Flood Iridium & Philosophy God Help Us

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I have just had an idea about what is known as the iridium layer and its origins.
This layer is found close to the layer in which the last of the dinosaurs finally became extinct.
Its something of a mystery, if you care to google a bit.
If there is interest I’ll post my view and others can try argue it to its proper place - extinction!
 
pig said:
I have just had an idea about what is known as the iridium layer and its origins.
This layer is found close to the layer in which the last of the dinosaurs finally became extinct.
Its something of a mystery, if you care to google a bit.
If there is interest I’ll post my view and others can try argue it to its proper place - extinction!
Click to expand...
It’s not a mystery. Please don’t cite the mythical Colorado study that never existed.
 
pig said:
I have just had an idea about what is known as the iridium layer and its origins.
This layer is found close to the layer in which the last of the dinosaurs finally became extinct.
Its something of a mystery, if you care to google a bit.
If there is interest I’ll post my view and others can try argue it to its proper place - extinction!
Click to expand...
Don’t hold back. Tell us your view.
 
Well its a simple idea really. At the start of this period the continents, then situated in a clump somewhere around the southern pole, were beginning to break up and drift apart.
So all I’ve done is to speed up the drifting apart bit. So, lets say it takes a few years for the continents to drift to the equator and as they are zipping along on the crust they cause continuous vibrations all over the earths surface. Continuous, as in continuous for a few years - non-stop vibrations.

Iridium, the heaviest naturally occurring element, is continuously deposited all over the earths surface by different natural fairly constant processes. There is a small continuous background level of iridium always deposited all over the earths surface.

So during this non-stop earthquake-type vibration of the entire earths surface the first few meters of soft mud just on the seabeds of the world is fluidized.

This allows grains of iridium, the heaviest element, to move down through the fluidized mud. A lot of iridium settles out at the bottom in a high concentration gradually tailing off as you move up through the mud before once again resuming the usual background level of natural deposition - after the continents stop their swift drifting to the equator.

see, very simple.
 
But it wasn’t a whale;

"It is also believed to have had unusual locomotion, compared with all other cetaceans; similarly sized thoracic, lumbar, sacral and caudal vertebrae imply that Basilosaurus moved in an anguilliform (eel-like) fashion, only vertically. Even more oddly, paleontologist Philip Gingerich theorized that it may also have moved in a horizontal anguilliform fashion to some degree, something completely unknown in modern cetaceans. "

49 million years ago

49 million years ago

48 million years ago

These are supposed to the the ancestors of whales in a transitional line, but they are contemporaries, all except the last, which has no legs and has left no transitional fossils. And there should be millions of gradual transitional fossils, according to you , Bradski.
 
pig said:
So, lets say it takes a few years for the continents to drift to the equator…
Click to expand...
Just throwing some ball park figures around and we get continental drift in this scenario at something like 5 kilometres a day (that’s over 3 miles if you still work in poles and furlongs and bushels per firkin).

You’d actually see the coastline moving.
 
ambulocetus natans
pakicetidae
rodhocetus balochistanensis
articetus clavis
dorudon atrox
basilosaurus
mysticeti
monodontidae

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ambulocetus_BW.jpg 50 mya

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pakicetus_BW.jpg 55mya

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rhodocetus_BW.jpg 47 may

articetus clavis - 4 legged long tail similar to above, 47 may

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dorudon_BW.jpg 41 mya

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Basilosaurus_BW.jpg 40 may (ever though their bite marks are seen on Dorudon skulls)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aetiocetus_BW.jpg 25 may

upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ee/Belugawhale_MMC.jpg Today

I am still missing the link between 4 legged mammals and flippered mammals.
In other words where are the transitional fossils between:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rhodocetus_BW.jpg 47 may
and…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dorudon_BW.jpg 41 mya
 
Bradski said:
Just throwing some ball park figures around and we get continental drift in this scenario at something like 5 kilometres a day (that’s over 3 miles if you still work in poles and furlongs and bushels per firkin).

You’d actually see the coastline moving.
Click to expand...
And why not, is there some reason?
 
40.png
Bradski:
You’d actually see the coastline moving.
Click to expand...
I’ve seen stranger things.

**Early Eocene and the equable climate problem
*One of the unique features of the Eocene’s climate as mentioned before was the equable and homogeneous climate that existed in the early parts of the Eocene. A multitude of proxies support the presence of a warmer equable climate being present during this period of time. A few of these proxies include the presence of fossils native to warm climates, such as crocodiles, located in the higher latitudes, the presence in the high-latitudes of frost-intolerant flora such as palm trees which cannot survive during sustained freezes, and fossils of snakes found in the tropics that would require much higher average temperatures to sustain them. Using isotope proxies to determine ocean temperatures indicate sea surface temperatures in the tropics as high as 35 °C (95 °F) and bottom water temperatures that are 10 °C (18 °F) higher than present day values. With these bottom water temperatures, temperatures in areas where deep-water forms near the poles are unable to be much cooler than the bottom water temperatures.
An issue arises, however, when trying to model the Eocene and reproduce the results that are found with the proxy data. Using all different ranges of greenhouse gasses that occurred during the early Eocene, models were unable to produce the warming that was found at the poles and the reduced seasonality that occurs with winters at the poles being substantially warmer. The models, while accurately predicting the tropics, tend to produce significantly cooler temperatures of up to 20 °C (36 °F) underneath the actual determined temperature at the poles. This error has been classified as the “equable climate problem”. To solve this problem, the solution would involve finding a process to warm the poles without warming the tropics.

***** “The early Eocene Epoch (50 million years ago) was about as warm as the Earth has been over the past 65 million years, since the extinction of the dinosaurs,” Ivany says. “There were crocodiles above the Arctic Circle and palm trees in Alaska. The questions we are trying to answer are how much warmer was it at different latitudes and how can that information be used to project future temperatures based on what we know about CO2 levels?”

Previous studies have suggested that the polar regions (high-latitude areas) during the Eocene were very hot—greater than 30 degrees centigrade (86 degrees Fahrenheit). However, because the sun’s rays are strongest at the Earth’s equator, tropical and subtropical areas (lower latitude) will always be at least as warm as polar areas, if not hotter… "

You see, this is not a problem in my idea at all as the continent was not across and within the arctic circle at the time with these life forms living there. The continent was in the tropics and naturally would have Palm trees and crocodiles (no surprises there!). Then very quickly, in a few years, it zipped along to the arctic north, froze and buried the palm trees and crocodiles - thus explaining both the presence of tropical life and its extinction within the Arctic circle!

And - the necessary years-long earthquake/continuous tremors caused by zipping a continent quickly across the globes mantle causes the heaviest element in nature, Iridium, to settle out into a concentrated layer in the lower layers of the oceans mud across the globe.
 
Right. So now that we have a model, for better or for worse, and in time scientific honoured tradition, it is time to take her out for a test drive. Time for some testing predictions;
  1. I predict the end of the dinosaurs.
  2. I predict the end of the dinosaurs from cold weather.
  3. I predict the end of the dinosaurs from really cold weather over just a few years. (lets pick an arbitrary number - 6 years)
So the model is this; north america was sitting in the Tropics with palm trees, crocodiles, and dinosaurs. Centrifugal forces pushing away from the south pole coupled with fault lines caused america to break away and with its stored energy it suddenly shot off across the equator in, lets, say 6 years.
The continent zips by the equator, and continues on northwards. Lets say alaska arrives inside the arctic circle during some summer. By autumn the crocodiles are dead and so are the palm trees.
The dinosaurs started dying as soon as they left the northern tropics depending on the habitat and temperature ranges they had been used to. The dinosaurs continue dying ou as the continent moves towards the arctic regions and the most resilient, but still essentially a tropical animal, dies out inside the arctic circle.

Those dinosaurs which died in water along the way from the equator to the north are covered in muddy water sediments. So that the vat majority of such fossil skeletons will have the Iridium layer above them, as the Iridium was agitated into a concentrated layer by the continent moving tremors. And as the dinosaurs died in transit north the Iridium would be deposited above their corpses as a general rule.

How am I doing.
 
Bradski said:
Just throwing some ball park figures around and we get continental drift in this scenario at something like 5 kilometres a day (that’s over 3 miles if you still work in poles and furlongs and bushels per firkin).

You’d actually see the coastline moving.
Click to expand...
Thats so strange. I just did a rough calculation and independently got a figure of 2.7 miles a day.🤷
 
So after minor tweaking I’ll reopen the scene with North America lying across the equator.
Alaska is on the Tropic of Cancer, around about the latitude of south florida or a bit lower.
Montana is on the Tropic of Capricorn.
North central Mexico is on the latitude of Viedma in Argentina.
And south Mexico is down around Tierre del fuego.

So thats the scene in the eocene.

In Alaska we have palm trees, crocodiles and dinosaurs.
In Montana we have a tropical forest beside the sea with tidal lakes filled with stingray, catfish, flamingos and a few smallish sturdy mammals, etc.

And the North American continent starts to move north very quickly, within just a few short years Alaska is pushed into the Arctic Circle.

So a few things you’d notice as the continent moved north;

If you were in Montana [Tropic of Capricorn] imagine you were a stingray living in a brackish shallow lake. So the weather is nice, about 27 degree C, warm tropical.
Two years later the continent has moved over the equator, its now 36+degreeC in your lake. A bit too much, and you die and become a fossil.

But what if you were a dinosaur in Alaska [Tropic of Cancer]. The same type of temperatures and flora and fauna are all around you.
But suddenly, two years later, you’re up around Ogoki, Ontario, not far from Polar Bear Provincial Park, and you’re wondering what happened. But its too late, you become a fossil.
 
The Eocene has something called the Eocene Thermal Maximum Event.

During this anomaly the earths climate rose suddenly by up to 9 degrees C.
Ahah… I hear you say. That sounds familiar…
Well just when we were faced with the prospect of another unexplained mystery we find our humble model comes to the rescue once again.
If Montana [on the Tropic of Capricorn] moves over the equator then its temperature rises from 27 degrees C to 37 degrees C. Almost exactly a 9 degree increase!

During this transit across the equator many lives would be lost some, like microscopic sea animals would become extinct; and some small mammals became extinct from drought.

Now you might wonder at conventional explanations that there was a 0.00006 degree [or something fabulous like that] rise in temperatures over a period of 200,000 years or so; but I have to question the likelihood of small mammals waiting around for that long, patiently, waiting for the temperature to rise high enough for an extinction causing drought.
But anyway…
 
So its crunch time. Theres the model. And here is the first proper prediction.
While Montana was over the Tropic of Capricorn during my eocene it meant that Mexico was much further south.
So, central and southern Mexico was much colder than the tropics, and not so suitable for dinosaurs.
The south of mexico today is well inside the warm tropical regions and it was supposed to be almost exactly the same in the eocene.
So all of Mexico should have lots of dinosaur fossils, even more in the central and southern parts as it gets warmer the further south you go, obviously.

But in my model I have south Mexico way down south, at the same latitude in fact as Tierre del Fuego. Cold, cold.
So the prediction;
  • Dinosaurs in Mexico should be found in the north of Mexico and not at all in the far south of Mexico, during the eocene.
Happily, “…state of Coahuila in north-central Mexico, where the specimen was found,” said Gomez. …"

Dinosaurs were found in north central Mexico. It is a mystery why they are not found further south where there was room for them.

[in my own new model north central mexico would be where viedma, in argentina, is with temperatures of 30 degreesC to 13 degrees C. So it gets colder further south.]

“In many ways, the Late Cretaceous is the best-understood time during the Age of Dinosaurs, thanks in large part to over 120 years of dinosaur hunting in Canada, Montana, and the Dakotas. “Yet the dinosaurs from Mexico have remained a mystery,” noted Scott Sampson, a Utah Museum of Natural History paleontologist and co-author of the study.”

theallineed.com/paleontology/08022404.htm

“In addition to isolated skeletons, the researchers found large bonebeds of jumbled duck-bill and horned dinosaur skeletons. These sites appear to represent mass death events, perhaps associated with powerful storms like those that are known to occur around the southern tips of Africa and South America today.”
 
And on to our next prediction:
  • If continental North America was on the equator just before the eocene began and had been there for a long time before, then the continent would show bands of vegetation corresponding to the climate at different latitudes.
For example, beginning with Alaska, if it used to be on the Tropic of Cancer, we would see plants native to the warm tropics.

And we do see palm trees, crocodiles and alligators.

Further south in Wyoming on what would have been the equator, if Alaska had been the Tropic of Cancer, we would expect to see a tropical rainforest as we see tody in equatorial South America and equatorial Africa.

And we do see fossil Tropical Rainforests in Wyoming, Colorado etc.

Further south again in Mexico around Durango in the central and north we would expect to see the Tropic of Capricorn and its type of climate.

We once again see dinosaurs as we did in the Tropic of Cancer. Assuming a warm tropical climate in north Mexico.

However, the interesting predictions begin now; central Mexico should show cooler temperate plants.
South Mexico should show cold climate plants.

Should be possible to find late cretaceous or paleocene cold spell in south mexico, or maybe not.:hmmm:
 
Morelia, south-central Mexico.
Climate Today: tropical/sub-tropical climate with record summer highs of 39 degrees C.

But…
If morelia was in its current position during the eocene during hottest part of earths history.
Morelia,
Climate Eocene: Tropical with record summer highs of 39 - 48 degrees C and winters of 11 - 21 degrees C.

Morelia in the fossil record:
“The land was covered in forests, grasslands, and chaparral, and these habitats were home to many animals from both North and South America. As the climate cooled, glaciers developed on the highest mountains.”

Chaparral are found in Mediterranean climates not Tropical climates.

But, if Morelia was 450 miles south of the Tropic of Capricorn it could, even with the anomalously high eocene temperatures, have a Mediterranean climate
 
So I’ll propose a mad scenario.
North America was on the equator attached to the western side of the supercontinent Pangea.
Along comes a giant meteor from the south-east and hits Yucatan peninsula at a low angle pushing the North American plate north-west fracturing the natural fault line between it and the rest of pangea.

With the force from the meteor strike travelling s-east to n-west and the earths west to east 1000 mile per hour spin at the equator, America was forced into what became a fast transit north north west away from the equator.

This pull of america away from the west of pangea dragged africa, the center of pangea, away from india the east of pangea, thus opening the Deccan Traps immediately.

All the continents drifted apart, america zipping ahead of the others arriving in the arctic circle in a few years. This causes the equatorially centered climate zones down the length of america to be frozen in time in the cold northern latitudes. Sub-tropical climate in alaska, Tropical Rain Forest climate in Colorado, Sub-Tropical climate in Durango north Mexico, Mediterranean climate in Morelia south Mexico, all these climates were shifted lets say about 5000 miles north in a few years and were frozen in time. Their plants and animal becoming extinct suddenly in the colder new climates, with only warm blooded mammals and feathery birds succeeding and surviving the new conditions well.

As America zipped along it created constant earth tremors and along with the possibly accelerating other continents the tremors could be global and sustained over several years.
This tremor fluidizes the surface soft mud on ocean floors, continental shelves, wet land areas and the heaviest element in nature naturally settles out in a more concentrated layer than normal.

The tremors could also account for the rapid burial of so many plants and animals at this time from rapid uplift in land as the continent sped over the underlying mantle and local earthquakes, landslides and mudslides as well as floods from lakes breaching would all be common place for a few years.

There are two points of interest, - mysterious anomalies and formations from this time period, which I might look into. A tremor lasting several years might just explain both…
 
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