Rod's Alter Ego

Wind, Earthquakes, and Dinosaurs

Finally a free moment to blog. Whew. Master has been down for a while with a bout of pneumonia so I've been laying low and doing what I can to succor him back to health. He's functioning at about 80% now, with the Augmentin making the difference by murdering the entire potpourri of nasty -coccus that have invaved his lungs and sinus cavity. Thanks GlaxoSmithKline.

I was home with him today and it was kind of crazy. Around noon the high winds that had been predicted started to blow so strongly you could feel the house shake. And warm winds at that, at least for Anchorage in February they were warm -- it's about 40 degrees outside. Then the earthquake hit. (Of course, we in Dogdom, prescient as we are about these things, knew the quake was coming before uprights actually felt it, but I didn't have enough time to jump off the bed and run downstairs to caution Master). Anyway, it was a pretty good shake, an early report said 5+, but fortunately no damage was sustained.

Why I don't know, but the ferocity of the elements outside today set me to thinking about dinosaurs again. There's a law (a principle actually) in geology called Uniformitarianism. Put forth by James Hutton in the 18th century it simply states that the earth's geological features as we see them today were slowly formed over time by the same processes we observe at work today. The principle stands in stark contrast, and was actually formed as a rebuttal to, the explanation put forth by catastrophism, which holds that all the geomorphologic features on the earth were formed by a series of catastrophic events.

While I don't care to dispute the view that the present is the key to the past, this doesn't mean that some processes didn't occur more frequently at certain times in the past. Take earthquakes for instance. Maybe back in the Cretaceous earthquakes occurred planet wide much more frequently and maybe more violently than they do today. Could it be that dinosaurs, being oviparous, came to a tragic end because their breeding season coincided with a time when the earth was undergoing an unprecedented spasm of violent seismic activity, and couldn't that have caused all the eggs to shake and break apart, or to roll into holes and crevasses, never to be seen again? Can you say extinction?

Sure, it's far fetched, and it does smack of catastrophism, but so does a meteorite, which in my mind fails the test of Occams Razor. Oh well, we'll probably never know for sure what caused ol' Dino to go extinct, but from now on every day I feel the wind blow and the earth shake I'm going to imagine all those fragile eggs rolling into the abyss.