Word: ericson
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Scientists once held that there were four ice ages, each as long as 100,000 years, separated by warm periods of at least comparable duration. But Emiliani's investigations, and also those of Columbia University's David Ericson and Goesta Wollin, have shown that the ice ages were as short as 10,000 to 20,000 years. Moreover, Emiliani says, the climatologically comfortable intervals between them were also geologically brief. Thus, Emiliani warns, the present period of "amiable climate," which has already lasted 12,000 years, may soon come to an end, perhaps within the next...
Could life evolve on planets unlike the earth - say on a completely waterless world? Experiments performed by Goesta Wollin and David B. Ericson of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory suggest that it could indeed, although without water any organisms would probably be totally unrecognizable...
Wollin and Ericson mixed the molecules of gases recently detected in the far reaches of space - ammonia, methanol, formaldehyde and formic acid - in various combinations. Then, keeping the gases completely free of water, the scientists exposed them to ultraviolet radiation and found that they combined to produce small quantities of some of the amino acids essential to life. Says Wollin: "Perhaps liquid ammonia, with its physical and chemical properties so similar to water, could serve as a solvent medium for waterless life...