scholarly journals The chemistry of fossilization on Earth and Mars

2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (6) ◽  
pp. 28-32
Author(s):  
Sean McMahon

The story of our world is written in the rocks. Turning over the stony pages, a trained geologist can read about mountains that rose and fell in the distant past, oceans that dried out in the sun, and continents that came together and drifted apart. The ground beneath us was shaped by processes like these over millions of years, and perhaps it is unsurprising that these epic shifts in the landscape should have left traces behind. But here and there, to our immense good fortune, the rocks yield something else: remains or traces of ancient life. If a good rock can be read like a good book, then a well-preserved fossil is like a finely wrought illustration, a vivid depiction of a fleeting moment in the life of the world. Fossils, whether on the scale of dinosaurs or individual molecules, provide our most decisive evidence for testing hypotheses about the abundance, diversity and evolution of life on Earth over the past three-and-a-half billion years. They are also our best hope for answering one of the most compelling questions in science: was there ever life on Mars?

Author(s):  
Professor John Swarbrooke

The fact that open ocean covers two-thirds of the surface of our planet dramati- cally illustrates the importance of the marine environment to life on Earth. But the importance of the oceans goes far beyond their sheer size for it is the oceans that largely determine our climate for the weather around the world is heavily influenced by what happens in our seas. ‘Weather patterns are primarily controlled by ocean currents which are influenced by surface winds, temperature, salinity, the Earth’s rotation and ocean tides....Ocean currents bring warm water and rain from the equator to the poles and cold water from the poles towards the equator’ (www.greentumble.com, 2016). Every schoolchild knows that the sun evaporates water from the sea which then become clouds that then produces almost all of the rain and snow which falls on every land mass in the world. The oceans also absorb heat from the sun and from human activities; this heat is then carried to the land in those places where the prevailing winds blow from the sea to the land. At the same time, the oceans play a vital role in the carbon cycle by absorbing carbon dioxide that is in the air.


Impact! ◽  
1996 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerrit L. Verschuur

During the first century B.C., Lucretius wrote, “Legend tells of one occasion when fire got the upper hand. The victory of fire when the earth felt its withering blast, occurred when the galloping steeds that draw the chariot of the sun swept Phaeton from the true course right out of the zone of the ether and far over all lands.” He knew about comets, which is why he said, “There is no lack of external bodies to rally out of infinite space and blast [the world] with a turbulent tornado or inflict some other mortal disaster.” This awareness made him think that the world was newly made, and perhaps in some sense it is. The wheel has come full circle. We now appreciate that the threat of comets and asteroids is real, although the distinction between comets and asteroids has grown blurred. What is no longer in doubt is that catastrophic impacts have occurred in the past, and that they will happen again. At the same time, the hypothesis that impacts and flood legends are related is beginning to experience a revival. A chink in the dam of prejudice against the idea actually began to appear in the 1940’s when two astronomers, Fletcher Watson and Ralph Baldwin, in separate books considered the implications of the discovery of near-earth asteroids (NEAs) and concluded that impacts were likely every million years or so. They were all but ignored. In 1942 H. H. Nininger, the famous meteorite researcher, gave a talk to the Society for Research on Meteorites entitled “Cataclysm and Evolution.” Because of his highly specialized forum, his remarks also went unheard in the wider astronomical community. He considered the danger following the close encounter with Hermes, the NEA discovered in October 1937 that passed within 670,000 kilometers of our planet, which can be compared with the moon’s distance of 384,000 kilometers. (Oddly, Hermes has never been found again. Its rediscovery is one of the prizes that asteroid hunters strive for.) If, instead, it had “smacked the earth in a single lump,” the consequences would “constitute a catastrophe of a magnitude never yet witnessed by man,” said Nininger.


Al-Duhaa ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (02) ◽  
pp. 01-16
Author(s):  
Muhammad Nabeel Musharraf ◽  
Basheer Ahmad Dars

Comparative religion is a field of study through which views of various religions about a particular topic or sets of topics can be collated, interpreted, and systematically compared for attaining useful insights and broadening the understanding of religious beliefs, behaviors, and actions [i]. The current research furthers the study of comparative religion by elaborating the conceptions or myths related to eclipses as found in various religions and cultures in the world. Written as a narrative literature review, it aims to collate these conceptions and opinions for comparative analysis. In this paper, we have studied the ‘myths’ and ‘mythology’ of the religions and cultures spread across Australia, Asia, the Americas, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. It is found that some common themes exist in the beliefs held by various people and religions. However, if we compare these themes with each other, they are found to be considerably different indicating that they have not come from a common source; people have been creating them at various points in history. However, very different to them is the Islamic perspective on the topic. It profoundly differs from the conceptions held in other religions. It does not say that the eclipses are caused by some giant creature eating up the sun, or because of the sun being imprisoned, or because of a fight between some ‘gods’, and so on. It rather explains them as a phenomenon of nature that invites reflection and pondering. This raises a very important question to ponder upon: Why did Islam not adopt any myths to explain the concept of eclipse unlike any other religion even though it could use them for its benefit? This paper answers it by explaining the nature and objective of the Prophet of Islam and the source of his knowledge which was that very Creator who created the sun and the moon and everything else. Another important point that the current research highlights is that there is an inseparable connection between the fields of history, science, religion, politics, culture, and psychology; none of them can be separated from each other if one wishes to obtain a holistic understanding of this topic as well as many other matters of the past, present, and future.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 126-141
Author(s):  
Md. Kohinoor Hossain

Only love to almighty Allah is the greatest love. From ages to ages, Allah has sent his messengers to preach only love to Him. Many destructions, disruptions, and explosions have occurred in this world. This paper tries to explore the causes of the great disasters in the world. The global people when they lead an invalid way, there occurs a terrible crisis. None of the worlds saves it. Only Allah can save global people. Today, the present world is full of share-ism, idolatry-ism, usury-ism, zakat-free-ism, killing-ism, injustice-ism, and inhumanity-ism. They practice about Gods and Goddesses. They believe that the sun, the moon, the stars, the trees, the stone, the angels, the jinn, and other animals can reach Allah. They are the dearest persons who are God, Gods, Goddess, and Goddesses related. Above eleven million people think and say that there is no creator of the universe. It is operating as automated. Marriages and sexism are human to animal. They practice as same-sex, polygamy, polygyny, and polyandry. Most of the global people pray to Materials, Death Guru, God, Gods, Goddess, Goddesses, Peer, Saai, Baba, Abba, Dihi Baba, Langta Baba, Khaja Baba, Joy Guru, Joy Chisty, Joy Baba Hydery, Joy Maa Kali, Maa Durga, Moorshid Kibla, Baba Haque Bhandary, Joy Ganesh Pagla, Joy Deawan Baggi, Joy Chandrapa, Joy Sureshwaree, Fooltali Kebla, Sharshina Kebla, Foorfoora Kebla, Joy Ganapati, Joy Krishnan, Joy Hari, Joy Bhagaban and Mazzarians. The new religions have preached in the world such as Baha’i, Kadyany, Khaljee, Din-E-Elahi, Brahma, and Humanism. The world is full of Shirkism, Moonafikism, Goboatism, Bohtanism, Mooshrikiaism, Oathlessism, and Khianotkariism. In the past, undetermined civilizations have vanished but none can save civilization. This Covid-19 great destruction is human-made. It is from climate change that comes to the global people as a great curse.


The Geologist ◽  
1863 ◽  
Vol 6 (5) ◽  
pp. 178-183
Author(s):  
S. J. Mackie

Whenever we begin to think about the formation of the universe we get at once into the realms of speculation, and the only value of our thoughts rests in their probability. In everything unknown we must first form an idea—that is, speculate; then, by partial gatherings of facts, or by positive reasoning, we may theorize. Ultimately, by the accumulation of evidence, we may prove that which, in the first place, we only imagined. When first men observed the sun, they regarded the earth as a flat plain, over which the sun passed in his heavenly course, and below which, at eve, he retired to rest. It was not until many ages had elapsed that the world came to be regarded as round, and even then it was long before the sun was considered as a fixed centre of the planetary system revolving round him.By no nation of ancient times has astronomy been more advanced than the Greeks. Not that the Greeks ever worked out much to a proved result, but they were an imaginative people, and they invented notions. If one theory or speculation was disproved, they invented another; and, hit or miss, they always seemed to have fresh ideas in reserve. In some things astronomical, as in many other things that the world believes in, we may be heretics, and we admit we do not adhere to all the cosmical, physical, geological, and spiritual tenets of the popular faiths. We may not entirely believe in the perfect stability of the universe; we may doubt the eternal endurance of the sun's bright rays; and we may not quite acquiesce in the unchangeable permanence of tne planetary orbits: in short, we do not believe in the permanence of anything whatever in creation. All ever has been change, and changeful all things ever will be. Diversity and change are visible in the first created things of which any relics have been left us.


ALQALAM ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Wasehudin Wasehudin

The search of a divine messages understanding should be sought in the newest formulation, so that the Scripture can provide a brilliant and glorious answer or it will be soothing the truth’s seeker in all problem forms, which is from the past, the present, and the future. The exclamation in the language of The Qur’an was revealed in various words forms: afala ta’qiluun, afala tatadabbarun, afala tubshirun and etcetera. Those words are a series of bids for people to constanly explore, make a review, and also do research through of education as the Caliphate task. The mind of this educational philosophy perspective is like two sets of the coin that cannot be separated from one another. If philosophy was crowned as “The Mother of Science” or The Mother of all Science kind, then of course mind will be the sun of science and the main media in the world of education.


2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivana Živaljević

The Anthropocene emerges as an aftermath of the long-held, pervasive belief in human exceptionalism, and a wake-up call to reconsider our being in the world as entangled with a plethora of other living selves. Along with ecological and social challenges facing all life on Earth, the very boundaries between Nature and Culture, biological and social, human and nonhuman are being destabilized. From an archaeological perspective, particularly relevant is the understanding of diachronic change through shifting webs of interspecies relations (sensu Tsing). By engaging with various strands of thought within archaeology, anthropology, ecology and ethology, this paper aims to offer a more inclusive, multispecies view of the past. Ultimately, a consideration of human and nonhuman histories as entangled, bears important implications for multispecies futures.


2010 ◽  
Vol 37 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 31-73
Author(s):  
Mark Atherton

Summary This article traces the interactions between the philologist and applied linguist Henry Sweet (1845–1912) and the anthropologist and evolutionist E. B. Tylor (1832–1917). Tylor was impressed by Sweet’s uniformitarian views on phonetic synthesis and word-division: that phonetic and grammatical processes observable in the present could be used to explain grammatical formation and inflection in the past. Conversely, Sweet’s views on language and its origins owe much to Tylor’s intellectualism and his doctrine of survivals. According to Tylor, ‘primitive man’ employed rational thought in his attempts to make intellectual sense of the world and its phenomena. In expressions such as ‘the sun rises’, vestiges of this primitive thought and animism then survive in the lexis and syntax of later, modern languages. Sweet used Tylorian material in his language textbooks, and the intellectualist theory was taken up by literary critics in the 1880s, e.g., in the Shelley Society — of which Sweet was a founding member, in order to explore the roots of poetic metaphor and figurative language as used in modern English poetry.


2014 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 262-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ted Toadvine

In a 1951 debate that marked the beginnings of the analytic-continental divide, Maurice Merleau-Ponty sided with Georges Bataille in rejecting A. J. Ayer’s claim that “the sun existed before human beings.” This rejection is already anticipated in a controversial passage from Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, where he claims that “there is no world without an Existence that bears its structure.” I defend Merleau-Ponty’s counterintuitive position against naturalistic and anti-subjectivist critics by arguing that the world emerges in the exchange between perceiver and perceived. A deeper challenge is posed, however, by Quentin Meillassoux, who argues that the “correlationism” of contemporary philosophy rules out any account of the “ancestral” time that antedates all subjectivity. Against Meillassoux, and taking an encounter with fossils as my guide, I hold that the past prior to subjectivity can only be approached phenomenologically. The paradoxical character of this immemorial past, as a memory of the world rather than of the subject, opens the way toward a phenomenology of the “elemental” past. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of the absolute past of nature and the anonymity of the body, as well as Levinas’ account of the elements at the end of the world, I argue that our own materiality and organic lives participate in the differential rhythms of the elements, opening us to a memory of the world that binds the cosmic past and the apocalyptic future.


1997 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 251-262

The past three years have been extraordinarily productive for the Bioastronomy community. In particular, the detection of extrasolar planets and the possible evidence for fossil life on Mars have given substance to the concept of life elsewhere in the universe, and reinforced the connection between life on Earth and its cosmic origin. The structure of this report follows the agenda from the highly successful IAU Colloquium 161 on Bioastronomy, organized by Cristiano Cosmovici and Stuart Bowyer on the island of Capri in July 1996. The content has been provided by attendees of that Colloquium. Given the breadth of the subject matter covered by this Commission, this report could not have been generated any other way, and I am most grateful to all the contributors.


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