beautiful dendritic quartz | source
NASA Data Sonification: Black Hole Remix
In this sonification of Perseus. the sound waves astronomers previously identified were extracted and made audible for the first time. The sound waves were extracted outward from the center. (source)
It's not even clear here🥲🥲ðŸ˜
Yes geologists! Doing the important work 💖
It's weird how geological time works. Eras start and end bit by bit over the course of hundreds of thousands of years. That sounds like a big uncertainty but that sort of timescale, on which the climate can overhaul itself completely and entire species rise and fall, is instantaneous compared to the age of the earth. Any hypothetical sentient creature would have no idea it was living through a major turning point. The Silurian slid into the Devonian as land plants became A Thing and insects started to wonder if 'pilot' might be a good career path, but there was no one moment when one thing ended and another began. That's not how that works...
... except for the Cretaceous. The Cretaceous had a Last Day and it was probably in April, and then the next day it was the Paleogene.
Utrecht University geologist Suzanna van de Lagemaat has reconstructed a massive and previously unknown tectonic plate that was once one-quarter the size of the Pacific Ocean. Her colleagues in Utrecht had predicted its existence over 10 years ago based on fragments of old tectonic plates found deep in the Earth's mantle. Van de Lagemaat reconstructed lost plates through field research and detailed investigations of the mountain belts of Japan, Borneo, the Philippines, New Guinea, and New Zealand. To her surprise, she found that oceanic remnants on northern Borneo must have belonged to the long-suspected plate, which scientists have named Pontus. She has now reconstructed the entire plate in its full glory. The work has been published in Gondwana Research.
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You have GOT to be kidding me. They will just name volcanoes anything.
wait are chickens actually decended from t-rexes or is it just a comedic pairing
Chickens and T. rex share a recent common ancestor, more recent than T. rex shares with Stegosaurus or Brontosaurus/Apatosaurus
Chickens did not descend from T. rex, because T. rex is a very specialized and derived dinosaur
However, they - and all other birds, because all birds are in a single group - descended from small raptorial dinosaurs like Velociraptor. And, the common ancestor of Velociraptor and all birds (including chickens) could fly
And since birds descend from the same common ancestor as all other dinosaurs, they're dinosaurs.
geology student 🪨 appreciation for igneous and sed rocks
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