by Anonymous Coward writes:
on Sunday September 05, 2021 @11:04AM (#61765653)
On one hand the article says there are no rocks from a billion years.
Poorly written.
There are rocks from that period, including with fossils. Some event certainly did happen and resulted in a really bizarre state of those rocks in the geological layer, so the article isn't completely talking out of its ass. Yet this particular statement about "no rocks" is incorrect.
If you look at their "Figure 1" image, layer 2 at the bottom is the one in question. It's turned partially sideways, for reasons unknown.
Normally we can infer fossils above other ones are more recent, and the fossils below are older. With this strange angle this doesn't always work all that well since fossils that used to be deeper can actually be closer to the surface in some places on earth, and much much deeper in other places on earth.
However there are fossils present, and they are at a frequency similar to below, which is far less frequent than the layers above. That's how we know there was life during that time, and we know from the many more fossils above that there was a few orders of magnitude more life after this period than the one before it. It's just very difficult to pinpoint exactly when within this angled layer the explosion of life happened.
Re:Rock vs fossils (Score:5, Informative)
On one hand the article says there are no rocks from a billion years.
Poorly written.
There are rocks from that period, including with fossils.
Some event certainly did happen and resulted in a really bizarre state of those rocks in the geological layer, so the article isn't completely talking out of its ass. Yet this particular statement about "no rocks" is incorrect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If you look at their "Figure 1" image, layer 2 at the bottom is the one in question.
It's turned partially sideways, for reasons unknown.
Normally we can infer fossils above other ones are more recent, and the fossils below are older.
With this strange angle this doesn't always work all that well since fossils that used to be deeper can actually be closer to the surface in some places on earth, and much much deeper in other places on earth.
However there are fossils present, and they are at a frequency similar to below, which is far less frequent than the layers above.
That's how we know there was life during that time, and we know from the many more fossils above that there was a few orders of magnitude more life after this period than the one before it.
It's just very difficult to pinpoint exactly when within this angled layer the explosion of life happened.