Is Planet Earth Under New Management?

[n2doc]

by ROBERT KRULWICH
February 26, 2014 8:03 AM

A hundred million years from now, when we're all dead and gone, a team of geologists will be digging in a field somewhere ...



... and they will discover, buried in the rocks below, a thin layer of sediment — very thin, about the width of a cigarette paper, says British stratigrapher Jan Zalasiewicz. That skinny strip, when they look close, will send what's called a "biostratigraphic signal" that something enormous happened back in our era, something life changing, planet reorganizing, even earth shaping. The evidence, when they look closely, will be visible in that same skinny layer all over the world. In her new book, The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert describes what they'll find.



For starters, Kolbert says, below this layer, geologists will see fossil remnants of all kinds of large animals: elephants, buffalo, rhinos, lions, tigers, whales, giant turtles (and deeper down, even earlier — saber tooth tigers, mammoths and giant sloths). Their big bones will litter those older rocks. But above this layer — after our era — they disappear. Something killed off the Earth's megafauna.



During this same time, they will discover that animals and plants that used to be in one place — gingko trees in China, tulips in Asia, starlings in Europe — suddenly moved all over the world. Grasses found on one continent now strangely appear on four continents. Flowering plants, rats, goats, pigeons, kudzu, ants, inexplicably spread their territories across enormous oceans, climates, time zones. Specific life forms — chickens, cattle, roses, wheat, rice — turn up everywhere. Something moved them, though they may not know who or how.

more

http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2014/02/26/282516133/is-planet-earth-under-new-management

[Cleita]

1. Those scientists will have to be from another evolved species

or another planet because we, as a species, will probably buried under there as one of the extinct ones.

[Jackpine Radical]

6. I believe they will be descendants of Bob, the Angry Flower

…or maybe cockroaches.

[Cleita]

7. Probably the cockroaches.

Don't laugh. In a place of business I worked at we were having a roach problem we were trying to address. The exterminator, who revealed he had a degree in entomology or whatever the bug science is, gave me a lecture on what fascinating creatures they were, how adaptive to evolutionary changes to be around for millions of years and so on. My money is on the bugs. Or maybe there could be H. G. Wells version in "The Time Machine" where we devolve into buglike critters to survive the sun eventually dying.

[democratisphere]

2. Humans will no longer be part of the equation, as they will have become extinct long ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_the_Earth

[northoftheborder]

3. Excellent film.

[dbackjon]

12. From my school :)

[Warpy]

4. And they'll discover all those deposits of things like Bakelite telephone cases

that might shatter over time but which won't biodegrade and wonder what religion produced them.

Funny, misinterpretation abounds even now when we're studying our own ancestors. When archaeologists sometimes see religious artifacts, weavers see the same things as weaving tools along with marked sticks that are threading diagrams. The archaeologists hate listening to us.

[chknltl]

5. And the good Earth will chuckle to herslf knowing that she alone has styrofoam.

Which according to Mr. G. Carlin, is the sole reason she created mankind.

[RainDog]

8. kick to placemark for myself n/t

[Hestia]

9. "The Cult of the Goddess Barbie"

http://www.mesacc.edu/~thoqh49081/handouts/barbie.html

In the year 5000, historians will seek to patch together traces of the past, to discover what life was like in today's current era. Here's one humorous view of what they might find:

We are proud to announce that archaeologists have made a major discovery explaining religious practice in the 1990's, over three thousand years ago! These discoveries help us better understand the myths and traditions which have been handed down over the years, and still survive today within the popular cult of the Goddess Barbie. This tradition is one of the fastest growing groups of modern-day Goddess worship.

more at link - and yes, it is satire

[Curmudgeoness]

10. That is hilarious

and creepily accurate.

[VA_Jill]

11. Reminds me

of a book that came out when I was a teenager, called "The Weans", by Robert Nathan. It's a satire on anthropology/archaeology, and well worth reading even now. It purports to be a report by future scientists of archaeological digs in the Washington DC ("Pound Laundry) and New York areas. Their conclusions are quite amusing.