Natures Mysteries

A sliver of four-billion-year-old sea floor has offered a glimpse into the inner workings of an adolescent Earth. The baked and twisted rocks, now part of Greenland, show the earliest evidence of plate tectonics, colossal movements of the planet's outer shell. Until now, researchers were unable to say when the process, which explains how oceans and continents form, began. The unique find, described in the journal Science, shows the movements started soon after the planet formed. "Since the plate tectonic paradigm is the framework in which we interpret all modern-daygeology, it is important to know how far back in time it operated," said Professor Minik Rosing of the University of Copenhagen and one of the authors of the paper.

Sea floor is not normally preserved for more than 200 million years. Professor John Valley, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison described the work as "significant" and "exciting". "If these observations are substantiated it will be a significant line of new evidence indicating that plate tectonics was active and familiar as early as 3.8 million years ago," he said. "That really is an important conclusion." Plate tectonics is a geological theoryused to explain the observed large-scale motions of the Earth's surface. The relatively thin outer shell of the planet is composed of two layers: the lithosphere and the asthenosphere. Ancient pillow lavas are preserved in exquisite detail The lithosphere - made up of the outer crust and the top-most layer of the underlying mantle - is broken up into huge plates; seven major plates and several smaller ones.To view the rest of this article, please visit the source

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Anthony North: We are facing dangers, today, from global warming. This essay is not going to argue whether this is man-made or a natural cycle as such, but is to suggest another avenue of research – into the relationship between climate and paranormal experience.Many researchers, including myself, have suggested that an environment can have an effect upon the mind. But does the present climate change offer a possibility of testing the hypothesis in action?Gaia: The idea that the Earth is a form of entity, living in a relationship with its occupants, is older than history. Tribal animism is based around the existenceof two worlds – the physical and the spiritual – existing parallel to each other.The continuance of this idea is represented in mythological goddesses from around the world.

Today, Gaia is the most well known, but many symbolize them all in the term, Mother Earth.In the late 20th century a touch of rationality was given to the subject in Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis where it is argued that the various aspects of the planet seem to co-ordinate themselves, including the biosphere, which includes us.Intelligence ? This is not to suggest the existence of intelligence or intentionality in this relationship. But could it be that, through natural processes embodied in the global environment, natural consequences could arise that suggestintentionality?El Nino is a classic example. A phenomenon of the Pacific Ocean, it seems to regulate global temperatures, as if a kind of pressure valve. Present climate change seems to be causing El Nino more often, suggesting a form of control.But it is a long way from here to suggesting a linkage with climate change and paranormal experience. Yet there has been research that, if allied to the possibility, could provide indications of such a mechanism.

View: Full Article | Source: Beyond the Blog

Celebrated in Buddhist temples and cultivated for its wood and cottony fibers, the kapok tree now is upsetting an idea that biologists have clung to for decades: the notion that African and South American rainforests are similar because the continents were connected 96 million years ago. Research by University of Michigan evolutionary ecologist Christopher Dick and colleagues shows that kapok---and perhaps other rainforest--trees colonized Africa after the continents split when the trees' seeds traveled across the ocean. The findings, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), appear online this week in the journal Molecular Ecology."This research provides vital information for one of the most highly threatened areas of the planet, tropical rainforests," said Sam Scheiner, program director in NSF's Division of Environmental Biology, which funded the research.

"In order to plan for and mitigate global climate change, we need to understand the history of life on Earth through studies like this one." Oceanic dispersal links the world's rainforests, said Dick, "and this study is one of the first to catch that process in action at the species level. Although single seeds are very unlikely to survive an oceanic voyage and then successfully become established elsewhere, such improbable events become probable over 10 to 15 million years." Dick studied the rainforestform of Ceiba pentandra, a species of kapok that grows taller than a 16-story building, its head poking above the forest canopy. Its flowers produce more than 50 gallons of nectar per tree in a season, attracting bats that travel as far as 12 miles between trees and transfer pollen in the process. When the seed pods ripen, they break open to reveal fluffy fibers that are used to stuff pillows and mattresses. The seeds, which are about the size of a sunflower seed, are buoyant and able to float down rivers along which the colossal trees grow.

View: Full Article | Source: Physorg

Tiny diamonds sprinkled across North America suggest a "swarm" of comets hit the Earth around 13,000 years ago, kicking up enough disruption to send the planet into a cold spell and drive mammoths and other creatures into extinction, scientists reported on Friday.They suggest an event that wouldtranscend anything Biblical -- a series of blinding explosions in the atmosphere equivalent to thousands of atomic bombs, the researchers said.The so-called nanodiamonds are made under high-temperature, high-pressure conditions created by cosmic impacts, similar to an explosion over Tunguska in Siberia that flattened trees for miles in 1908.Doug Kennett of the University of Oregon and colleaguesfound the little diamonds at sites from Arizona to South Carolina and into Alberta and Manitoba in Canada.

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