Trudy Myers's Blog, page 24

Modern Dinosaurs

 This is not about alligators or sharks or any other animal that may still exist in something like the form they had back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. It is not about some lizard or other creature that looks like it belongs in the age of the dinosaurs.

This is about people. More specifically, people of a certain age in their life. If you have reached retirement, you might recognize yourself in some of the scenes I describe. This is your notice that you are not alone.

Perhaps you are younger than retirement age. If you have parents or grandparents who are retired, you might want to consider what I say and reflect how these situations might affect your older relatives.

This is not exactly a rant, although it started out as one a few days ago. More of a dirge for possibilities and opportunities that seem to have slipped us by.

And this is about technology, among other things.

First, the physical problems. They are likely to sneak up on an aging person, who probably is busy living their life and not thinking about muscles, bones and joints that need a little more attention than they used to. The wake-up call may come when they stumble and fall, or have difficulty lifting a pan to drain the water, or they can’t open a jar of their favorite condiment because they can’t get a firm grip on the cap. I don’t know what causes the uncertainty with one’s balance, but I suffer from it, and now my hubby is beginning to recognize it, too.

I have heard that it is possible to get something like ‘occupational therapy’ to help counter these effects of aging. Is it possible to get some of this without spending time in the hospital, recovering from a fall or a scalding first? I don’t know. Happily, I have a wellness check with my doctor in a few days, and I will definitely be asking questions about that. I have learned that half an hour of walking, 5 days a week, help with my balance uncertainty, and help strengthen my leg muscles so that getting around is easier. And there appear to be exercises one can do to help regain some flexibility in your body, which is so important when trying to check traffic when driving. Alas, all of those I have found start out with ‘Sit on the floor’, and getting up and down from the floor is a major, time-consuming effort.

Second, the mental effects. Even without dementia, the brain starts to fail the person involved. It usually starts with embarrassing events like forgetting the word you need to finish the sentence you’re saying. It’s not just in conversation, either. As a writer, I have that happen to me while I am writing. I have become adept at using my dictionary and thesaurus to try and track down the work I was looking for. There are other lapses of memory, too. These days, I have a daily ‘to do’ list, which I consult several times during the day. If something like a doctor’s appointment doesn’t get added to my to do list, it gets forgotten! I now rely on shopping lists, too.

I’ve been told that doing puzzles and playing games helps the brain stay active, that certain herbal supplements will help the brain. Unfortunately, the latest article from AARP that I read on that subject is that puzzles and games help the brain be good at puzzles and games, and that there is no proof that any of the usual supplements are of any help at all. Bummer.

Third, the senses problems. As one gets older, the senses get tired. I have specifically noticed it with eyesight, hearing, and taste. If the world is a bit dim, for instance if the sky is heavily overcast or the sun is somewhere below the horizon, I need more light than our house is set up to provide. I have lamps all over the place. I may also need my crafter’s magnifying glasses. My husband is constantly complaining that I mumble too much. And I’ve noticed I’ve been dumping more salt and pepper onto food, trying to make it taste like it used to.

Of course there are eye exams and hearing exams to help deal with fading eyesight and hearing. I wear glasses all the time now, and still need more help when the lighting is dim or I’m trying to do my crafts. I haven’t heard of anything to help with a fading sense of taste.

Fourth, the technology. We are surrounded with technology these days. It seems to have a planned obsolescence to it, so that 18 months (or less) after you get a new phone, laptop, computer, whatever, you are expected to replace it. And yet, these items are so complex, I am still learning to use it after 18 months, so I am not inclined to replace it and have to start the learning process all over again. Especially not with phones.

There doesn’t seem to be much support to help people learn how to use their technology. I once heard of a class held by the local library and community college to help people solve any problems they were having with their gadgets. I took my e-reader, because I couldn’t figure out how to download any new books to it. It was old at the time, on its way out, but it still worked, so why should I replace it with something even more complicated? No one there could help me figure it out.

And in a related note, the techno-expectations. We recently visited Disney World’s Hollywood Studios for a long and rather frustrating day. We wanted to ride the newest ride, which had a ‘virtual line’, which you are expected to join using an app on your cell phone. My husband has the app on his cell phone, but it kept wanting to update, and update, and... we had to ask a staff member to help us, which they were reluctant to do, because it’s ‘just a matter of using the app.’ Yes, our phones are smart phones, because they are smarter than us. But they aren’t THAT smart. Having gotten our time slot to ride, we then enjoyed the park until about noon or a little after, when we started wearing down (remember the physical effects?). So we started looking for a place to grab a bite to eat. We tried 3 different places, and each one expected us to have ordered our food before we got there by using an(other) app on our phone. The third place could finally accommodate us without using the app, but they let us know this was a special arrangement.

I’m not ready to kick the bucket yet. I’m hoping for another 40 or 50 years. So I have to take care of myself. I know that. I’ll probably have to start relying even more on technology. I just hope I can find a mentor to help me figure out how to get my cyborg parts to work.

Archaen Eon

 

The Archean Eon is the second of the four geologic eons of Earth’s history. (The first was Hadean Eon.) During the Archaen Eon, which lasted roughly 4,000 to 2,500 million years ago, the Earth’s crust cooled enough to allow the formation of continents and the beginning of life on Earth. Sounds like a busy time, doesn’t it?

The oldest rock formations on Earth’s surface are Archean. They are found in Greenland, Siberia, Canada, Montana, Wyoming, Scotland, India, Brazil, western Australia and southern Africa, as well as other regions. Volcanic activity was much higher than it is today, producing many different kind of volcanic rocks.

The continents started to form during the Archean, although details are still being debated.  Although this is when the first continents formed, rock of this ages makes up only 7% of the present world’s land mass. Allowing for erosion and destruction of past formations suggests that only 5-40% of the present area of continents formed during the Archean Eon.

By the end of the Archean, plate tectonic activity may have been similar to that of the modern Earth. For those who know how to read it, evidence demonstrates that liquid water was prevalent and deep oceanic basins already existed.

The Archean atmosphere had very little free oxygen, yet temperatures appear to have been near modern levels. The moderate temperatures may be because of greater amounts of greenhouse gases. Or, the Earth may have reflected less sunlight and heat due to having less land area.

There is substantial evidence that life began either near the end of the Hadean Eon or early in the Archean Eon.

The earliest identifiable fossils consist of stromatolites, which are microbial mats formed in shallow water by cyanobacteria. The earliest were found to be 3.48 billion years old. They were found throughout the Archean and became common late in the Eon. Cyanobacteria were instrumental in creating free oxygen in the atmosphere, and created so much of it that later, there was a crisis of sorts, when the life that existed at the time could not cope with the high level of oxygen. (I read that somewhere and have included it in one of my other blogs, but at this time, I can’t remember where I got that from.)

It is generally agreed that before the Archean Eon, life as we know it would have been severely challenged by the hostile environmental conditions then found on Earth.

Life during the Archean consisted of simple single-celled organisms such as Bacteria.

However, fossilized microbes from terrestrial microbial mats show that life was already established on land as long ago as 3.22 billion years.

So, it was a busy time. Lots of water sloshing around, lots of volcanoes creating land masses, and life beginning to get a first grasp on the place. If we wound up crash-landing on a planet like that, could we survive? Could we cultivate cyanobacteria to create more oxygen for us? Doing that to any large extent might strip out some of the greenhouse gases, which could lower the temperature of the planet. Which only goes to show that you have to be careful what you do to make a place your home.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archean....

Ichthyosaurs

 

Ichthyosaur is Greek for ‘fish lizard’, and is the name for a group of large extinct marine reptiles. They lived during the time of the dinosaurs, but formed a separate group from them and may not have been closely related.

Ichthyosaurs thrived during much of the Mesozoic era. Based on fossil evidence, they appeared about 250 million years ago, and at least one species survived until about 90 million years ago, during the Late Cretaceous. During the early Triassic period, ichthyosaurs evolved from some unidentified land reptile that returned to the sea. In a case of convergent evolution, they gradually came to resemble modern dolphins and whales, which evolved from land-dwelling mammals millions of years after the ichthyosaurs returned to the ocean. These ‘fish lizards’ were abundant until the later Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, when they were replaced as the top aquatic predators by the Plesiosauria, another marine reptilian group.

Ichthyosaurs averaged 2-4 meters (6.6 to 13.1 ft) in length. Some specimens were as short as 1 ft, while other species were much larger. During the Triassic, the Shonisaurus popularis was about 15 meters (49 ft) long. The Shastasaurus sikanniensis was estimated in 2004 to have been 21 meters (69 ft) long. Some lower jaw fragments found in England indicated a length between 20 and 25 meters (66 to 82 ft).

Weight estimates indicate a 2.4 meter (8 ft) Stenopterygius weighed around 163-168 kg (359-370 lb), while a 4 meter (13 ft) Ophthalmosaurus icenicus weighed 930-950 kg (2,050-2,090 lb). That would be a lot of tuna! Or salmon.

The earliest members of the ichthyosaur lineage were eel-like, but later members resembled more typical fishes or dolphins. Their limbs had been fully transformed into flippers, and some species had a fin on their backs and a more vertical fin at the rear of a rather short tail.

Their heads were pointed, and the jaws often came equipped with conical teeth to catch smaller prey. Some species had larger, bladed teeth to attack large animals. Their eyes were very large and the neck was short. Later species had a stiff trunk with a more vertical tail fin, which made for a powerful propulsive stroke. Ichthyosaurs were air-breathing, warm-blooded and bore live young. It’s possible they had a layer of blubber for insulation.

They may have looked like fish, but they were not. They were reptiles. They adapted so well to their environment that some of them developed dorsal fins and vertical tail fins without their ancestors having had anything there to be adapted.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichthyo...

Quarks

 I actually did study quarks in high-school chemistry, but that was so long ago, I thought I’d take another look at them. And, no, I’m not talking about the bar owner on Deep Space 9; my high school days were long before that particular TV show came along.

I’m very glad to report that what I learned in high school chemistry is still true, that a quark is a fundamental piece of matter, making up protons and neutrons, the things that make up atomic nuclei in all matter.

Quarks have various properties; electric charge, mass, color charge, and spin. They also are the only elementary particles that experience all 4 fundamental interactions; electromagnetism, gravitation, strong interaction and weak interaction.

There are 6 types of quarks, known as flavors. These are up, down, strange, charm, bottom and top. (My personal favorite flavor is lime green with orange polka dots, but that flavor hasn’t been discovered yet.)

The up and down quarks have the lowest mass. The heavier quarks rapidly change into up and down quarks through a process of particle decay, the transformation from a higher mass state to a lower mass state. This generally makes the up and down quarks the most stable and the most common in the universe.

For every quark flavor, there is an equal but opposite antiquark. Yes, the antiquark differs from its corresponding quark in that some of its properties have equal magnitude but opposite sign.

As my high school teacher said, quarks are strange little things. They have a fractional electric charge value of either -1/3 or +2/3 of the elementary charge, depending on their flavor. Those with +2/3 e include the up, charm and top quarks, while the rest have -1/3 e. Antiquarks, of course, have an opposite charge to their corresponding quarks; the up, charm and top antiquarks have charges of -2/3 e, and the other antiquarks have a charge of +1/3 e.

In the atomic nuclei, Neutrons have no electrical charge, because they are made of 2 down quarks (-1/3 e each) and 1 up quark (+2/3 e). Similarly, the proton has a positive charge of 1e, because they are made up of 2 up quarks (+2/3 e each) and 1 down quark (-1/3 e).

So, I learned some new stuff about quarks, couldn’t make sense of other stuff in the article. May have to consider getting a new chemistry textbook, or maybe a textbook on particle physics. And then find the time to actually study it.

Oh, I did see that quarks have a color (red, green and blue), as well as a flavor, but alas, still no lime green with orange polka dots. I’m sure they’ll show up eventually.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark

Columbia SuperContinent

 Columbia was a supercontinent thought to have existed about 2,500 to 1,500 million years ago in the Paleoproterozoic Era. It is also known as Nuna and Hudsonland. It consisted of proto-cratons known as the Amazonian Shield, Australia, Baltica, Laurentia, and the Ukrainian Shield. It may have possibly included Kalaharia, North China and Siberia as well.

Following its creation by combining most or all of the known bits and pieces of land, Columbia continued to grow by various areas of volcanic activity that created magma flows.

Columbia began to fragment about 1.5 to 1.35 billion years ago.

This is pretty much the sum total of what I learned from this article. I find it irritating when an article that is supposedly written for the average person presumes that the average person has taken a course or three in the specific subject covered by the article, and so it is filled with language and terms that actually mean very little to the average person. More and better pictures might have helped.

There was one graph that seemed to say that when Columbia began collecting its various pieces, single-cell life was strong, as was photosynthesis. Then a type of life known as eukaryotes began. This is a very broad type of life, where the cell nucleus containing the cell’s DNA is enclosed within a nuclear envelope. This is so broad a definition that these days, it includes all life except some or all types of bacteria.

At the very end of Columbia’s life, as it was beginning to break up, multi-cellular life was just beginning.

I don’t think I’d want to try to colonize a planet during this period of its life. I don’t think you could get crops to grow unless you brought along various soil denizens that would help make the soil and its potential nutrients usable by your plants. But then, I don’t have a degree in biology or agriculture, either, so maybe I’m way off base there.

I’d like to take a course in paleogeology, I just don’t know where I’d have to go to find one.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_(supercontinent)

An Update on MoonPhaze Authors

 Okay, I don’t do this very often, so I hope you’ll bear with me. Things have been busy here, and I thought I would let you sneak a peek into the lives of a pair of authors.

In August, I saw a call for submissions to a themed anthology, with a 30-day deadline. I told my husband, who writes science fiction. I knew he was busy with some of  his hobbies, but I wanted to give him the chance to participate. The first thing I sold was a story to a themed anthology, so I have a bit of a soft spot in my heart for them.

Meanwhile, I tried to think up a plot for a suitable story. It only took me a couple days to realize I had 2 plots! So I wrote both of them. When I asked if they would accept multiple submissions, they said yes, so a few days before the deadline, I sent both of them in.

We are not sitting around, chewing our fingernails and climbing the walls waiting for word on whether or not we were accepted. The contributors do not, generally, make a lot of money from anthologies, but it’s nice to be able to put them on our ‘resume’, so to speak. And yes, we are competing with each other, but I am also competing with myself!

In other news, I recently took an on-line class on how to effectively use Goodreads to let people know about our books. So I have spent some time getting my husband’s books listed on Goodreads, including 2 that have not been published yet, but have been edited and are waiting for the cover to be done. I never imagined how much marketing in involved before the book is published! I had to make an entire new ‘To Do’ list for the Goodreads site, to keep me on track.

I also spent some time this week trying to upload the files for his next book, “De-Evolution” to our printer. They changed the way files are uploaded, so I had to re-learn the entire procedure again. And I’m not done, because somehow I managed to come up with 2 chapter titles for each chapter, so I’m exchanging emails with their support crew, trying to figure out how to eliminate one set of chapter titles, preferably the ones they added.

I should also upload the file for the e-book, but I figure, one problem at a time.

Upcoming books by John Lars Shoberg include “De-Evolution”, with a tentative release date of November 15, 2020 and “The Stone Ship”, with a tentative release date of May 15, 2021, and which is a sequel to his first book (The Stone Builders). Both of these books are currently having the covers done. I have a book, “Hank’s Widow”, tentatively scheduled for release on July 15, 2021. Actually, the author name will be Linda (NMI) Joy, which is my pen name for romances.

And there you have it. In among all the other things in our lives, I have accomplished this in the last couple of weeks, with other on-line seminars on Sunday and next Tuesday. In the meantime, it’s time to start editing yet another of John’s books, “And the Meek Shall Inherit”.

I need clocks that run slower.

Author Blogs

The worst part of being an indie author is that you are required to do all of your own marketing and promotion. You always wonder if you are missing something, some way of connecting to your audience. There’s lots of advice out there about having your own blog, so this week, I did some research of what other authors talk about in their blogs.

I was lucky enough to find a list of ‘well-crafted’ author blogs compiled by a well-known site for authors. So I checked out the first dozen or so.

The first thing I noticed was that all of the blogs I was connected to were over a decade old, even though these blogs got points for being ‘frequently updated’. In one or two cases, newer posts were easy to find; but in most of them, I was stuck with the post I landed on, looking for similarities, differences, anything that might tell me what made a successful author’s blog.

Two or three of them were down-right political in nature. I have my political views, of course, but I don’t like cramming my views down other people’s throats, nor do I like having other people’s views crammed down mine. I didn’t spend much time on those sites.

One blog page consisted of boxes with a headline in each box. The headlines did not make much sense to me, perhaps because I wasn’t familiar with that author’s work, and that’s what they pertained to.

One blog page was a guest blog by a friend of the author, who waxed poetic about how much better his life was, now that he had adopted just one of the attitudes suggested is the author’s non-fiction self-help book. Well, that was an interesting possibility... if I wrote non-fiction self-help books.

Several of them talked about their current Work In Progress, which was pretty much what I expected. But even now, I’m not sure how that can be done effectively, given a blog that gets a new post every week, which is the absolute minimum suggested by all the advice given to authors that I’ve seen.

Now, I don’t write 8 hours a day. I am an editor and publisher (and person) as well as an author, and so I spend 8 hours (and more) at my computer, I do not spend 8 hours a days working on my own stories. Not even 8 hours writing, re-writing and editing my own stories. But let’s look at some math:

Suppose an author writes 8,000 words a day ( that’s 1,000 words per hour, and boy, is that fast!) 5 days a week produces 40,000 words. To the best of my knowledge, a typical romance is about 80,000 words, so that’s 2 weeks of work, just for a rough draft. One romance writer complained that she had finished her rough draft, only to have her editor tell her it had problems, problems so bad that she (the author) was going to have to step back and rethink the entire story. And yet, that author still managed to include in her blog post an excerpt from that story.

I’m left wondering, does she include an excerpt with every blog post? Even if all she did was tell her audience about whatever she had written that week, she is basically telling them the story before it ever gets published.

And that’s during the rough draft stage. What does she do during the rewrites? More excerpts? Explanations of what she’s changed?

I don’t really understand, so I guess I’ll have to continue studying blogs by other authors, preferably more than one post by the same author. Do any of you know of an author whose blog you feel would be a good example for me to study?

In the meantime, I’ll return to writing about the science I’ve self-studied.

Whale Ancestors

Where did whales come from? How did a fish evolve to become as large as a modern whale?

Actually, whales took a round-about route to evolve into today’s huge ocean creatures. They are actually descended from a land animal.

There are plenty of clues in a whale’s body and biology that their ancestors lived on land:

* They breathe air.

* They nurse their young with their own milk.

* Their paddle-shaped flippers encase hand bones with five ‘fingers’.

* As embryos, whales have tiny back limbs which disappear before birth.

It turns out that hippos are the closest living relatives of whales, but not their ancestors. Both hippos and whales evolved from four-legged, even-toed, hoofed ancestors that lived on land about 50 million years ago. The hippo’s ancestor stayed on land, but the whale ancestor—which was about the size of a goat—moved to the sea and evolved into swimming creatures over a period of about 8 million years, which is quite fast for evolutionary processes.

When fossils of gigantic ancient whales were first discovered, they were mistaken for dinosaur fossils and given the name Basilosaurus. But later, they were recognized as mammals. These prehistoric whales were more elongated than modern whales and had small back legs and front flippers. Their nostrils were situated halfway between the tip of the snout and the forehead. They had earbones just like those of modern whales. Therefore, Basilosaurus showed the link between whales and their terrestrial ancestor.

The current theory is this: That some land-living hoofed animals favoured the flavor of plants at the water’s edge. Eating them had the added advantage of allowing them to easily hide from danger in shallow water. Over time, their descendants spent more and more time in the water, possibly in an ancient estuary, and their bodies became adapted for swimming. The front legs became flippers. A thick layer of fat called blubber replaced their fur coats to keep them warm and streamlined. Their tails became bigger and stronger for powerful swimming, and their back legs shrunk. Their nostrils gradually moved to the top of their heads so that they could breathe easily without having to tilt their heads while swimming. As these creatures began to feed on a different diet, they lost their teeth in favor of a baleen filter method of feeding.

Between these articles, there was some disagreement about what whale ancestors ate. One stated that they favored plants found at the water’s edge. Another felt they ate small land animals and fish found close to shore. Neither article had any information on the teeth whale ancestors had, so their eating preferences seem pretty much up in the air.

So, what can we learn from this tale of whales? Be careful what and where you eat? Evolution is your friend? I find myself wondering if whales would ever come back out of the water, what would they evolve to then? Some version of a goat-sized, hoofed animal again? One of the articles did mention that occasionally, a whale comes along that does have vestigial back legs that are completely encased within their body. Therefore, it seems possible that back legs could make a comeback.

Come on, work with me here. If octopuses can come out of the ocean and become a terrestial bad guy, as some scientists seem to think, then surely whales can also emerge from the oceans. Given enough time to evolve.

 

https://us.whales.org/whales-dolphins/how-did-whales-evolve/

https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/evograms_03

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/when-whales-walked-on-four-legs.html

Velociraptors

Velociraptors lived about 75 to 71 million years ago. There are 2 known species, both from Mongolia. The second species was only discovered in 2008.

They were depicted in the Jurassic Park movie as swift bipedal reptiles with a long tail and an enlarged sickle-shaped claw on each hindfoot, 6 1/2 feet tall and weighing about 180 pounds. Not so, say the scientists. They were bipedal reptiles, they were fast, and they had the fearsome claw. But they also had feathers, and were actually the size of a turkey. The raptors depicted in the movie series were based on a related genus, because the script said they had to look suitably fierce.

Instead of being 6.5 feet tall, velociraptors were as much as 6.75 feet long, snout to tail tip. Scientific artistic renditions show a very long, feathered tail. They were about 1 ft 7 inches high at the hip and weighs about 33 lbs. Although bipedal, their body and tail were roughly parallel to the ground. Their forefeet were also feathered, but were too short to serve as wings.

Their skulls grew up to 10 in long. The jaws were lined with 26-28 widely-spaced, serrated teeth on each side, more strongly serrated on the back edge than the front.

Their hands were large, with 3 curved claws. However, the structure of the wrist bones forced the hands to be held with palms facing inwards and not downwards.

On their feet, the first toe was a small dewclaw, and the 2nd held the ferocious claw spoken about earlier, which could get 2.5 inches long along its outer edge. Only their 3rd and 4th toes were used in walking or running. Although some beliere their 2nd toe claw was used for disemboweling prey, tests have proven it was most likely used for stabbing and holding, to keep their prey from escaping.

If we’re going to compare fiction to fact, then we must consider the depiction in the Jurassic Park movies of velociraptors hunting in packs. Although there are some indications of other species in the family hunting in packs, there is little to no indication in the fossils of velociraptors doing it.

Most of the known velociraptor fossils have been found in current desserts, under conditions that indicate the locale at the time of their death was also arid and covered in sand dunes, or possibly a little less arid.

Now, my first thought about incorporating velociraptors in a story involves a comedy-ish story where a town in the desert is suddenly overrun by predatory turkeys, which turn out to be—according to the local Wise Guy—descendants from velociraptors, long thought extinct these millions of years. Of course, once the raptors ate up all the local cats, dogs, and chickens, they would necessarily start picking on larger prey... large dogs, wolves, goats... children? Alas, I don’t do horror, which is where this thought is quickly leading me. Anybody out there have any other ideas?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velociraptor

https://www.livescience.com/23922-velociraptor-facts.html

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/velociraptor-facts.html

Ur...

Okay, not a lot of information on this subject. Only to be expected, I suppose, since Ur is the name given to the very first super continent, which came into being about 3.1 billion years ago. At that time, the only life on Earth was single-celled, and some of it knew how to photosynthesize. And it’s called a super continent, though it was probably smaller than modern Australia.

It qualifies as a super continent because it incorporated all or nearly all pieces of land then in existence. More recently, scientists have started calling Ur and other small ‘super’ continents by the term super-cratons. The best I can figure is that a craton is a piece of land considered too small to be a continent.

Other scientists have postulated the existence of another super-craton at about the same time, which they have called Vaalbara, but apparently, the ideas of these two early cratonic assemblages are incompatible.

About 1,300–1,071 million years ago, Ur joined the continents Nena and Atlantica to form the supercontinent Rodinia. In one proposal, Ur remained the nucleus of East Gondwana until that supercontinent broke up. But in other proposals, India and East Antarctica did not collide until Rodinia formed 1,071 Million years ago. However, during that time period, the Earth’s mantle was 200 degrees C hotter than today, making many characteristics of modern tectonics rare or non-existent. This would preclude Roger’s 3 billion years ago supercontinent of Ur.

The proposal for the super-craton Vaalbara places two cratons, Kaapvall of southern Africa and Pilbara of western Australia, next to each other based on stratigraphic similarities. In Roger’s configuration of Ur, these two cratons were placed far apart during Gondwana, which is contradicted by widespread collisional events between Australia and Africa.

Yet another possible supercraton, Zimgarn, was proposed by Smirnov in 2013. Unfortunately, I didn’t understand the paragraph dealing with it, so I’m mostly ignoring it. After all, I’m supposed to be studying Ur.

Geological similarities in parts of India (Singhbhum and Dharwar), western Australia (Kilbaran and Pilbara), and southern Africa (Kaapvall and Zimbabwe) indicate these area were close together in the Mid-Archaean Era. Ur was named for the german prefix meaning “original” by Rogers because in his proposal, it was the first continent. Other Archaean continental assemblages are considerably younger. In some reconstructions, the various pieces of Ur stayed near each other until the break-up of Gondwana.

So, was there really an Ur, as proposed by Rogers? Should it really be called Vaalbara or Zimgarn? Or something else entirely? I didn’t find any indication of where it was located, and given how long it supposedly existed, it could have drifted quite a ways from its original location, but still, I would have liked to see some of that type of information.

How many planets do you suppose are out there with only single-celled life and 1 large island? With such a small land mass, would it be worth it to colonize it?

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur_(continent)

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur_(supercontinent)