Mass extinction, Asteriods, Volcanic Traps and why there is no Horsetail in Australasiawww.nealadams.com/nmu.html —Expanded Earth Theory Animation
Hi Neal,
Here is an interesting key to your expanded earth theory which you might be able to shed some light on. The Horsetail genus exists on all other land masses except New Zealand and Australia…since horsetail was so prevalent in the tropical land mass of the carboniferous…I cannot understand why Australasia (and perhaps Antarctica) doesn’t have evidence of it. Any Ideas?
Horsetail comprises 30 species of flowerless, rush-like plants allied to ferns, which grow in all continents except Australasia (NZ &Oz). The hollow jointed stems have a whorl of tiny leaves at each joint. Spores are produced in a cone-like structure at the top of a stem. Horsetails date from the Carboniferous period. The Carboniferous Period occurred from about 354 to 290 million years ago during the late Paleozoic Era; when much of the land was lush and tropical and there was an explosion of vascular plants (which later formed coal, which is why the period is called the Carboniferous). But the giant species were gone by the middle to late Permian, some 50 million years later. Phylum Sphenophyta, genus Equisetum.
Perhaps there is no horsetail in Australasia because of the Permian Meteor hit. 250 million years ago Australia and Antarctica were joined along with the bottoms of South America and South Africa. There is a 300 mile crater in Antarctica, 125 mile crater off Northwest Australia and a 200-mile-wide crater off the eastern coast of South America.
Since the meteor hit prompted the break up of Gondwanaland and the land was basically sterilized by the impact…perhaps horsetail was not given the chance to recolonize Australasia. Recolonization from less devasted areas of land away from the ground-zero sites did not occur before separation of landmass occured.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDbz2dpebhQ&feature=related —Siberian Traps mass volcanic event breaking open of crust, raised world temp. 5-10°C creating the Permian Mass Extinction, which made way for the age of the Dinosaurs. The Siberian Traps form a large igneous province in Siberia; estimates of the original coverage are as high as 7 million km²with a thicknesses of 12,000 feet. The massive eruptive event spans the Permian-Triassic boundary, about 251 to 250 million years ago and lasted for a million years. This a flood basalt event—Instead of isolated volcanoes spewing out lava, the crust split and curtains of lava were released. Also contributing to the extinctions was the fact that the Siberian Traps eruptions occurred near coal beds and the continental shelf, they also triggered very large releases of carbon dioxide and methane. The Siberian lava came up through the largest coal basin in the world. The vaporized coal would have produced immense amounts of carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide. (There is an unusually rich deposit of platinum metals associated with the Siberian Traps.)
A 300-mile-wide crater lies hidden more than a mile beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet…more than twice the size of the Chicxulub crater in the Yucatan peninsula, This meteor could have been 48 km (30 miles) across and is estimated to have struck 250 million years ago - the time of the Permian-Triassic extinction, when almost all the animals on Earth died out.
The Permian–Triassic (P–Tr) extinction event, sometimes informally called the Great Dying, was an extinction event that occurred 251.4 million years ago,[1] forming the boundary between the Permian and Triassic geologic periods. It was the Earth's most severe extinction event, with up to 96 percent of all marine species[2] and 70 percent of terrestrial vertebrate species becoming extinct.
Australia and Antarctica were joined at the time of the impact, and there is another crater (125 miles wide) related to this time period off Northwester Australia—Bedout crater. Today Australia's share of the world's known uranium resources is about one third and it produces about 22% of the world's mined uranium.
http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=969 These large asteroid hits K-T and P-T are associated with the larva outputs of the Deccan Traps-India and the Siberian Traps respectively. the Siberian Traps were almost at the antipode - the point. Apparently when a large meteor strikes the Earth and sends shock waves to the antipodal point creating flood volcanism. This is the theory of Michael Rampino, of New York University and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. In Rampino's view, one giant meteor - an asteroid or comet – crashed into southern Gondwanaland (the southern portion of the supercontinent
Pangea). This object, at least 10 miles in diameter, scooped out a crater some 125 to 200 miles wide and 25 miles deep. The impact released enough heat to trigger a worldwide forest fire and vaporize a significant amount of water from the ocean. Shock waves reverberating through the Earth touched off intense volcanism. Airborne soot and dirt from the impact and volcanism blanketed the Earth and stopped photosynthesis, triggering a mass extinction of species. If all that weren't enough, Rampino believes the impact was so severe it triggered the breakup of Gondwanaland, setting free the landmasses that would much later become South America, Africa, Antarctica and Australia. "In fact," he says, "I think there's a case to be made that large impacts may be the triggers for large-scale tectonic movements and massive volcanic eruptions. If this is true, then to a large degree, huge impacts control the geology and biology of Earth."
Rampino and Stothers noted that the solar system passes through the debris-strewn galactic plane every 30 million to 33 million years. Rampino's conclusion: A comet or asteroid 6 to 12 miles in diameter slammed into the Earth at an angle in southern Gondwanaland, forming the larger crater about 250 million years ago. The top of the object sheared off on impact, flew west and crashed to Earth near present-day South America, forming the smaller crater. A 200-mile-wide craterlike feature on the seafloor off the eastern coast of South America. The impacts triggered the breakup of Gondwanaland and led to the Permian mass extinctions.
Rampino believes that the Gondwanaland impact itself may have triggered the Siberian eruption. In the Permian, the Siberian Traps were almost at the antipode - the point on precisely the opposite side of the globe - of the impact site, Rampino says. It is his contention, supported by some theoretical modeling, that the interior of Earth transmits shock waves from an impact site to its antipode. If a plume of magma from the mantle happened to be poking up at the underside of the crust at this antipodal point in Siberia, Rampino says the shock from the meteor impact could have been enough to breach the crust here. This would have allowed the magma to rush up through the sedimentary rocks and cause lava to erupt onto the surface.
Rampino suggests a large meteor strikes the Earth and sends shock waves to the antipodal point, triggering flood volcanism there; He also contends that the asteroid that did in the dinosaurs 65 million years ago probably sent shock waves racing to the antipode of the impact site near Chixchulub in the Yucatan. That area was the Deccan Traps, a thick layer of basalt that covers much of west-central India. The age of the Deccan Traps is in accordance with this idea: 65 million years.
http://atropos.as.arizona.edu/aiz/teaching/a204/dino/Earth94.3.1.42.txt
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