How This Ship Digs Deep Secrets In The Sea?
The continent of Antarctica is completely covered by ice. Nothing is seen far and wide except snow. It is called the snowy desert.
But, it is not like that it has always been snowing in Antarctica. 120 million years ago, Antarctica was as green and full of life as the rest of the continents.
Paleontologists call that era the Cretaceous Mahayuga. At that great age, the climate of Antarctica was completely different from today's cold environment.
India, Australia, and Antarctica were connected. These three land expanses together made up the area of the South Pole.
Paleontologist Brian Huber says that today it is a big challenge to find evidence of old times on Antarctica. The reason for this is that the entire continent is covered by a thick layer of ice.
But it also has an advantage that the fossils of millions of years ago are safely buried in the ice.
In such a situation, many secrets of the past of Antarctica are held by the ocean in their arms. These secrets, hidden in great depths in the sea areas around Antarctica, tells the history of millions of years of Antarctica.
Digging Deep in the Sea
Brian Huber says that since the sixties, the history of the earth hidden in the layers of rock is being explored by digging in the deep sea. The cruise ship Joides Resolution, on a scientific mission, works to uncover these secrets from deeply hidden rocks in the oceans around the world.
Marine geologist Kara Bogus says that this ship is always looking for answers to some direct questions. From the rocks located inside the ocean, it finds out how tectonic plates, that is, the layers of rocks hidden in the Earth's womb, move.
What changes do they bring to the earth?
Where there is devastation and where are these changes a bargain of profit?.
Mission number 369 of this ship was to find out the conditions in Australia and Antarctica during the Cretaceous period. This was the era when dinosaurs were found on earth.
Geologist Richard Hobbes, aboard the Joides Resolution, seeks answers to all scientific questions. They say that we do not have deep knowledge about the history of the earth. Most of the millions of years old secrets of the earth are hidden in the sea.
The oceans are spread over two-thirds of the earth. Richard says that humans have so far explored only five percent of the ocean. Richard explains that this ship is specially designed to collect data from the depth of the sea and the bottom.
Such machines have been installed in Joides Resolution, which can go deep into the sea up to four kilometers and excavate rocks. You can collect samples from there. It is the only ship in the world with such capability.
Richard Hobbes is a very experienced geologist. They tell that the climate of the earth today is the result of a geological event that happened 120 million years ago. At that time the eastern part of the Indian subcontinent was connected to Antarctica and Australia. However, due to the movement of tectonic plates within the earth, these vast areas were separated from each other.
The Stream That Emanated From The Separation Of Australia
The separation of Antarctica and Australia resulted in a cold current flowing in the ocean. We know this as the polar ocean current or circumpolar current. Today the weather of the world is determined by this cold ocean current. It flows around the continent of Antarctica.
Fossils of microbes are found in the rocks which are extracted from the depths of the ocean. These reveal the age of the rocks. That is, it becomes known which era of the earth they belong to. These rocks also show what was the atmosphere on the earth at that time.
The story is that these rocks, which are millions of years old, act as an intelligent detective, who uncovers the secrets of millions of years old on the earth.
Brian Huber says that these rocks of different ages are different answers to a puzzle. When all these are added up, many questions get answered.
Carbon Dioxide Reached the Sea by Air
Layers of rocks reveal the role that volcanic eruptions played in the development of the Earth.
What were the changes on the earth due to the movement of rocks during that period?
How did the environment change?
When these rocks of the sea are placed in a way, then the answers to such questions are threaded to each other. And the chapters of the novel of the development of our earth are prepared.
Data collected from rocks of the Cretaceous age show that the amount of carbon dioxide in the ocean was very high at that time. Carbon dioxide from the air was continuously dissolving in the seawater. Due to this, the creatures of that era were suffocating. Many species of living beings perished like this forever.
The evidence of that era matches the environment of today. We are slowly moving towards the same phase. Today humans release a large amount of carbon dioxide into the earth's environment. This is just like the carbon dioxide released from the volcano was dissolving in the air in the Cretaceous era. But its speed is many times more than that period.
If we do not control our actions, then we are heading towards such a climate as it was in the Cretaceous era, when dinosaurs were counting their last breaths.
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