

                                  

THE LOST WORLDS OF PLANET EARTH is Episode #9 of the thirteen-part 2014 television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey.  Narrated by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, this series resurrected the spirit of the original Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, from 1980 and featuring the late astronomer Carl Sagan.  The Cosmos series are an excellent introduction to science and the history of scientific discoveries and those who made them...this particular episode is no exception.  It focuses upon a subject that has always fascinated me: Earth's cataclysmic mass extinctions, of which the Permian Extinction was the most severe.  It occurred about 250 million years ago, wiping out some 90% of the world's species and caused by massive supervolcano eruptions over the course of hundreds of thousands of years in what is now Siberia and their toxic interaction with masses of underground coal deposits and undersea methane stores.  This episode also goes into the late Cretaceous meteor strike that caused another mass extinction including that of the dinosaurs, the development of the theory of plate tectonics that explained continental drift, and how gravitational effects from other planets may have influenced our past ice ages.  Tyson, like his predecessor Sagan, is a compelling and effective communicator: I highly recommend both the 1980 and 2014 series. Last year a third Cosmos series (subtitled Possible Worlds) also aired, but I have yet to see any of its episodes, again hosted by Tyson.  When I was a kid in elementary school, we had a film series presented by Bell Science with Dr. Frank Baxter as its host, produced in the late 1950s and early 60s for television.  I feel that Cosmos is the continuation of a great tradition of popularizing science that these old programs began... 

Snowball Earth, Among Other Prehistoric Disasters

I've always been interested in the origins and development of the Earth, both in its geological context and in that of the evolution of life.  I am also a subscriber to Netflix, at least the streaming Netflix which much too often comes up severely lacking with its offerings of movies and shows.  This time around, though, I found on it a four-part television series titled Prehistoric Disasters that explored the Earth's distant past through four key disasters that struck it over the eons.

The four "disasters" were the formation of the Moon through the collision between early Earth and a minor planet, the 25-million year long lapse into a completely ice-packed "snowball" status covering the entire globe some 650 million years ago, the eruption of a supervolcano in what is now Siberia causing a chain of events leading to excessive global warming and mass extinctions 250 million years ago, and the hypothesized collision of an asteroid with Earth about 63 million years ago causing the end of the age of the dinosaurs.  I was especially interested in that strange "snowball Earth"...

Earth throughout its span of existence has gone through an extensive cycle of ice ages, when ice glaciers would flow far south of the polar regions and into more normally temperate climate zones.  But 650 million years ago the ice passed a threshold of latitude and went on to cover the planet with ice, and very thick ice at that (several hundred meters).  The cause: depletion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to loss of this gas as it combined with solid material through excessive weathering from the then-single, huge continental mass lying on the equator and then settled on the sea bottom, far away from the atmosphere.  The advance of the ice sped up the process of global cooling because the ice's reflectivity of sunlight was much higher than the liquid ocean's, sending the sun's heat back out into space instead of absorbing it into the Earth.  Life at that time, for billions of years ongoing as a matter of fact, was composed of unicellular organisms, mainly bacteria.  Nearly all of the species died out, leaving only those few that could adapt through evolution.  After the ice cover eventually receded from the heat generated by massive volcanic eruptions 25 million years later, life began evolving rapidly into more complex forms...but only after the "snowball" period.

By all accounts, the "snowball" period in our planet's past was a singular, nonrepeating event.  That bothers me a little and keeps me from completely accepting it, even though there seems to be empirical evidence that it occurred.  I would have expected at least of handful of other "snowballs", too, in the records.  But if it was truly the only time that Earth was completely encased in thick, thick ice...and for millions of years at that, then to me this has to be the most incredible period of its past. 

Haiti's Devastation

A devastating earthquake of magnitude 7.0 struck Haiti, with as many as 28 aftershocks averaging 5.0. It seems that the horrors that have been inflicted on this impoverished nearby little Caribbean nation are being revealed almost exponentially as the media gains greater access to the focus of the catastrophe. Different estimates of fatalities have been given, from as many as 100,000 to even a half million. In a country encompassing only nine million people!

Haiti is so poor that 80% of its GDP is in the form of foreign aid bestowed upon it, according to a Public Radio segment I recently heard. The same source, however, goes on to say that this may be misleading as a moneyless barter system tends to account for much of their domestic economy. But for Haiti to ever climb out of their despair, they need to have a stable, available currency that can enable them to develop the infrastructure necessary for them to exist as a viable country that is friendly to small business development and trade, both domestic and international.

"1-12" probably won't go down in history with the same instant, emotionally arousing effect that "9-11" did. To be sure, "9-11" was the wake-up call that mobilized us to the real, dire threats that terrorism posed to us if left unchecked; earthquakes are, on the other hand, naturally and (seemingly) randomly occurring events that sometimes tragically affect heavily populated areas. Especially heavily populated areas devoid of effective building standards, as is now the case with Haiti.

When I was a little kid in the early 1960s, I would hear references to places like Jamaica and Haiti as vacation paradises. One could travel there, be in exotic surroundings, and be pampered while lounging around on the beautiful beaches. Jamaica still enjoys a vibrant tourism industry, which contributes greatly to its economy. But Haiti has gone down a different path, with corrupt dictators and its military sapping the country's wealth and repelling visitors instead of luring them. Well, for a few years Haiti has enjoyed a very fragile democracy of sorts. This, though, is only a tiny step in the right direction. Things will have to change there on a grand scale in order to turn the country around. But short of a long term international takeover, I don't see this happening.

The 2004 "Christmas" tsunami that killed so many in southeast Asia seemed so far away, on the other side of the world. This earthquake, though, was too close. Especially when you consider that when a hurricane brushes by Haiti, people in south Florida begin to board up their homes and businesses. Yet Haiti and Florida, in spite of their proximity to each other, are in vastly different geologic zones. Or are they really?

Devil's Millhopper Visit

This past Thursday, I drove over the two miles from my home to where Devil's Millhopper, a Geological State Park, is located. It is a huge, ancient sinkhole sporting its own special variety of plant life (as opposed to the surrounding land's flora). This is a rather modest, small park, with a $2 parking fee, a small picnic area, and visitor's office in the front. A 0.6 mile nature trail loop (which I naturally had to run) encircles the sinkhole. The bottom of the Devil's Millhopper sinkhole (117 feet deep) can be gradually reached by descending a long, twisting wooden path/stairway. Actually, the descent was quite easy; the walk back up was a killer!

Anyway, here are some pictures I took of my experience.