October 2005

A graduate student at the University of Colorado at Boulder have found tracks in Wyoming that were made by a swimming dinosaur. The fossilized tracks of this previously unknown dinosaur are thought to be around 165 million years old.

Debra Mickelson of CU-Boulder’s geological sciences department said the research team identified the tracks of the six-foot-tall, bipedal dinosaur at a number of sites in northern Wyoming, including the Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area. “It was about the size of an ostrich, and it was a meat-eater,” she said. “The tracks suggest it waded along the shoreline and swam offshore, perhaps to feed on fish or carrion.”

The dinosaur currently does not have a name.

For those living in the San Francisco Bay Area, both Stanford and Berkeley are hosting a lecture series on the 1906 earthquake. There are upcoming talks at both Berkeley and Stanford in the next two weeks on lessons learned from 1906 quake and fires as well as a talk on what it was like through the eyes of survivors.

@ UC Berkeley
7:30PM on October 20, 2005. Kevin Starr - The Great Earthquake and Fire of April 1906 - Lessons Learned (Located in 155 Dwinelle Hall)
7:30PM on October 26, 2005. Malcolm E. Barker - Through the Eyes of the Survivors (Located in the Sibley Auditorium)

@ Stanford
7:30PM on October 25, 2005. Malcolm E. Barker - Through the Eyes of the Survivors (Located in the Kresge Auditorium)

San Francisco City Hall after the 1906 Earthquake and Fire.

More information is also available from the 1906 Earthquake Centennial Alliance. Wikipedia also has a good article on the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake.

Note that today is also the anniversary of the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake as well.

Researchers from the Hebrew University’s Institute of Earth Sciences and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich have conducted experiments to characterize hot fluid activity happening at depths of 120 to 180 kilometers. Their studies have primarily focused on downward plunging plates in subduction zones, examining how much water is stored in the plates, how much dissolved material they contain, and when these fluids are eventually released from the plate.

In order to characterize the fluids participating in every stage of the downward water cycle, the Hebrew University and Swiss researchers developed a novel experimental and analytical laboratory technique by which the composition of a fluid phase can be directly analyzed following high pressure and temperature experiments. Their work focused on determining how much water is stored in the down-going earth plate, how much dissolved matter it contains, and when these fluids are released from the plate and transferred to the mantle.

Despite this recent article, a new bird like dinosaur, Buitreraptor gonzalezorum, was discovered in Patagonia. At 90 million years old, it pushes back the date for some of the oldest known raptors discovered in South America and also has implications on dating other dinosaur species.

“Buitreraptor is one of those special fossils that tells a bigger story about the Earth’s history and the timing of evolutionary events,” says Makovicky, lead author of the Nature paper. “It not only provides definitive evidence for a more global distribution and a longer history for dromaeosaurs than was previously known, but also suggests that dromaeosaurs on northern and southern continents took different evolutionary routes after the landmasses they occupied drifted apart.”

Researchers from the University of California at Santa Barbara have discovered some of the strongest evidence yet for a direct linkage between temperatures around tropical regions on Earth and the amount of greenhouse gases that are present in the atmosphere.

“The relationship between tropical climate and greenhouse gases is particularly critical because tropical regions receive the highest proportion of solar output and act as a heat engine for the rest of the earth,” said Lea.

Modern observations of tropical sea surface temperature indicate a rise of one to two degrees Fahrenheit over the last 50 years, a trend consistent with rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to fossil fuel combustion, according to the authors. The paleoclimate evidence from this new study supports the attribution of the tropical temperature trend to the ever-increasing greenhouse gas burden in the atmosphere.