Science drill ship sets depth record off Japan bbc.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from bbc.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Posted on May 5, 2021 | Views: 42
cwebb2021-05-04T18:19:47-07:00
by Jonathan Amos: It’s an unassuming rock, greenish in colour, and just over 4cm in its longest dimension. And yet this little piece of sandstone holds important clues to all our futures…
It was recovered from muds in the deep ocean, far off the coast of modern-day West Antarctica.
The scientists who found it say it shouldn’t really have been there.
It’s what’s called a dropstone, a piece of ice-rafted debris.
It was scraped off the White Continent by a glacier, carried a certain distance in this flowing ice, and then exported and discarded offshore by an iceberg.
E-Mail
Boulder, Colo., USA: The Geological Society of America regularly publishes
articles online ahead of print. For April,
GSA Bulletin topics
include multiple articles about the dynamics of China and Tibet; the Bell
River hypothesis that proposes that an ancestral, transcontinental river
occupied much of northern North America during the Cenozoic Era; new
findings in the climatic history during one of the Earth s coldest periods:
The Late Paleozoic Ice Age; and the age an nature of the Chicxulub impact
crater. You can find these articles at
https://bulletin.geoscienceworld.org/content/early/recent
.
Evidence of Carboniferous arc magmatism preserved in the Chicxulub
In 2016, Sean Gulick and a team of researchers extracted asteroid dust from sections of dark brown, silty claystone and greyish-green marlstone buried beneath the ocean in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. Now, five years later, that dust has answered perhaps one of humankind’s most poignant questions: What killed the dinosaurs?
Gulick, a research professor at the Jackson School of Geosciences, spent over a decade sending out proposals for the mission, so when it finally commenced, and he was bunked six-to-a-cabin and sharing one bathroom with his fellow scientists for two months on a lift boat perched 15 meters above the water much higher still above the crater they were drilling into the intimate quarters were forgiven in lieu of the excitement of discovery. Each layer they drilled into revealed a new mystery.