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On Darwin's Lost World - Part II

<< Previous page So what do we (did Darwin) know by now (then) ? That living creatures from the very very ancient past (we're talking in terms of millions of years) were often found preserved in the rock record. That we could make out some things about the past environments from these fossils. Fossils showed specific associations: you saw only certain types and groups of fossils in certain suites of rocks (belonging to different periods of geological time). There came a dead end at the base of the Cambrian. Scientists like to call this the Cambrian Explosion today, but back then, many of them were more inclined to dismiss this either as a figment of the imagination of relatively smaller body of researchers, or simply, incomplete/inaccurate science. That the Creator had made us all, was the popular view. 3 theories emerged to explain why we see the Cambrian Explosion (if it even is a real thing!): Charles Lyell Interestingly, it is said that Lyell was...
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On Darwin's Lost World

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Martin Brasier was a prolific paleontologist. And from what little I know of him, he must have been a pretty cool guy. I recently read his book "Darwin's Lost World" and it was definitely one of the better decisions of my life. On Darwin Thankfully, even the most plebeian of science curricula finds it worthwhile to describe Charles Darwin's scientific accomplishments. To me, all through childhood, Darwin represented my superiority to the apes. When someone said Darwin, I would get a mental picture of an ape gradually turning human. That's an overly simplistic picture, but then again, there is so much to learn about everything  that one doesn't quite know where to start. Source The rock record is the only thing that can give us a picture of the ancient Earth. Most other branches of science can tell you what the Earth is like, and why it is the way it is. But it was Geology that first told us what the Earth was  like, and bits of why it w...
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What is ENSO? Page 2 - SSTs and trade winds

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  This is Page 2 of the sub-series "What is ENSO?". If you haven't already, please read Page 1 first. For convenience, keep that page open in a different tab. = = = What is ENSO? In the previous post , we learnt to identify ENSO phases from the perspective of sea surface temperature anomalies . In this post, I'm going to answer a question that no one really asked ―  What if I wanted to identify ENSO phases from the perspective of sea surface temperatures (SSTs) instead? What if, for no good reason but because I felt like it, I wanted to do away with the "anomalies" bit? Looking at SSTs instead of SST anomalies makes matters unnecessarily complicated, but we're going to do it anyway because it also teaches us a lot. In the image below, I've plotted SSTs from the HadISST dataset. These are mean SSTs for the months of December, January and February (DJF) over all years from 1872-2009. Why did we select the months of DJF? Because ENSO events can be seen...
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