03-October-2008, 01:28 AM
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Established Member
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Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Madison, Ohio
Posts: 1,701
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Quote:
Originally Posted by grant hutchison
Yes, thanks, I've read it, and I would echo your recommendation. 
I just pulled it off the shelf, and I see that his reference list handily overlaps yours, to a large extent.
He helpfully gives full titles and dates, so I'm seeing that your list mainly involves publications from the 1990s, dealing with an assortment of oxygen-related things: plant adaptations to fire, the flight of Carboniferous dragonflies, K-T impact effects, polar gigantism, and some of Robert Berner's older work using gas bubbles trapped in amber. Nothing so far jumps out at me as being both relevant to Mesozoic oxygen levels and up-to-date.
Are you aware of anything more recent, specifically countering Berner's 2005 model?
Grant Hutchison |
I too have them on my shelf and I echo Grant's sentiments. Since I live in the U.S. I am most familiar with what J. W. Powell would call the Arid Lands of the western part of the country. The most striking thing to me is that during the Mesozoic an amount of sediment that was laid down, with interruptions, prior to the Tertiary uplift that was simply enormous. A sea stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic waxed and waned while there were no ice caps. Vast coal seams formed during times of anoxic swamp deposition. Some even preserved dinosaur footprints that were discovered when the coal was removed and casts in clay and sand sediments were seen on the ceilings of the mine tunnels. We are talking about a time period of +- 185 million years. Through the geology of those sediments now exposed are clues to the past climate, but probably not with a resolution that we might find satisfying. To sort of all those years of ebb and flow with all the potential variables will suffice to employ an army of humans discerning one clue at a time and then to put the puzzle pieces together, more time. Berner's work is a good start, but I am certainly hungry for more.
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(By the way, I hate it that so many papers in the areas of planetary science and geology are not easily available to the dreaded "non-subscribers". It is like they are screaming at me: "YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH". Good, I feel better now.)
"Quaerendo inventis"
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