Starry-shores - No Frontiers

Wow, it’s Friday! Have a great weekend. 

Dunkleosteus model featured in ep. 12 of Shelf Life: 6 Extinctions in 6 Minutes.

Picos de Europa, Spain - by Arturo Garcia

Voyager: The Golden Record

It’s the 1970s, and we’re about to send two spacecraft (Voyager 1 & 2) into space. These two spacecraft will eventually leave our solar system and become the most distant man-made objects…ever. How can we leave our mark on them in the case that other spacefarers find them in the distant future?

The Golden Record.

We placed an ambitious message aboard Voyager 1 and 2, a kind of time capsule, intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record, a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth.

The Golden Record Cover

The outward facing cover of the golden record carries instructions in case it is ever found. Detailing to its discoverers how to decipher its meaning.

In the upper left-hand corner is an easily recognized drawing of the phonograph record and the stylus carried with it. The stylus is in the correct position to play the record from the beginning. Written around it in binary arithmetic is the correct time of one rotation of the record. The drawing indicates that the record should be played from the outside in.

The information in the upper right-hand portion of the cover is designed to show how the pictures contained on the record are to be constructed from the recorded signals. The top drawing shows the typical signal that occurs at the start of the picture. The picture is made from this signal, which traces the picture as a series of vertical lines, similar to ordinary television. Immediately below shows how these lines are to be drawn vertically, with staggered “interlace” to give the correct picture rendition. Below that is a drawing of an entire picture raster, showing that there are 52 vertical lines in a complete picture.

Immediately below this is a replica of the first picture on the record to permit the recipients to verify that they are decoding the signals correctly. A circle was used in this picture to ensure that the recipients use the correct ratio of horizontal to vertical height in picture reconstruction.

The drawing in the lower left-hand corner of the cover is the pulsar map previously sent as part of the plaques on Pioneers 10 and 11. It shows the location of the solar system with respect to 14 pulsars, whose precise periods are given.

The drawing containing two circles in the lower right-hand corner is a drawing of the hydrogen atom in its two lowest states, with a connecting line and digit 1 to indicate that the time interval associated with the transition from one state to the other is to be used as the fundamental time scale, both for the time given on the cover and in the decoded pictures.

The Contents

The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University and his associates. 

They assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind and thunder, birds, whales and other animals. To this, they added musical selections from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings from Earth-people in fifty-five languages, and printed messages from President Carter and U.N. Secretary General Waldheim.

Listen to some of the sounds of the Golden Record on our Soundcloud page:

Golden Record: Greetings to the Universe

Golden Record: Sounds of Earth

Songs from Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony are included on the golden record. For a complete list of songs, visit: https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/whats-on-the-record/music/

The 115 images included on the record, encoded in analog form, range from mathematical definitions to humans from around the globe. See the images here: https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/whats-on-the-record/images/

Making the Golden Record

Many people were instrumental in the design, development and manufacturing of the golden record. 

Blank records were provided by the Pyral S.A. of Creteil, France. CBS Records contracted the JVC Cutting Center in Boulder, CO to cut the lacquer masters which were then sent to the James G. Lee Record Processing center in Gardena, CA to cut and gold plate eight Voyager records.

The record is constructed of gold-plated copper and is 12 inches in diameter. The record’s cover is aluminum and electroplated upon it is an ultra-pure sample of the isotope uranium-238. Uranium-238 has a half-life of 4.468 billion years.

Learn more about the golden record HERE.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

by Eduardo Flores

Hiking to the largest Ammonite in the world!

Video description:

Titanites lived during the Late Jurassic Period and had a shell diameter of around 137 centimetres! surprisingly it wasn’t the largest ammonoid, as some species such as Parapuzosia could get over twice as large!

There were also some plant fossils around the area of this site!

The Most Hardcore Period in Earth’s History, or the Permian, was preceded by a complete ecosystem collapse, and featured three different major mass extinction events - including the largest in earth’s history, the Great Dying, which lead to nearly all life on earth dying out. 

During the Permian, all the land on Earth was in one supercontinent, called Pangea; and all the water was in one ocean, called Panthalassa. This meant that life intermingled and expanded all over the world, more so than it was able to in other periods (besides the Triassic, which also featured a single continent and a single ocean). 

Pangea, and the Permian, was characterized by extremes. The beginning of the Period featured the end of the Karoo Ice Age - the poles were filled with ice caps, the center of the continent was dry, and temperature extremes were found throughout the land and ocean. The end featured multiple mass extinctions and a rapid warming of the continent, reaching the extreme heat of the Triassic period. 

By @franzanth​ 

The Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse was primarily caused by an intensification of that ice age - leading to the start of the Permian featuring dry, harsh, extreme climates. This time period featured the rapid diversification and specialization of some of the earliest animals adapted for a dry existence - prior to now, life almost entirely existed in the oceans, or in the forested and swampy world of the Carboniferous. This was the first truly dry time for (at least some) life.  

By @alphynix​

Olson’s Extinction marked a change from that initial habitat in the Cisuralian epoch to the next, the Guadalupian. As the world began to rapidly warm after the Karoo Ice Age ended, this lead to a major extinction of plants and vertebrates especially. The vertebrates would not fully recover before the Triassic; however, it did lead to many new forms, especially among synapsids, appearing in the new vacant environmental roles. 

(By @paleoart​) 

The Capitanian Extinction was caused by the explosion of a moderately sized laval flow system, the Emeishan Traps, which lead to immediate global cooling followed by rapid global warming. This greatly affected ocean chemistry, making it far more acidic than previously. Many reef animals were killed by this extinction, in addition to brachiopods; many vertebrates were also affected. 

(By @paleoart​) 

So the Permian was a hard, broken world when the Siberian Traps - one of the largest lava flows in Earth’s History, and one of the largest volcanic events known - exploded, leading to even more dramatic climate change and extremely rapid global warming. This lead to acidification of the ocean’s and a dramatic drop in ocean oxygen. Almost every group of organisms was dramatically affected, and this extinction was the largest known in Earth’s History, with between 85-96% of life on Earth dying out (and some researchers thinking it may have even been higher), leading to this extinction being dubbed The Great Dying. Many groups utterly disappeared, despite having been features of the entire Paleozoic Eon (the eon that the Permian was at the end of) - trilobites, eurypterids, “spiny sharks”, tabulate and rugose corals, and blastoids complete disappeared, as did many other groups. Brachiopods, Gastropods, Ammonites, Radiolarians, Foraminiferans, Crinoids, and most Parareptiles also went extinct, as did many synapsids and amphibians. It was an utter catastrophe. 

(By @paleoart​) 

The Permian was a time of extensive hardship, dramatic changes, and extinction event after extinction event. Life was truly on the brink - just as it was beginning to settle into terrestrial existence. So new animals, from insects to amniotes to conifers, spent their school years in a prehistoric hunger games - and only a few species managed to reach the weirdness kiln of the Triassic. 

Welcome to the Permian. 

The Most Hardcore Period of Earth’s History. 

QUETZALCOATLUS

Quetzalcoatlus goes down in history as the largest flying organism of all time, with a wingspan of 12 metres, which is larger than some planes. Quetzalcoatlus was the undisputed king of the Late cretaceous skies, so it seems fitting that its name is derived from an Aztec god, Quetzalcoatl. Although its wingspan is impressive, Quetzalcoatlus also had a huge 2.5 metre long skull, that is the average height of an Asian elephant! To get such a huge animal in the air, a complex system of air sacs was needed inside the bones, this meant that Quetzalcoatlus probably weighed no more than 250kg. Quetzalcoatlus, along with many pterosaurs, was originally thought to spend most of its time gliding over the oceans, skimming fish out from the surface of the water with their elongated beaks. However, due to the skull and beak morphology and the presence of fossils far inland it has become more widely accepted that Quetzalcoatlus stalked prey far below on the land. The fore and hind limb morphology of Quetzalcoatlus also suggests that they were competent walkers on the land, they would have stood up to 3 metres tall. 

The feeding habits of Quetzalcoatlus still remain something of a mystery. It was originally thought to be more of a scavenger, but the blunt beak was unsuited to stripping and picking flesh of a bony creature. It is more likely that Quetzalcoatlus hunted like modern-day storks, stalking the land from the skies above for smaller animals and then swooping down to eat them whole.

Isn’t it kind of bananas that for most of human history we’ve been completely oblivious to how utterly environmentally tumultuous the planet has historically been? Before the advent of paleontology, conventional wisdom posited that the earth has more or less looked the same for as long as its been around, but soon enough naturalists like Georges Cuvier came along and said, “well it actually turns out that most of the organisms that have ever existed are actually no longer with us,” thereby introducing the entire concept of extinction to the human race?? Do you realize how coconuts that must have sounded back then?

Not only that, but the more we delved into paleontology the more it became apparent that the Earth has spent so much of its existence (about a billion years) being completely unsuitable and even hostile to life as we know it. A significant stretch of the cosmic timeline classifies our planet as being an oxygen-poor wasteland constantly pounded by asteroids and brimming with active super volcanoes. Even after life on Earth started to stretch out its stubby little amphibious legs we’ve had like five mass extinctions events almost completely fuck it all up (including one known as the Permian extinction which killed off no less than 70% of the planet’s land-based life and 96% of its sea critters). Can you recognize how rare and unlikely it is that out of all the downright catastrophic times any of us could have existed as unfortunate little trilobites or dimetrodons we actually get to exist as humans beings who can learn about this stuff with the help of a scientific discipline that effectively allows us to peer back into the reaches of the past?? Anyway, here’s wonderwall