What if the Earth’s history (our planet’s age is approximately 4.54 billion years), compressed into just one year, let’s say the year of 2018? @YearOnEarth just did that. At midnight on the 31st of December 2017, Chris Jennings started a little project for the incoming year: tweeting the entirety of the geological history of the Earth, compressed into the year of 2018.
The result is an amazing timeline of the Earth’s history.
Continue reading What If Earth’s History Compressed Into The Year of 2018
Birds (Aves) range in size and weight from the 5 cm (2 in) and 1.6-2 grams bee hummingbird to the 2.75 m (9 ft) and 104-156 kg (229-344 lbs) ostrich. Here are the top 15 largest bird species in the world (by body weight).
Birds form one of six basic animal groups, with the others being amphibians, fish, invertebrates, mammals and reptiles. They are endothermic vertebrates, characterized by feathers, toothless beaked jaws, a high metabolic rate, a four-chambered heart, and a lightweight but strong skeleton. They reproduce by laying of hard-shelled eggs (eggs fertilize inside the female). The fossil record indicates that birds are the last surviving group of dinosaurs. So, they are also termed avian dinosaurs.
Continue reading Top 15 Largest Birds in the World
Around 66 million years ago, an asteroid or comet at least 10 kilometers (6 miles) in diameter impacted a few miles from the present-day town of Chicxulub in Mexico (hence it is dubbed as the “Chicxulub impactor”), at around 64,000 kilometers per hour (40,000 mph). The impact has created a crater (Chicxulub crater) more than 180 km (110 miles) in diameter. But, what’s more, the energy of the impact (which is equivalent of about ten billion Hiroshima atom bombs) vaporized the rock which was rich in sulfur compounds, filling the air with a thick cloud of dust, similar to that created by a catastrophic volcanic eruption.
This cloud blocked out the sun at least for a decade and caused a global, dark winter: even in the tropics the temperatures were barely above freezing, and the average global temperature was below 0°C (32°F). Before the impact, the average global temperature was around 26°C (47°F), so this means a huge drop. And the recovery time was more than 30 years! The dinosaurs which had dominated the Earth for more than 150 million years were used to living in a lush climate and were already in decline, so non-avian dinosaurs couldn’t survive after the last deadly blow.
Continue reading Dinosaur-killer Asteroid Triggered a Global Warming which lasted 100,000 Years
I stumbled upon an amazing web page showing what did ancient Earth look like. On “Dinosaur Pictures and Facts” web page (dinosaurpictures.org), there’s also an interactive animation. On this page, you can either select the years (i.e. 600 million years ago) or jump to a particular event (i.e. first multicellular life) and see how ancient Earth did look like then. You can also remove the clouds and stop the Earth’s rotation if you want to.
Continue reading What did Ancient Earth Look Like
According to the scientists who drilled into the Chicxulub crater buried underneath the Yucatán Peninsula and the Gulf of Mexico, the asteroid hit the “worst possible place”. They summarized their findings so far in a BBC Two documentary titled “The Day The Dinosaurs Died“. The documentary presented by professors Alice Roberts and Ben Garod.
Continue reading Dinosaur-killer asteroid hit “worst possible place”, say Scientists
Crocodiles are aquatic reptiles, and among the most feared carnivores on Earth, because of their size, big powerful jaws and aggressiveness. They are so successful predators – once they were living alongside the dinosaurs. After the Chicxulub impact, which happened around 66 million years ago, the non-avian dinosaurs were gone but crocodiles were managed to survive. Here are top 20 amazing crocodile facts about these fascinating beasts.
Related: Top 10 most googled crocodile whys
Continue reading 20 Amazing Crocodile Facts
Identifying the largest dinosaurs ever lived isn’t an easy task, because it’s very rare to unearth a complete fossil. Furthermore, only a tiny percentage of these amazing animals ever fossilized, and most of these “lucky” bodies will remain buried underground forever. So, we may never know exactly what dinosaur was the biggest (or the tiniest) ever.
Despite this fact, size always has been one of the most interesting aspects of these prehistoric animals. There are extreme variations in their size, from the tiny hummingbirds, which can weigh as little as three grams, to the titanosaurs, which could weigh as much as 70 tonnes, or even more.
Here are the largest dinosaurs ever lived.
Continue reading Largest dinosaurs ever lived
Now we have a computer simulation of how the afterward effects of famous Chicxulub asteroid (estimated to be 10 km/6.2 mi) wide) killed the non-avian dinosaurs (and also a wide range of other species). On January 13, 2017, an article titled “Baby, it’s cold outside: Climate model simulations of the effects of the asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous”, published by the Climate scientists of Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), revealed a detailed model of what happened to the atmosphere and the climate after the Chicxulub impact.
Continue reading How the darkness and the cold killed the (non-avian) dinosaurs
People believe many things which are actually not true. Here are the top ten misconceptions about Earth.
Continue reading Top 10 Common Misconceptions about Earth
2015 Norwegian catastrophe drama film The Wave tells a fictional story about Geiranger, a small tourist village in Sunnmøre region of Møre og Romsdal county in the western part of Norway. In the movie, the village threatened a huge mass of rock tumbles into Geirangerfjord (which is one of Norway’s most visited tourist sites, and it was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2005). The rock sets off a 300 feet megatsunami. The villagers must rush to the mountains in ten minutes, before “the wave” reaches them.
Continue reading Megatsunami and The Wave (movie)
Here is the trailer of the movie. Directed by Roar Uthaug (born 25 August 1973), it was Norway’s official submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 88th Academy Awards but it was not nominated.