This is a fascinating video just for all the neat extinct animals it illustrates. Basically the guy just walks you through the massive evolutionary radiation of different animal types that happened after the dinosaurs got wiped out. There are really giant bunnies, a snake that’s the largest animal on Earth, whale ancestors walking around both on dry land and under the water, and dry land walking “hoofed” alligators (busy eating the proto-horses of the era – Yeah, I’m not liking the idea of a ‘gator that chases down horses on land either…)
Now in general, when watching it, one big take away is that extinction is frequent, common, and does NOT need people to happen. It’s an arms race and most critters lose it.
Also of interest is just all the strange paths nature takes. Sea Cows closet relative is the Elephant. There was a giant carnivorous land duck / goose. Ever have one them mean buggers chasing you at the park? (One pecked / bit my 3 year old kid back in the day). Well, imagine it being 6 foot tall… Then there are some very bizarre animals that were alive when people entered the Americas that now we think of as horrific monsters. Now THAT would make an interesting movie!
But what really “lit me up” was near the end when he got to whales. Seems they were mostly small until fairly recently in evolutionary terms. Then, suddenly, a lot of baleen plankton eaters got real big real fast. (Discussed at about 44 minutes to 47 in the video) What happened? A lot of cold deep water formed as the ice age began when the Isthmus of Panama formed and rearranged the ocean currents.
So here we have two things in the evolutionary record, attested. Closure of the Isthmus caused Ice Age formation. Rearranged ocean currents can cause dramatic climate change. I think that makes the notion of lunar tidal current re-arrangement (that is known to happen) a much stronger contender for “climate changes” than CO2.
Post Script
This article discusses the whale paper and has the following reference in it:
Reference:
Graham J. Slater, Jeremy A. Goldbogen, Nicholas D. Pyenson. Independent evolution of baleen whale gigantism linked to Plio-Pleistocene ocean dynamics. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2017; 284 (1855): 20170546 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2017.0546
The Paper:
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/284/1855/20170546
Abstract
Vertebrates have evolved to gigantic sizes repeatedly over the past 250 Myr, reaching their extreme in today’s baleen whales (Mysticeti). Hypotheses for the evolution of exceptionally large size in mysticetes range from niche partitioning to predator avoidance, but there has been no quantitative examination of body size evolutionary dynamics in this clade and it remains unclear when, why or how gigantism evolved. By fitting phylogenetic macroevolutionary models to a dataset consisting of living and extinct species, we show that mysticetes underwent a clade-wide shift in their mode of body size evolution during the Plio-Pleistocene. This transition, from Brownian motion-like dynamics to a trended random walk towards larger size, is temporally linked to the onset of seasonally intensified upwelling along coastal ecosystems. High prey densities resulting from wind-driven upwelling, rather than abundant resources alone, are the primary determinant of efficient foraging in extant mysticetes and Late Pliocene changes in ocean dynamics may have provided an ecological pathway to gigantism in multiple independent lineages.
Sudden increase in whale size when oceans cool and upwelling increases
So all we need to do to end ice ages is to nuke Panama (operation plowshare) to create the straits of Panama and restore circulation between the Pacific basin and the Atlantic.
/sarc (no I don’t want to fix things I don’t know are broken)
@Larry:
Well, yes.
I know you don’t want to fix it now, but when the folks in New York City are looking at an approaching ice wall 100 yards high, headed for a mile high over their heads, they might just decide it is worth it.
;-)
About Wind:
The guy also talked about more offshore winds causing greater nutrient turnover and raising cold bottom water… While cleaning up tonight (from dinner and a lard rendering first try) I got to thinking… (which tends to happen when the hands are busy and the brain is bored…)
I’ve noticed that the winds now are stronger than before. More like they were back in the ’60s. Rarely dead stop anymore. We’ve also entered a more meridianal jet stream phase. The “loopy jet stream” now has a much longer path around the planet and seems to be moving faster.
Could that be the mechanism by which a solar minimum causes cooling? More wind from a merdianal jet stream turning up more cold bottom water?
We would need temperature vs depth profiles for lots of places around the planet to know if the cold deeps are now getting more like the cold shallows. I’m pretty sure the data doesn’t exist. A proxy for it might be just the frequency of El Nino vs. La Nina cycles. Or perhaps the PDO / AMO says something about overturning. Wind drives the currents more than anything else, so it would make sense that wind could modulate the overturning, and through it the temperature… So what modulates the winds? And is the idea that a meridianal jet stream is a faster surface winds valid?
Oh Dear! Looks like “Often Wrong” Michael Mann may have the right data but the wrong conclusion on Wind!
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-e-mann/global-warming-speed-bump_b_4756711.html
He then confounds bringing UP cold water with sending DOWN heat. It doesn’t work that way, The dispaced water gets pushed, along the surface, toward the poles where that heat radiates to space. The heat does not magically move counter current against the up-welling cold water.
So basically he says winds ARE stronger and making more cold upwelling. Instead of stopping with those facts and saying “Gee, that makes it colder” and realizing what that means; he goes off into fantasy wrong way heat flows and all sorts of other crazy stuff.
But I’m happy with the bits that:
Winds ARE higher and have been for at least a decade.
That DOES cause more cold up-welling and surface cooling (the uncomfortable ‘pause’ in the cooked data – while snow is stacking up in mid-April across the entire northern half of North America and Britain is running a few weeks maybe headed for a month late on spring crops, and that indicates it is actually getting colder not just pausing.)
I think the process / thesis “has legs”. We just need to get “Wrong Way Mann” out of the discussion…
Winds are driven by pressure differentials which are in turn created by the Hadley cell circulation.
The larger the differential in temperature between the equator and the poles the more drive for the winds as I understand it.
Warming at the poles and cooling at the equator (extra clouds or wind driven over turning of the ocean) should suppress global winds and cause warming over the whole planet, but at some point as the delta T drops and the winds go relatively quiet the poles would cool again and the equator could warm and the process repeats on – – – Oh perhaps a 30 year cycle??
https://www.seas.harvard.edu/climate/eli/research/equable/hadley.html
Don’t forget about Kelvin and Rossby waves. Pehaps deep water brine current impacts on phytoplankton helped whale growth?
I recall watching this Koch production a few years ago and found it interesting enough to share.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/earth-from-space.html
IMHO, I think this little event had a significant impact on our Pale Blue Dot and it must have been an SAUV (Stone Age Utility Vehicle) that done it! ;-)
@ossqss “SAUV (Stone Age Utility Vehicle)“ – excellent
@ossqss:
That jpg is fascinating. It had never occurred to me that there was still an ice sheet just 7000 years ago. If it was still over northern Canada, where else was still covered? That’s only 5,000 BC and at the start of historical civilization.
Not the image you get when folks say the Holocene started 12 kya…
The ice melt kinda correlates with the 20,000 years of SLR we have had, and mass migrations too ;-)
That image is from here. https://www.glerl.noaa.gov/education/ourlakes/background.html
Whales being a product of ice ages is one of those things that is obvious once someone tells you. I guess we never thought of it before. But their bodies are built for cold (all that blubber). And now we know how they got so big – all that seafood – without the competition from walking gators!
I saw this paper hyped the other day and never got around to checking it out. Dr. Roy did it for me. Interesting how so many media hyped things can’t pass closer inspection..
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2018/04/the-100th-meridian-agricultural-scare-another-example-of-media-hype-exceeding-reality/
At one time the central western plains were called “The Great American Desert”, and there ARE massive sand dunes under the thin surface layer, but it becomes that way during COLD, not during WARM. Warm times have more Gulf moisture pulled up into the central USA and more water making more green growth. Right now we’ve taken a cold turn from the sun going quiet; the result? Lots more snow and precipitation from the loopy jet stream.
It would sure help if the folks doing these crap studies would read about the geology of the place they are studying and compare / contrast the Ice Age Glacial and LIA surface conditions to interglacial and Roman Optimum conditions. Then at least they might get the sign right…
Evolution requires chaotic conditions that created new niches for survival. A “new” or different type species can not evolve into a niche that is being successfully exploited by an existing species.
I have traveled much of the North Pacific and have seen the bloom of life where the cold nutrient rich waters up-well into the sun warmed surface waters. Deep blue seas turn reddish green with life, some times so dense that it makes windrows on the surface. Great shoals of fish search the oceans for these blooms of life and the sea mammals hunt the fish. Baleen’s also hunt these blooms and can intake tons of rich seafood in a short time. Then travel for days or months to find the next. In the sea, large size is a positive survival advantage if you can feed it.
The human foot and upright stance indicates that hominoids have been ground walkers for a very long time. The tree Apes are very niche limited as they must live and travel in forested jungles. They require the stable conditions of Equatorial jungle. Meanwhile the ground Apes can follow the need to find better living conditions as climate conditions change. The more I think on this the more I feel that ground apes are the general ape line and the tree apes are the specialists that have evolved to exploit a particular forest/jungle niche. Tool making exists among many species that find the need for it, Humans are just very good at it. Humans can even reinvent their own behavior and tool kits to fit the needs that they find on their walk around and fill every niche of life from Arctic to equator, from mountain to desert. Today, even ocean to space. Even more important they can teach unborn generations the abilities needed to survive in conditions they have not yet encountered.
This communication system that we are using is as important as speech and memory in human species evolution. The thing that concerns me about this is the level of civilization needed to maintain this tool system. For some reason the “Educated Elites” just don’t get it. There is a vast tail that makes their privileged lives possible. Millions of little people are needed just to keep these computer/communication systems functioning. Hundreds of millions to keep the darkness at bay…pg
At the time the high plains east of the Rockies were referred to as “The Great American Desert” the word desert had a different connotation than it does today. At that time barren steppes with no timber and little water were considered “desert” because without pumped water they were not suitable for farming.
From the perspective of folks from the Ohio river valley, and Mississippi river valley where there was reliable water at the bottom of almost every draw between ridge lines, it was a forbidding place for horses oxen. In St Louis Mo. The average annual rainfall is between 42 and 45 inches per year, On the high plains average rain fall drops suddenly to between 15 and 10 inches per year. At La Junta Colorado a short distance from the old Sante Fe trail on the Arkansas river, average rainfall is 11.5 inches. At Limon on today’s I70 it is just over 15 inches as is Denver. At Pueblo the average is 13 inches but in all those locations in a dry year the annual precipitation can be half the average, in which case almost all water courses run dry in the late summer. Twice in my lifetime we have had annual precipitations of only 7.5 inches here in the Denver Metro area, (2002, 1954)
There is a vast area south of the Platte River in Nebraska and southern Wyoming to the Arkansas river in southern Colorado where timber is almost unknown except in isolated seasonal drainages and seeps. Without intimate knowledge of were water could be found, it could not be crossed by covered wagon or horse back especially in late summer.
The Oregon trail in the north and the Sante Fe trail on the south pretty much defined that zone between them until about 1855 and later.
It was not until the mid 1850’s that alternate routes were developed along the Smokey Hill trail, and the Republican River trail into the heart of the high plains.
@Larry, yes, the definition of desert has changed over the years. Generally it is considered that 20 inches of rain fall is needed for dependable non-irrigated agriculture, More or less, depending on the crop. Also the timing of wet season to crop growth season is of importance. Fertility is of great importance as well in beneficial use of the water available. The increase in fertility in the soil as well as in the air (CO2) results in reduced water demands by the plant to complete it’s life cycle…pg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandhills_(Nebraska)
The Wiki is then infested with Warmista Rabid Speculation that Global Warming will make it a worse desert in the future. I just find it fascinating that it essentially admits the Medieval Warm Period A) Existed and B) was warmer!
Don’t know exactly when it transitioned from sandy to not, or when the “desert” aspect became less so dominant, but “not that long ago” and “not so much” since it isn’t a peaches and ice cream environment today…
For my money, it’s still a desert… You can drive all day in Nebraska and not see a Starbucks!
;-)
Yes we are right on the edge of being true desert (modern connotation) as I recall the precipitation cut off is around 6-8 inches of precipitation per year or less for several years.
I bet if you got to digging you would find that during the 800 year drought in the Midwest that the sand hills almost reverted to true desert and only recently have recovered.
This PDF seems to confirm that – there were reports in the 1860’s news accounts of drought conditions of blowing sand and deep drought engulfed much of the great plains in the 1300’s
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0477%281998%29079%3C2693%3AYODVIT%3E2.0.CO%3B2
Another reference confirming the same thing just a few hundred years ago the Nebraska Sand hills were a sand dune desert.
http://netnebraska.org/article/news/931581/dating-drought-nebraskas-sandhills
When you get to areas such as the Sand Hills, a hot range fire can turn range grass lands into blowing desert for many years until the dunes cover reheals and drifting halts. After the roots and duff accumulates a fire starts and all the organics burn off again. Reset, the dunes move again. General points of view may not reflect local realities. Accepted facts are not! forest and brush consume vast amounts of water. Bare rocks and soils accumulate deep horizons of moisture that feed springs and grasslands that become brush and tree covered, that burns off to become bare once again. The Great Basin exists at the edge of wet/dry. It has one drainage, The Colorado River, much of it is comprised of closed drainage’s, A very small increase in water accumulation in the Basin results in thunder storm recycling. At present the Jet Stream storm line just skirts the northern edge of the Basin…pg.
Speaking of Great Basin, 14,000 years ago when it rained a little more, it had big lakes…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Bonneville
So what’s going to happen when the Ice age Glacial returns Nevada / Utah start to fill up with water again?
Folks get all excited about the ice up north. They tend to forget about the changes where the hydrology changes…
So the interesting question is just the timing on the drought in the Great American Desert vs the Lake Bonneville… Are they in sinc, or anti-sync? Or uncorrelated?
(Talk about your Climate Change! And no SUV or coal burning involved…)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Lahontan
So want lake front property? Buy some desert dirt in Nevada or Utah and wait for the next glacial…
We have existence proof of that theory, we are very close to being able to sustain a growing lake Bonneville again. About every 10- 12 years the land speed races at Bonneville get rained out due to the course never drying out enough to allow racing. In 2014 and 15 there was standing water on the course for all but a few weeks in late June and early July, and the normal dry out in August never happened.
Same thing happened in the early 1990’s and of course the flooding of 1983 which almost put the airport under water.
https://www.ksl.com/?sid=41402975&nid=148
20 – 50 years of precipitation in that class would regrow the old Provo stand lake Bonneville so that a shallow lake extended from the middle of what is now Salt Lake City to the Nevada boarder 114 miles away.
An amazing amount of BS is still included in the above. Not everything but a lot. I used to live in the bottom of one of the “lakes” that is now dry, Lake Surprise, in the north east corner of California to the north of Pyramid Lake area.
Another lake in northern California that is missed in their science was the one responsible for the moisture plume that flooded the Great Basin. During the volcanism that created the “Devil’s Garden” a lava flow blocked the Pit River to great depth at Fall River. Backed water up to Alturas at the foot of the 8 to 9,000ft Warner Mountains. Evaporation from this lake created an enhancing of the west to east moisture flow. This moisture plume caused very heavy precipitation in the Warner Mountains, the filling of Goose Lake to the west into Oregon and Lake Surprise to the east, both of which added to the accumulation of moisture in the plume into the Great Basin to the south and east. Lake Surprise also over flowed into the Basin by way of the Blackrock/Smoke Creek area and Pyramid. Goose Lake and the Pit River are the real headwaters of the Sacramento River and drain a huge amount of the area. The lake of the Pit only lasted for a few thousand years before it eroded the volcanic dam and drained the area and the Great Basin dried out. Goose Lake is now 50 feet below it’s outlet on the Pit River. Lake Surprise once 15 by 70 miles 450 feet deep is often dry. To the north in Oregon alongside the North Warners is Warner Lake that also fed into the Basin. Today little moisture gets past the Warner Mountains and into the northern Great Basin. This drying out may have taken place as recently as 3,000 years ago.
Lake Sacramento may well have drained even more recently according to Indian myth…pg
@P.G.:
There’s a lot that is above your last comment. Perhaps you could narrow down what part you think is the BS part? The Wiki stuff? Nebraska Sand? Whales?…
BTW, I thought the last recorded occurrence of Lake Sacramento was 1862? Folks had to row around the city. After it dried out they raised the dirt level 14 feet so as to not need boats again…
Somewhere around ’64 ( I was so young I don’t remember the year) my Dad was driving near the Sutter Buttes with me in the car. It was a flood year and all I could see for miles was water, and the road elevated about a foot above it. We had 12 miles to go to get home and my Dad was racing the waters… It had stopped raining so we had hope it would not rise more. We did make it. But I’ve seen that area when the Buttes are about the only dry thing you can see.
It goes on from there to list many more floods of the following decades.
I know he wants to call 1964 the eighth in that series… but it’s that 170 year period that I find interesting. Very close to the 179 year solar period. Now that 1862 +170 = 2032 or about the point we are supposed to be well into this Grand Solar minimum…
Hmmm….
About pg. 40 he covers mechanism that, interesting to note, needs a loopy jet stream… like we know have again as the sun has gone quiet…
It’s quite a good read and full of lots of fascinating historical severe weather information not found elsewhere (or there, but not easy to find scattered in old newspapers). I also like their “style”. It reminds me a lot of us Skeptics. Not worried about SJWs or PC.
As to Lake Sacramento, the flooding of the Great Valley in historic times. There have been several times that there was in fact a Great Lake of the West Coast. The Conquistadors were told by the Aztec of a place far to the north of them that contained great riches of Gold, this place was on islands in an inland sea. While I was very young in the Sacramento area I took note of the bench marks on the El Durado Hills above. The Valley/Lake used to exit by way of the Salinas River before the present outlet was cut. From time to time the north south slippage of faults along the coast has sealed off the valley’s outlet and flooded the valley for an extended time. Anytime that lake fills moisture is pushed over the Sierra into the Great Basin. Climate change may be as much geologic changes as Solar. California is a very active place to live and it is not just political…pg
As to Lake Lahonton, rather then a vast lake, it was more an area of lakes with little or no surface connections. or drainage for most of the area.
I have covered much of the northern part of this area in vehicle, afoot and by air and marveled at it’s topography and geology. today there is even Google mapping to use. Such a wonder! almost as good as being an Eagle that flies over the land…pg
@P.G.:
I think we’re off from each other by about 1/2 million years… You are talking long term slow geology, I’m talking faster precipitation & hydrology changes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Corcoran
So that whole Salinas River drainage and massive deep inland lake thing was about 1/2 million years before the last lake Sacramento via flooding events and the waning of Lake Bonneville and Lake Lahonton at the start of the Holocene.
Now the interesting question out of this is how long it took those Basin Province lakes to dry up. They originally FORMED about while this wet Central Valley was in existence. ( I’m pretty sure there will be enough error band in the earliest dates for both to allow 50,000 to 100,000 years of overlap time between end of Lake Corcoran and start of Basin Province lakes.)
So there could be the case that a flooded California was needed to form the Basin Province lakes, but once it is full of water, it can persist without a flooded California (at least until some other major shift happens like a very dry Holocene…)
In which case we could have an oscillator in the lake system. Enough hysteresis on each end such that you only get it to form when the West is really really wet, but it only goes away when things are really really dry… And now that the Carquinez Strait exists, I can’t see the Central Valley losing its drainage again short of some massive volcanism or uplift beyond anything seen before.
Curious…
Interesting… We’ve got a 500,000 million year ago probable formation date for Lake Bonneville in Utah, but I can’t get a numeric date for the formation of Lake Lahonton. (though I’ve only looked for a few minutes). Best I can get is a vague reference to it being about the time humans first arrived. (Which is itself disputed a lot).
Hmmm…. Looks like the two giant lake processes are disjoint. Nevada Lahonton more tied to wet California, Bonneville not so much.
Also interesting that Encyc. Britannica seems clueful about prior climate changes vastly beyond the present AGW Panic.
I’m going to quote heavily from it just to preserve it against the Global Warming Langolears… I’m bolding some bits that are interesting from a “Natural large changes” POV.
https://www.britannica.com/science/Holocene-Epoch/Holocene-environment-and-biota
Gee, sounds kind of like “The Great Flood” and “It rained for 40 days and 40 nights”… ;-) Also they note 2 “warm stages”, as opposed to now not being so warm. Then in the next bit, gee, solar variation…
So it was hotter. Significantly hotter, and that was the time of “milk and honey”, then it started getting colder and dryer… to now.
Then it goes into detail on some periods (note bce-ce is B.C./A.D.):
This cool period description gives a lot of clue about what we can look for in our present cooling.
Now that all matches what I learned in various biological sciences and geology classes over the decades. Natural changes, found in the dirt, and climate changing all by itself; often with a solar variation correlation.
I suspect just mining the old records of research in those fields, plus old encyclopedias and text books could give a lot of clue as to what is to come.
@EMSmith; when I was young and observed those Bench marks on the hills above Sacramento, they were pronounced. When in the area last year, 60 years later, they are nearly invisible.
That would indicate that the last filling and drainage of the Central Valley was quite recent. maybe a few thousand years, not tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years ago.
The Lake Sacramento flooding of the last 300 years were weather events that flooded the Valley to about the 50 foot elevation above sea level. This took several months to drain out. Serious movement along the Hayward fault could block that drainage for quite some time. Evaporation in normal rain fall years will exceed the inflow when the valley is flooded to about Chico, 70 feet elevation. Mare Island in the River outlet into the Bay is the alluvial fan created during the last wash out of the blockage during the last sea level high point. 3000 years ago ? The Great Central Valley has been a Great Lake many times over the last few million years. The last time was not so long ago…pg
“I suspect just mining the old records of research in those fields, plus old encyclopedias and text books could give a lot of clue as to what is to come.”
Good thing Connolley cannot edit Britannica. But I guess in the internet age, old tomes are taboo.
Interesting discussion of mass balance of Rocky Mountain National Park glaciers and the many factors that control their growth. Some are controlled by build up of wind blown snow from adjacent accumulation areas, others by timing of spring snows (fresh white snow in spring slows ablation due to sun exposure, vs dirty snow crust when spring snows are missing)
I think the important takeaway from all this indirect geophysical evidence is that climate is not nearly as stable at the global warming community would like people to believe and undergoes rather substantial periodic changes over short millennial time scales. Lakes appear and flourish as an ecosystem for a couple thousand years than in just a few hundred years changes to a marsh land then flat valley floor highly favorable to agriculture. Streams swell and then dry up to trickles, snow fields and glaciers are dominant for a century or more than rapidly retreat only to advance decades later.
Too bad students are not required to take physical geography classes where this sort of long term historical tracking of climatic impacts could be taught.
Historic changes in Arapaho Glacier over the last century.
Photographic time lapse of Arapaho glacier over the last century
Recent history of these glaciers over the last 3 millennia or so, shows at least 3 different advance and retreat cycles
Dating of Indian Peak Glacier advances using
lichenometry from growth of Lichen on glacial debris
For timing on the glacial advances in Rocky Mountain park the glacial high stands of the Arikaree advance in the above link are placed at about AD 250, The second at AD 550 and the most recent at AD 950.
The above shows that century long ice retreats are not uncommon in this area, as the most recent century long retreat of Arapaho glacier appears to have been similar to the Gannett Peak retreat from A.D. 950 to A.D. 1050
The big Elephant in the room involving extinctions based on the Darwin Principles is the fact that the Dinausaurs that according to connventional science and wisdom have been wiped from the face of the earth 65 million years ago due to a comet impact wouldn’t be able to live on our planet today due to a change in gravity which by conventional science and wisdom today is pushed as an Universal Gravity Standard that must explain all that happens in the universe from black holes to pulsars and degradates solid iron astroids and comets to the level of “dirty snow balls” to explain their tails. We really have to start thinking out of the box like the Electric Universe guys are doing. If fluctuations in gravity caused the extinctions of the dino’s it would explain why the land living ancestors of the wales mutated back into sea living animals again and why a little mouse like mamal could become the predecessor of human kind. We still have a lot to take into account and a lot to learn.
I gave the curren President of Panama a call if he would be prepared to give up his country to prevent the next ice age and he wasn’t very enthousiastic about that idea. Looking at Ice Age temperature reconstructions Panama and Alska are the only “warm” places left so it will be crowded there. LOL
And there is still the unanswered explanation for the extinction of the Mega Fauna that roamed the planet untill 13.800 years ago.
The fact is that we are still wrestling with the question “What’s Gravity”.
https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2015/04/06/charged-gravity-2/
Fooling around with gravity
One day….
@R. de Haan:
It isn’t gravity. It’s done with magnets:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levitron
Pretty simple really.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin-stabilized_magnetic_levitation
There are a very large number of Great Mysteries that evaporate on closer inspection and without need for rewriting physics. Such as megafauna extinction in 13000 BP. All it takes is a rock into the ice sheet of Canada. All the needed indications are there for it to have happened.
And that, in a nutshell, is my complaint about the electric universe folks. They try to explain all sorts of things with it that need no exotic explanation. That’s something carnival barkers exploit. Real Science ™ works in the opposite direction. Occam’s Razor first and above all, extraordinary claims needing extraordinary evidence.
Per dinosaur “problems”:
In general, when someone says “It can’t be” about nature, I look for the bogus part of their assumptions. Things like “It would take sooooo much muscle to hold that neck up”. Well, that’s assuming it was done with muscles. Note the spines on the backbone. There were major ligaments from those spines making a suspension system (rather like we use on very long bridges today). So they may well have had necks less flexible than ours with less range of motion, but well suited for the motions they needed.
Similarly, the “let’s use a human weight lifter for our max standard” assumption that all muscles are more or less the same. Unfortunately, they are not. Humans are, in fact, often the weaklings on a power / lb basis. Even if you look at our closest living relative, the chimp, that has something like 98% identical DNA; it is stronger / lb that we are. I’ve heard 4 x many times, but this article only says 1.5 x. Still, a 50% bump in an almost identical critter is indicative of a large potential range.
https://gizmodo.com/scientists-have-finally-figured-out-why-chimps-are-so-d-1796424304
Now that doesn’t even involve any new kind of muscle genetics or fiber types. Just more or less of two kinds of muscle fibers we already have.
What kind and what proportion of muscle fibers were in animals 100 Million years ago? I’ll wait….
dum dum de dum… tweedle de de… de dum dum…
Yeah, nobody knows. We can GUESS it’s kind of like birds. Yet even there the strength of a Canadian Goose that flies at 35,000 feet where people would simply die, or even little humming birds that fly a few thousand miles every year just to nest where it’s nicer; well, not many people could walk back and forth between Oregon and Costa Rica twice a year… So I’d speculate that birds have better muscles and better breathing apparatus to support them for intensive activity. To the extent that’s true, and representative of dinosaurs, I’m not seeing a problem with Dino-physiology.
BTW, note that an ostrich, with head / neck proportions rather like a lot of dinosaurs, doesn’t seem to be having much of a problem holding it’s neck out. Nor much problem running as fast as a car on a drumstick about the size of a weight lifter’s forearm.
I’m pretty sure the dinosaurs were just tough strong old birds, rather like the ones running around today, but with teeth.
Now again, this fits the same mode as my general complaint about the Electric Universe folks. There’s just no need to run off to variable gravity land to explain dinosaurs as long as a little bit of different muscle fiber and some real world examples that are NOT human and closer to them are used for your “thought experiments”.
The “special pleading” by “this unrelated species looks limited therefor that other unrelated species MUST NOT BE ABLE” is just wrong. By that reasoning no land animal can exist because fish die out of water, and no bugs can survive radiation because humans, birds, and bats can’t. Yet we know that land animals exist and bugs are less bothered by radiation and survive while we cook.
So first look for simpler closer to home explanations for things before leaping off the cliff of changing fundamental forces… Even if it is “No Fun”. ;-)
On the topic of climate change, ocean currents, atmospheric moisture etc, we may have a new national record for 24 hour rainfall from Hawaii.
http://denver.cbslocal.com/2018/04/26/hawaii-rain-gauge-records-nearly-50-inches/
Related I suspect we have massive rains and flooding in Israel.
Twitter video of street flooding
https://www.timesofisrael.com/9-youths-missing-after-class-trip-swept-away-by-flash-flood-near-dead-sea/
Yeah, that wet period is what I expected. 30 years of deep ocean warming with high UV levels, now turned to 30 years of evaporative cooling with both deeper water dumping heat as it gets pulled to the surface by higher winds, plus sunlight as IR causing more prompt evaporation.
This ought to continue for the next decade or two… until eventually the top couple hundred feet of the ocean have lost the excess heat from the high solar cycles. Then we ought to go really cold AND dry…