Sunday, March 31, 2019

Sunday, March 31, 2019, T+88, Part 1 -- Nothing About The Bakken

YES!!! Duke finally beaten.

Finally.

Lost on a free throw.

The week has hardly begun and already too much to report.

First, "The Day The Dinosaurs Died: A young paleontologist may have discovered a record of the most significant event in the history of life on Earth." From The New Yorker. I posted this story from another source earlier this week (month?). Archived.

Three great sports events today:
  • Kisner won the golf tournament; Tiger Woods went home yesterday, Saturday.
  • Hamlin won the NASCAR race. Kyle Busch would have won but ran into unexpected / unknown problems with less than 50 (?) laps left to go. 
  • March Madness: Auburn (5) moves on, beating #2, Kentucky. Duke (1) now in a close one with Michigan State. Duke is lucky to have gotten this far; should have lost either of two earlier games. If Duke pulls this one, they deserve to win the national championship. [Duke lost.]
Futures: look good. Not good. Great!!!! This is the perfect market.

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment, financial, job, travel, or relationship decision based on anything you read here or think you may have read here.

Vacation: looking to spend time at Flathead Lake in June (2019).

Coal: the more I read, the more I "know" that coal will be the story in 2030. Period. Dot. No matter what anyone else says.

Back to the dinosaur story. I will have to see what's new. I thought the story was already well known. From the story:
  • 66 million years ago
  • an asteroid hits the Yucatán peninsula
  • the Cretaceous period ends and the Paleogene period begins
  • Los Alamos National Laboratory; Q Machine -- one of the world's most powerful computers: modeled the impact
  • energy released: a billion Hiroshima bombs
  • blobs of glass, tektites, blanketed the Western Hemisphere
  • as the earth rotated, the airborne material fell; set fire to the entire Indian subcontinent
  • fires eventually consumed about 70% of the world's forest
  • giant tsunamis
  • the damage had only begun
  • not all details known, but it is know that the soot prevented all sunlight from reaching the plane'ts surface for months
  • photosynthesis all but stopped, killing most plants
  • oxygen in the atmosphere plummeted
  • after the fires died down, Earth plunged into a period of cold, perhaps even a deep freeze
  • Earth's two essential food chains, in the sea and on land, collapse
  • 75% of all species went extinct  
  • more than 99.9999% of all living organisms on Earth died; the carbon cycle came to a halt
  • KT boundary: marks the dividing line between the Kretaceous and the Tertiary period )the Teritary has been redefined as the Paleogene)
And finally here's the mystery:
One of the central mysteries of paleontology is the so-called “three-­metre problem.” In a century and a half of assiduous searching, almost no dinosaur remains have been found in the layers three metres, or about nine feet, below the KT boundary, a depth representing many thousands of years. Consequently, numerous paleontologists have argued that the dinosaurs were on the way to extinction long before the asteroid struck, owing perhaps to the volcanic eruptions and climate change. Other scientists have countered that the three-metre problem merely reflects how hard it is to find fossils. Sooner or later, they’ve contended, a scientist will discover dinosaurs much closer to the moment of destruction.
Conclusion here.

No comments:

Post a Comment