Mediterranean Might Have Filled In Months 224
An anonymous reader writes "A new model suggests that the Mediterranean Sea was filled in a gigantic flood some 5.3 million years ago. According to Daniel Garcia-Castellanos' paper in Nature, the sill at the Straight of Gibraltar gave way rather suddenly, with 40 cm of rock eroding and the water level rising by 10 m per day at its peak. They imagine a shallow, fast-moving stream of water (around 100 km/hr) several kilometers wide pouring into the basin with a flow greater than a thousand Amazon rivers — that's about 100,000,000 cubic meters per second." The flood would have dropped worldwide sea levels by 9.5 meters, probably triggering climate changes. In this model the Mediterranean filled in anywhere from a few months to two years at the outside.
Roland Emmerich (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Roland Emmerich (Score:5, Funny)
And that filled the Mediterrean? Might explain the water quality...
Climate change!!?? (Score:3, Funny)
"The flood would have dropped worldwide sea levels by 9.5 meters, probably triggering climate changes."
OMG, something MUST be done to revert the planet to it's pre-Mediterranean-Sea-filling pristine state, or you will all rot in Al Gore's climate Purgatory!
5 million? (Score:4, Funny)
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Are you sure that flood didn't happen 5 thousand years ago?
This man is right. Read all about it right here: http://conservapedia.com/Great_Flood
Re:5 million? (Score:4, Interesting)
For a much better story, read the Saga of Pliocene Exile [wikipedia.org] by Julian May.
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Came here for a Felice Landry reference. Leaving satisfied.
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Re:5 million? (Score:5, Interesting)
The creation of the Bosporus Strait is probably a better candidate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_theory [wikipedia.org]
Re:5 million? (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you sure that flood didn't happen 5 thousand years ago?
The whole point is there were multiple flood events at different points in history. It's one of the reasons the stories are universal is that most areas had some form of great flood at some point in history. Look at it this way. At the end of the last ice age most of the population of Europe as well as much of the rest of the world would have lived along the coast much as they do now. Most of that land is now under water. The coast flooded through both gradual sea level rise and a series of flood events. When you are dealing with oral histories 2,000 years and 6,000 years can be hard to tell apart. Also the much quoted Biblical age of the Earth was calculated in 1650.
"In 1650, Archbishop Ussher published the Ussher chronology, a chronology dating the creation to the night preceding October 23 4004 BC."
There's no real dates in the old testament that can be referenced to modern dates. He came by that date by adding up ages of biblical figures some of whom are claimed to have lived 500 to 900 years. Coming up with an exact month is impressive given the fact few of the births were referenced to the actual age of the parents. Translated it was all guess work based on wild suppositions and had little to do with the Bible itself. Most of the Christian that quote the real age of the Earth have no idea how fabricated the date was. Personally I'll take facts over faith any day of the week.
Re:5 million? (Score:5, Funny)
Me personally, I would have *loved* to have been born BC. That way, we count down our age, and your friends would greet you with, 'You're looking younger; how *do* you manage it' with each birthday!
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wrong ! that only occurs when we approach the Gnab Gib ! Red dwarf had a great documentary about that.
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I see a lot of themes/stories occurring in many different series, so it's probably not surprising references to a particular series is sometimes misinterpreted to be a reference to another series.
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A wonderful deleted scene in "The Life of Brian" has shepherds in the fields around Bethlehem wondering "is it AD yet?"
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Yeah, but knowing the exact date on which you'll suffer the horror of un-birth would be a terrible burden to bear.
Re:5 million? (Score:4, Funny)
You must be a hit at parties.
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There's no real dates in the old testament that can be referenced to modern dates.
To be nit-picky, this isn't true. There are plenty of Old Testament references to contemporary events. For example, Isaiah 45 refers to the conquest of the Babylonian Empire by Cyrus the Great, which was ca. 540 B.C.. Solomon can maybe be dated from references in non-Biblical king lists. There are other examples. However (and this is what you're really talking about), through Exodus the references to external events are so fuzzy as to be meaningless.
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what's wrong with following a made up date based on made up material. That's like saying that the year 12 B.B.Y. in Star Wars is just made up and should be ignored. If you're a Star Wars fan it may have significance. If you are a Bible fan then the 4004BC date is significant.
Re:5 million? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:5 million? (Score:5, Informative)
Also the much quoted Biblical age of the Earth was calculated in 1650.
Untrue. The belief the earth is 6000 years old goes back at least to 200 CE [wikipedia.org] : "The majority of classical Rabbis hold that the Earth was created around 6,000 years ago.[10] This view is based on a chronology developed in a midrash, Seder Olam, which was based on a literal reading of the book of Genesis. It is considered to have been written by the Tanna Yose ben Halafta and covers history from the creation of the universe to the construction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem."
I know because saint Augustine [wikipedia.org] (400 CE) referred to this timetable too : "They are deceived, too, by those highly mendacious documents which profess to give the history of many thousand years, though, reckoning by the sacred writings, we find that not 6000 years have yet passed."
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They would be of little importance, and I would have no problem with someone believing that the Earth poofed into being 6,000 years ago (or yesterday at 3PM) except that some of these people are pushing for the "Poof theory" to be taught alongside evolution and other scientific topics. When their "teach our religious beliefs in science class" arguments failed, they "took the religious out" by calling it Intelligent Design. (There's someone *wink* *wink* intelligent *nudge* *nudge* who created all this. N
Re:5 million? (Score:4, Interesting)
Most of the Christian that quote the real age of the Earth have no idea how fabricated the date was.
Most Christians don't know anything about Christianity. They don't read the Bible. They don't know where it came from. They don't know who wrote it. They don't know anything about Judaism, which was the actual religion of Jesus, and what, if they were serious about their religion, is what they should practice. They spout gibberish that would be improved substantially just by going back to the actual text and asking their local rabbis what a lot of it means--and that's really just correcting their gibberish with older gibberish!
I'm an atheist, but I was raised evangelical. I want to shake so many Christians, because it is absolutely possible to be Christian and not be a tiresome moron, but it just takes some reading not just parroting what they hear from other ignorant leaders. Even just reading the Bible and learning what it says would improve their behavior (in most cases).
The bible doesn't say... (Score:3, Insightful)
That the earth is 5000 years old, or 6000 years old. In fact, the bible doesn't give a date for any of its events at all. It's really only certain protestant faiths that have the bible as being completely inerrant and the earth as 6000 years old. The rest of us Christians are in it for some good food on Dec 25th and maybe to bomb some muzzies when they get out of line.
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But you can get the good food and kill people without the effort of being Christian!
Re:The bible doesn't say... (Score:4, Informative)
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do you think the world was made in 6 literal days? especially before the sun and moon were created?
its hard to find evidence for everything up until joseph (were there is evidence that he was something like the prime minister of egypt)
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You're probably thinking of Nahmanides [wikipedia.org] aka Ramban who lived 800 years ago. His theory is the 6000 odd years since Adam were preceded by the 6 days of creation, except each instance of creation was not a 'day' but a cycle from chaos to order and back again that lasted billions of years, and that the entire universe was created in a big bang. Even that time itself was created in this event. All by interpreting the deeper meaning in the holy texts, which would make these ideas even older.
Re:5 million? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:5 million? (Score:4, Interesting)
Orson Scott Card wrote a short story [hatrack.com] which unifies many of the world's flood myths and explains them as a sudden rise in the level of the Red Sea at the close of the last ice age.
Speculative fiction, not science, but pretty entertaining and a little bit interesting.
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Re:Yet another great /. science discussion kicks o (Score:5, Funny)
Well, before that, it was a lake. Where do you think the aliens stole all the water from?! It was freshwater then, of course. Sadly the Sahara Forest never recovered.
Re:Yet another great /. science discussion kicks o (Score:2, Informative)
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If Valdrax thought you were a creationist he would hardly have accused you of trolling creationists, would he?
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How ever did this post not get modded funny /endsarcasm
Don't quit your day job.
Undo It! (Score:5, Interesting)
It has been done, it can be undone: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa [wikipedia.org]
Whatever the arguments against it, I suppose it is within reason that it could be done. But should it be done?
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Gosh, yes, a few meters added to the current sea levels sounds like brilliant idea. Count me in (a few meters of sea water).
Geo-engineering (Score:3, Insightful)
This research has inspired me to save the planet.
Consider, what are the 3 big problems with AGW?
1. The climate gets warmer than we'd like.
2. The sea levels rise.
3. Mass famine as the farmland goes dry.
4. The extra CO2 acidifies the oceans screwing with the fishies and shellfish.
So now I give you the perfect geo-engineering solution to all these problems!
Step 1: Set off a bunch of Nukes in a desert somewhere, excavating giant holes in the ground.
Step 2: Dig a little path to the ocean and have it fill in the holes.
Benefits: First the ocean levels go down to their regular levels, yay! Second the resulting Nuclear winter offsets global warming, another yay!
Third the desert is now ocean front property and not as deserty, maybe more farm land (do this in Africa for bonus famine offsetting points).
And lastly to handle the acidy oceans... the fallout from the Nukes mutates the fishies and shellfish to adapt to the carbonic acid oceans!
Now can I have my Nobel Peace now? Other than some minor side-effects [imdb.com] this should be a pretty effective solution.
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Geo-engineering (Score:4, Informative)
There are other alternatives. One is in the Death valley [wikipedia.org] in California. Another is the Qattara depression [wikipedia.org] in Egypt, where there have been proposals to generate electricity by letting the Mediterranean sea water flow in through turbines.
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Re:Geo-engineering (Score:4, Informative)
Unlike the other options mentioned, the Grand Canyon is significantly above sea level. It is quite a ways up a river which eventually could make it to the ocean, no?
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ummmm, not really. Reference the Salton Sea [wikipedia.org]
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The Salton Sea is fed by a few rivers and various drainage run-offs. In order to flood Death Valley, a channel would be opened to either the Pacific Ocean or the Gulf of California (a.k.a. the Sea of Cortez), which is open to the Pacific Ocean, or both.
A Death Valley project would have a much larger source and thus would not have the many of the issues the Salton Sea has. The primary concern would most-likely be pollution and climate effects.
Re:Geo-engineering (Score:5, Funny)
I am intrigued and invite you to join our Evil Overlords World Domination Club.
Our plan is evil. Man, it is so evil!
It is a bad, bad plan, that will hurt many people that are good!
I think it’s great, because it’s so bad!
Prerequisites to enter:
- An evil lair (preferably under a volcano).
- At least 100 minions (get the starter pack today!) or 10 lifeforms with super-powers.
- Super-secret secret super-weapon.
- Read the club rules [globalguardians.com].
- And most importantly: An evilness of at least 10,000 on the trough-the-roof Schwarzschild scale!
We also have a dress code [google.com]. But as long as you look really evil, you’re welcome. :)
Re:Geo-engineering (Score:4, Funny)
Wow, is the site really gone? Wait, here are the new club rules:
http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html [eviloverlord.com]
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Too bad the material that gets removed to make a crater has to go somewhere.
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Too bad the material that gets removed to make a crater has to go somewhere.
It does go somewhere, it goes to the side of the crater and vaporized into the atmosphere.
Terrraform the Eyre Basin - bigger than God (Score:4, Interesting)
Huge salt desert in Australia which used to be an inland sea. It's about 15m below sea level
Dig 2 canals. boom. you have an inland sea again. Australia stops being a huge desert.
You'd need 2 canals at opposite ends to pump the salt out.
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Australian aborigines have legends which documented the time there were forests in central Australia. These were confirmed by analysis of seeds found in sediment layers. Those legends were confirmed to be around 10,000 years old.
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Offset global warming for how long? (Score:3, Interesting)
The Eyre basin is some 171000 cubic kilometers, assuming an average of 15 below sea level.
The entire ocean has some 1347000000 cubi kilometers.
This makes the Eyre Basin approximately 0.000126948775 of the entire oceans in the world, and since the average depth of the ocean is about 3,796 meters, that comes to a roughly 48cm drop, which according to wikipedia [wikipedia.org] should offset the effects of global warming for a century or so.
Current sea le
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The material has to go somewhere. Specifically, it gets blown to a fine dust, which settles over probably most of the rest of the world. Said dust will be radioactive (there will be far more than just the radioactivity from the remains of the weapon, since much of that soil will have been exposed to extreme neutron flux and transmuted into unstable isotopes).
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Have you a reference for that? It was certainly talked about, but I never heard of it being done.
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Well, if by "much of that soil" you really meant "a minute fraction of that soil", then you're pretty much right.
Do note, for the record, that most of those "unstable isotopes" fall into either:
(A)long lived, and thus not very radioactive, or
(B)short lived, and thus not radioactive very long.
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All of that earth has got to go somewhere. Where? Nukes->explosions->vaporized dirt->clouds of dirt->nuclear winter.
No, it's not a good thing.
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If you read the entire proposal, he mentioned that as one of the benefits. (Avoid global warming.)
FWIW, most of the objections are silly. If you use an underground nuclear blast, most of the radioactivity stays in place. In this case you'd want to emplace them close enough to the surface that the cavern melted by the bomb collapsed...that being kind of the point.
I don't know that the proposal is practical, but it's not blatantly obvious that it isn't.
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I have always wondered if that would be a good way to go about reclaiming deserts. Less violently though, I'm not sure nukes would be all that effective at moving sand where you want it to go. Then again, that's a lot of digging.
True, but my method is also a type of Nuclear disarmament.
In fact it even allows Iran to acquire, and use Nuclear weapons for peaceful purposes. Iran's nuclear program could save the world!
Re:Geo-engineering (Score:5, Insightful)
Be honest, you just wanna see a huge kaboom, like everyone else here!
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Be honest, you just wanna see a huge kaboom, like everyone else here!
Not just any kaboom, it's supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom!
But... (Score:2)
Be honest, you just wanna see a huge kaboom, like everyone else here!
Not just any kaboom, it's supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom!
But- "That creature has stolen the Illudium 236 Explosive Space Modulator!" -Marvin the Martian in "Hare-Way to the Stars".
Strat
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Oops. Brain-fart. That's Q- 36.
Strat
No news (Score:5, Informative)
Ugh... I know where this is going... (Score:2, Insightful)
Somehow I feel that this hypothesis will mangled beyond recognition so creationists can make it somehow seem as if it supports their idea of young earth and Noah's ark.
How do you think stories got started? (Score:5, Insightful)
This one happened almost 5 million years before modern man first arrived. There are several better floods, if you want to explain the presence of so many flood stories in ancient cultures. Really, there are several candidates that could explain all of those stories about the entire (known) world getting flooded, and Noah isn't the only ancient story about the world being flooded. Frankly, such things being passed down in oral history is only reasonable. If anyone had seen this flood, you can bet that every generation for a very long time would have heard the story!
It's like all those myths about dragons, which are spread through many different cultures. Of course they never really existed, but they have a basis in reality: people probably found dinosaur fossils and the legends grew. Just because things have been legendized doesn't mean they have no basis in fact.
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The Easter Bunny, for example.
Video please? (Score:4, Funny)
This story would be much cooler with a video clip.
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Pix or didn't happen.
Imagine the Netherlands... (Score:3, Interesting)
Normally I consider news like this "well nice to know, but it doesn't really affect me".
This case is different, living in a country which is already mostly under sealevel, these 9.5 meters would have made a huge difference.
For example see the map at http://www.rivm.nl/vtv/object_map/o1213n39037.html [www.rivm.nl]. If it hadn't happened, we would now have had the island "De Veluwe" :-)
Surf's up (Score:2)
Oh man, wave of a lifetime.
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Well, there might not be so great waves, but according to TFA "It would be an exciting rafting place" Garcia-Castellanos says.
Climate Control Mass Engineering (Score:2)
For the audacious, pump the water back out and refill when a new climate is desired ...
In MONTHS? (Score:3, Funny)
Video of the flooding (Score:5, Interesting)
The flood hypothesis is not new (Score:5, Informative)
The Mediterranean flood hypothesis is not new [wiley.com] - these authors have just done more work on the geology. They lean against the giant waterfall idea ("We do not envisage a waterfall..."), which is a shame - I always liked the idea of a supersonic waterfall.
Mediterranean Basin floods? (Score:2)
Dam' Anthropgenic Global Warming! Al Gore, you're too late to save us!
Documentation (Score:4, Funny)
And you just know there are cave drawings somewhere showing jackasses trying to body surf in it.
Yeah, right (Score:2)
I'm not usually a Grammar Nazi, but... (Score:2)
"Straight" of Gibraltar (Score:4, Funny)
According to Daniel Garcia-Castellanos' paper in Nature, the sill at the Straight of Gibraltar gave way rather suddenly, with 40 cm of rock eroding and the water level rising by 10 m per day at its peak.
I'm relieved to know the Strait of Gibraltar is not gay; I was convinced he was hitting on me the other day.
Would be cool to do with Death Valley (Score:4, Insightful)
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The crucial difference is whether scientists do understand the shaky foundation or they foolishly insist on objectivity of their research.
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it is all based on observations made by rather imperfect human eyes
Don't confuse this with actual observation. It's far from it.
This "research" is little more than a computer game where the programmer puts in the physics of a closed environment, and plays with some numbers with a big incentive to get an impressive result in order to get published.
Computer models are the spam messages of complex science.
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Don't confuse this with actual observation. It's far from it.
This "research" is little more than a computer game where the programmer puts in the physics of a closed environment, and plays with some numbers with a big incentive to get an impressive result in order to get published.
Did you RTFA?
Because if you did, you obviously didn't understand shit.
Instead of trying to explain it for you, go back and read the two paragraphs with "Strait of Dover" in them and the paragraph in between.
The short version is that someone was digging for a tunnel and the new information caused scientists to change their opinion of Gibralter's geologic past.
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99% of me agrees with you wholeheartedly. It's rather useless.
Yet there is 1% of me which also knows that it is an integral part of science to make up some silly theories and models about stuff which we would never know for sure. After all, pretty much everything in the today's science started some long time ago from a silly theory. It was silly and unknowable in the past - while now it is treated as an fact.
Re:Chaos theory (Score:4, Interesting)
The Mediterranean could easily have formed over tens of thousands of years (it says so in the article), but they're puzzled that there's a U-shaped sediment deposit instead of a the V-shape made by slow water erosion.
Glacial valleys [wikipedia.org] are also U-shaped. Glaciers have covered that area many times over the last 5 million years.
Tectonic movement could also smooth out the normal V-shape of slower water erosion. All patches of earth are constantly rising, sinking, and/or moving horizontally. The middle of the V rising could explain the U. The sides of the V sinking or moving away from the center could also explain the U. Notice the mountainous areas around Spain and NW Africa [wikipedia.org]. There is a tectonic plate boundary next it [wikipedia.org]. There's been plenty of movement in that area over the last 5 million years.
Multiple rivers could also have broken into the Mediterranean and eventually carried off the bits of land in between, also explaining a U-shape, but over a longer period of time than the "2-year max" their simulation shows.
Here are 3 less exciting, but (as far as I can tell) plausible explanations. It could also be a mixture of these and/or other factors we haven't considered.
It looks like they simply chose one hypothesis that sounded impressive and made a computer simulation of it.
A geologist's explanation and thoughts on theory: (Score:5, Informative)
I'm a geology grad student doing a thesis on tectonic geomorphology. I read this article with great interest; my research is on mountain rivers/streams so I know a bit about this kind of thing.
Your alternate theories don't really work, for a variety of reasons. I'm not an expert on all these topics, but I'll explain as best I can and hopefully anyone that might know better will correct me :)
The glacier theory doesn't work because glaciation did not, in fact, reach that far south. The area has stayed at a relatively stable latitude for the past 250 million years at the least (check out a plate reconstruction for 30 Ma [utexas.edu] compared to the present [utexas.edu] - the site has earlier reconstructions as well). Even during ice ages, glaciation never got that close to the equator. This is beside the fact that you can actually distinguish between a glacial valley and the kind of thing they're saying this is - based on the shape, type of sediments, and so on.
Tectonic movement doesn't operate on the same time scale as erosional and stream processes. Tectonics has a major influence on the way rivers operate - in fact that's what my research is about - but not in the way you're speculating. You might be surprised how well preserved rock formations are compared to when they originally formed - it sounds like this one is more or less the same as when it was deposited, which is common in most areas. Tectonics is constantly shifting the crust, yes, but not as much or as fast as you're supposing, and even then this is a relatively inactive area.
Now, your final theory is actually about right, but if you change it to follow how river erosion actually works, then you're basically saying what the researchers here are saying. Their description is a bit misleading, depending on how long you think this took to occur (and I would lean more towards it taking longer - two years as they say, or even a little more, but I don't know the specifics of where they came up with that figure).
The valley shape and sediment type suggest a braided river system, with multiple small, fast streams covering a broad area, constantly shifting left and right. As they drop sediment and fill in depressions, the areas where water is not flowing become the new depressions, so the streams shift back and forth, filling the area with sediment evenly. The coarse of meandering rivers (which are more mature and have slower flow rates) can change on sub-decade time scales, and braided rivers are constantly shifting. Now, the important thing is that these braided streams don't carve v-shaped valleys - they spread themselves out broadly, eroding laterally.
Thus, the initial break would have carved a v-shape valley, but it would quickly erode laterally. Most of the initial deluge would not be recorded - it simply wiped everything away. What's left is the wide valley that got flushed out, and the coarse deposits that filled the valley from the braided streams that existed near the end of the deluge, when flow rate was still high but not enough to wipe away absolutely everything.
One of the most interesting things about this research is that it supports the idea that these things can happen catastrophically. In the 1800's, during the early days of geology, there was a huge debate surrounding whether geology happened catastrophically or gradually. Now, the theories those guys were pushing were ridiculous (although a lot of fun), but the question of time scales is still relevant. It became clear by the early 1900's that gradualism is more realistic, and all of geology is essentially based on that - almost anything can happen if you give it enough time. It's the same conceptual leap that you need to understand biology and evolution, but with geology there is even more time to play with, and physics can easily explain how rocks are affected by forces over long time periods.
This led eventuall
You understand neither chaos nor computer models (Score:5, Insightful)
Computer models of chaotic systems may not reflect the exact performance of what they are modeling, but they can demonstrate the range of possible and likely results.
And the model is not just based on mountain streams; it is also based on some much larger and more recent events, such as the creation of the Snake River Gorge (300 meters deep in a matter of weeks) and the flooding of the English Channel. Water has enormous power to carve up rock, and the conclusion of the study is not in any way extraordinary; it's what anyone who has ever stood at the bottom of the Snake River Gorge would even find rather obvious.
The problem is that throughout the colonial era it was widely assumed by learned men that the Earth is a stable place where a comfortable equilibrium reigns. What we have found in the last 40 years or so is that the Earth is actually an extraordinarily violent and often inhospitable place, and the relative stability of the last few centuries is an exception, not the rule. If we hang around here long enough we will have to deal with violent changes, and efforts to engineer such a complex and sensitive system might make things worse. The problem is that we are engineering it by pumping carbon into the atmosphere, and a sensible person might conclude knowing what the system is capable of that kicking it might not be such a good idea.
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Not so. The earth is normally in a rather placid state, as it is at this instant. But occasional events happen which are neither placid nor safe. And they happen on a large number of scales. But almost all of the time, at any particular scale, things are relatively stable. Those aren't, however, the parts that are memorable or newsworthy.
E.g., there have been several major extinction events, but there's been only one that killed off over 90% of all species living at the time. (I didn't put a precise n
Re:I don't get it... (Score:5, Informative)
Ok, just once, giving you the benefit of doubt concerning trolling:
The mediterrean doesnt have that many rivers flowing into it, but is in a relatively hot climate.
This means that much more water evaporates than it recieves.
Several times in history, the connection of the mediterrean with the other oceans (i.e. the atlantic) was closed by the way of plate tectonics,ice age, etc (plate of africa going north and forming the alps...)).
During these times, the entire sea evaporated away. IIRC, it was once MUCH deeper, but at the ground there are a few km of salt and sediments from those times.
But such things cannot last. Thousands (if an ice age) or millions of years later there was a breach somewhere to let water enter (be it by way of an earthquake, rising water level of the outside oceans, etc). And after that, erosion had its way.
It must have been an unimagineable awesome display ...
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it struck me that the author intent was "40cm of rock eroded per day, while waterleved rose bay as much as 10meters per day at its peak..." that being the case 40cm or rock erosion per day is pretty huge
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it struck me that the author intent was
_Intent_ belongs to such fields as soothsaying, and sadly nowadays, law.
It has no business in a "scientific" article. If a "scientist" can't even check his work before posting them, he just failed peer review...
However if you note TFA it says "centimeters of rock". The error is on the part of the submitter/editors. Surprised? Of course the person who actually wrote TFA forgot that we don't live in
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40 cm per day. Across ten km or so.
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I've heard it said before that the only reason so many scientists get those dates is that they base them on assumptions. Assuming the earth is so many billion years old will get you a date that confirms your theories. Like, if you assume that a variable in an equation is a certain number, and depending on the number you assume you'll get a totally different answer than if you assumed a much larger or smaller number. Could someone confirm or deny (with evidence if possible) whether or not this is true for me? I'm very curious about this.
Read something like The Age of the Earth [amazon.com].
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but it is indeed based on assumptions, and the actual parent post is in the scientific spirit, while replies such as yours are in the "prestigious people said so, thus it must be true" category. If you delve to the root of the generally accepted age of the earth, you will find statement such as "The best age for the Earth comes not from dating individual rocks but by considering the Earth and meteorites as part of the same evolving system in which the isotopic composition of lead, specifically the ratio of
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The middle of the canal is 26 meters above sea level. So if you opened all the locks, the water would just drain out on both ends.