Word: sedimentality
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Palo Alto specimen probably died nonviolently, then its body sank to the ocean floor. A few shark teeth were found among the bones, suggesting that sharks may have had a few bites of paradoxia's plentiful flesh before a storm or flood covered the body with sand. Then sediment from the sierras covered it deeply, and a mountain range pushed upward between its grave and the ocean. At last big-brained primates, which had not evolved during its lifetime, brought it into the sunlight while searching for the secrets of infinitesimal matter...
Wrote the boy: "The orchards are stinking ripe. The tea-colored brooks run beneath the rocks. There is sediment on the stone and no wind in the willows. Everyone is preparing to go back to school. I have no school to go back to . . . If I had left because I had to go to work or because I was sick it would not have been so bad. Leaving because you are angry and frustrated is different. It is not a good thing to do. It is bad for everyone." The frustrations seem to have been not much more than...
This week, in the magazine Science, Oceanographers David B. Ericson, Maurice Ewing and Goesta Wollin, of Columbia's Lament laboratory, offer new and promising evidence on all these questions. The oceanographic trio discovered that on sloping parts of the ocean bottom, earthquakes sometimes make the sediments "slump." Layers many feet thick are suddenly stripped away, leaving ancient sediments bare. If enough sediment is removed, the normally inaccessible base of the Pleistocene is left within reach of the oceanographers' tools...
...back far enough. Four came from near the Bahamas, two from mid-Atlantic, one from near Brazil, and the eighth from the Indian Ocean. All showed a band 4 in. to 6 in. wide marking a sudden change in the remains of small ocean creatures. Below the band the sediment is full of discoasters, the tiny star-shaped fossils of ancient, single-celled plants. Above the band no discoasters can be found. Apparently, they died off suddenly. So did other kinds of tiny, freely drifting creatures, while new kinds appeared just as suddenly...
...oceanographers point out that the discoasters and their associates had thrived for many millions of years in the warm, unchanging oceans before the Pleistocene. The narrow band of sediment in which their extinction is recorded, represents a period of less than 6,000 years, and in this short time-which is almost no time at all on the geological scale-something drastic must have happened to the water in which they lived. Best bet is that the change was a sudden cooling that marked the beginning of the Pleistocene, when the first great glaciers were creeping over the continents. Since...