Maybe this post is a little off topic but I do have an interest in astronomy and cosmology and it does tie in with the theme of this site.

In the August Sky and Telescope magazine, starting on page 20, there is an article by Jeff Hecht which essentially covered the earth through geologic time as well as the progression of life through the 4.56 billion years of the planet’s history.

It is often asked by many outside of the scientific community, “Why haven’t we found life or at least some sort of signal from an intelligent race?”

We have only been looking for a few decades and our first radio transmissions have only penetrated a scant 90 light years into space so it is likely that no one has heard us either. I was watching a video recently of a talk that Dr. Sara Seager, (Ellen Swallow Richards Associate Professor of Planetary Sciences at MIT) gave on the search for life in our galaxy. Early on in her presentation she showed a graphic of the Milky Way Galaxy with a red dot on it signifying our place in the galaxy. She then asked rhetorically, “Where do you think we are looking within our galaxy for life?” She paused a moment then continued, “Within the red dot”…

Now where am I going with this you must be asking by now… Dr. Seagar’s red dot represented a sphere that encompassed an area within few hundred light years of Earth. We can think of space in this way representing an area and the amount of time that it takes light to cross it. With regard to finding life though, there is another time variable.

Let’s say there is a planet found within the red dot that is in the habitable zone around its star. Providing the elements are there (water, oxygen etc) to support life (as we know it), we might wonder what sort of life exists there. The type of life that exists there will be dependent on age of the planet.

What if we found a planet that had elements for life as we know it, but was only as far along as the Earth was at the time that the Tethys Ocean was at its largest extent (100-120 mya). The planet could have life, but would intelligent life have had time to evolve? All of this is assuming that the planet has a magnetic field and plate tectonics similar to the Earth. Without the magnetic field, life as we know it could still exist in deep oceans.

Maybe the planet was another 500 million years along than the Earth is now; the liquid core (assuming all else is similar) would have cooled and the planet had lost its magnetic field; plate movement will have slowed considerably. In this case life may have arisen then had already been wiped from the planet…

So when it comes to looking for planets with life, the other variable is the timing. Personally, I think it would be exciting to find all sorts of planet with life on them and determine how far along the planet is in its development. This is assuming that it is life as we know it.

Vanished Ocean by Professor Dorrik Stow is a great read if you know something of geology, oceanography and paleontology. One has to be interested to read this book. I am certainly one of those that are interested. 

Professor Stow takes the reader from inception of the Tethys Ocean through its “life” all the way to the closure of the Tethys as well as what the future Earth may look like. The Permian (PT) extinction is covered as well as the KT extinction. Was the KT extinction one big event (a meteor hit) or a combination of events that spelled doom for so many species? I think he presents an interesting case especially since nearly all of us armchair geologists/paleontologists spend more time watching History Channel and NatGeo specials on extinction events than we do research in the field.

I certainly felt a sense of place while reading the book. I attempted to read the book through the first time but realized that I did not know enough about geology or paleontology (I am stronger in oceanography and meteorology) to absorb everything. I am actually reading for the third time now and am indexing every term which may not be familiar to the amateur geologist/oceanographer/paleontologist to build a glossary of all things Tethys for this site. It will take a while. I may need a new copy of the book because mine is severely marked up with pink highlighter marks now.

Each chapter takes you through a different time period in chronological order. There is a small map of Tethys and surrounding landmasses at the given time along with ocean currents which are important. The author describes a few interesting experiences along the way in his years of research which I thought was a nice touch. I read other reviews of the book and some of the authors are correct; the book would have to be 1,000 pages long to go into details of every phase of Tethys.

I also do not think Professor Stow thought of the NY Times bestseller list when writing this book. It is a book for a niche. It is a work of passion; that certainly comes through in the book and I can understand and identify with passion.

See the video…

I figured out how to put all of the images into a flash animation. I am going to build a bigger animation for the video page which is blank now. I am finding more and more images for different uses as well.

With regard to Tethys resources, I have a lot and am finding more all the time. Some of them are within sites that require membership. I will link those anyhow.

The video in the feature box on the home page is an animation using powerpoint of images by Dr. Ron Blakey, Professor Emeritus NAU Geology. You can find all of these images and many more in a variety of representations at Global Paleogeography, a site by Dr. Blakey. He has generated many resources both globally and regionally.