Current Events 11/22/11

Giant, Dinosaur-Age Islands Found in Deep Sea? 

by Richard Lovett 

on National Geographic 

I read a mind-blowing article about how some scientist have found a dinosaur-age island. This "island" is actually two microcontinents. These two microcontinents are 1,000 miles off the coast of Perth, Australia and is about the size of West Virginia.   Scientists think that these micro-continents actually were part of India and Australia when they were connected to Gondwana. Gondwana was a super continent during the time of the dinosaurs. Something interesting that scientists and researchers found on these microcontinents was that it was not covered in basalt rock. Basalt rock is what is usually found on the seabed, instead they found granite, gneiss, and sandstone. All three of these are found on land, not in water. In the chunks of these materials they pulled up, they found several fossils in them. They found a few fossil fragments of bivalves. Bivalves are mollusks, this was important to researchers because they know bivalves live in shallow water not deep water, or land. These findings are some of the little evidence of Gondwana's existence. Gondwana's breaking apart is still a big mystery.  

I chose this article because in Humanities we have been talking about prehistoric times and I thought it would be a cool mix of science and humanities. I know this article is valid because it is on National Geographic which is a trusted website. It was also on digg.com, which I have read good articles on before. I found it very interesting how big land masses or microcontinents can be completely submerged over time. It is also kind of frightening because  our modern day continents might experience this. I am also intrigued by the fact that the we know so little about stuff like Godwana despite our fancy and complex technology that we have. Personally I think it is fascinating how fossils can tell us about something so long ago. Fossils can help us also make inferences. For example, they said that they found bivalves. This tells them that maybe these microcontinents had shallow waters.