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Antarctica mystery — 12 Comments

  1. Does this mean that there is no hole in the pole leading to a cavernous hollow earth world of dinosaurs and hairy midgets and Raquel Welsh clones scampering around in … whatever it was she scampered around in? (long time ago and I was just a kid)

    Just dead jellyfish?

    So much for science being fun.

  2. neonecocon says:One thing we do know is that it wasn’t caused by humans.

    There wouldn’t be much left to confirm or deny that even if there were humans back then.

    : o

  3. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
    Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
    – Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio

    It’s a wondrous universe.

  4. Neo, you are the real thing. Langdon Smith! I have loved that poem since my mom first read it to us (my twin brother and me) as children. Talk about one-hit wonders. He was a telegraph operator who became a reporter. The poem begged to be read aloud. The concrete images, the rich words — “Kimmeridge clay” and “Coralline crags” — the snap and lilt of the rhyme. It is fun to read it, to career through it at a flashing pace. I can still remember “Deep in the gloom of a fireless cave/ When the nights fell o’er the plain,/ And the moon hung red o’er the river bed,/ We mumbled the bones of the slain.” I loved that, “mumbled the bones.” Evolution “by the grace of God.” Happy New Year, Neo. Thanks for this, and for all your years of sound judgment, the wisdom of humility, the whimsy of a deep and eclectic mind, a wonderful sense of fun, honesty; yes, honesty. The best salon on the net.

  5. Ralph Kinney Bennett:

    Why, thanks!

    That poem created an amazing earworm for me as a child. It has such an insistent beat. Sort of like Poe (although with a different tone): “Once upon a midnight dreary, as I pondered, weak and weary…”

    And it’s really pretty deep at times, too. It’s easy to ignore some of what he’s saying, because the rhymes and the beat are so dominant and insistent. But phrases like “Till we caught our breath from the womb of death/And crept into life again” bear thinking about. He’s describing a resting period between lives, in a reincarnation sequence in which the “womb of death” (which seems at first glance to be a contradiction or oxymoron) expresses the idea of death being a springboard, phoenix-like, to a new life.

  6. If memory serves, the Deccan Traps in India occurred at about the same time as the Chixulub strike. It has been theorized that the impact caused the mantle plume for that volcanic event on a point on the globe nearly the opposite of meteor strike. I have often wondered if the Siberian Traps were formed in a similar event, but the geologic record didn’t show such a strike. Maybe now it does.

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