[HN Gopher] The Paratethys Sea was the largest lake in Earth's h...
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The Paratethys Sea was the largest lake in Earth's history
Author : Petiver
Score : 42 points
Date : 2023-04-16 13:39 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bigthink.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (bigthink.com)
| f6v wrote:
| I'm from Crimea and found a seashell inland once. Someone told me
| "of course, this was all covered with water long time ago!". I
| guess the seashell had nothing to do with the lake, but it's
| still amazing how the Earth isn't static at all.
| gerikson wrote:
| Deep geological time is hard to get your head around. 34M years
| ago is basically an eyeblink in deep time.
| shagie wrote:
| https://nautil.us/the-greatest-animal-war-235067/ has a neat
| graphic in it.
|
| > Deep Time: If the timeline of Earth were mapped onto the
| human arm, it would begin around the shoulder where the earth
| formed about 4.6 billion years ago. Animals originated within
| the palm, but the myriad forms alive today exploded onto the
| scene around the first knuckle, in the Cambrian period.
| Blocks along the fingers represent the periods that followed,
| such as the Jurassic (dinosaurs!) and the Cenozoic (in which
| humans evolved, a microscopic sliver at the tip of a
| fingernail)..
| FpUser wrote:
| I was doing student summer job for a month in Crimea sometime
| in 70s. We were building dwellings for locals. The walls were
| made of stone that was billions of shells cemented together. It
| was very soft and we were all covered in dust. In combination
| with the summer heat it was awful.
| irrational wrote:
| > the physical parameters or our world -- continents and oceans,
| mountains and lakes -- appear fixed only because our own lives
| are so infinitesimally short, measured against geological eras.
|
| And the geological eras are over in a nanosecond in comparison to
| the lifetime of the universe. It makes me wonder if the lifetime
| of the universe is over in a nanosecond in comparison to whatever
| the universe is embedded within (this is assuming the multi-
| universe theory is correct).
| disconcision wrote:
| bit of quibble, but a geological era, as a technical term,
| describes a duration on the order of 100MYA, which is nearly
| 1/100th of the age of the universe, making 'nanosecond' a bit
| of an exaggeration. even if we consider periods on the order of
| 10MYA (how long ago the titular lake disappeared), that's still
| on the order of 100000x a human lifespan, versus 1/1000th the
| age of the universe.
|
| anyway, i bring this up mostly because, while it's widely
| appreciated that spatially speaking earth exists an a scale
| utterly insignificant compared to astronomical distances, from
| a temporal perspective the age of the earth (and the duration
| of life on earth) are actually quite comparable to that of the
| universe
| groffee wrote:
| [dead]
| version_five wrote:
| High on mushrooms as a teenager I used to flick my lighter and
| imagine a whole universe spinning up, stars and planets
| forming, life evolving and lives being lives, decline and
| eventual heat death, all in that quick spark.
| jschveibinz wrote:
| Given the infinite dimensions of the universe, I'd say your
| assumption is just as valid as any other argument.
| xg15 wrote:
| Could someone explain the semantic difference between "lake" and
| "sea" here?
|
| Why is this called a "lake" (or even "megalake") even though it
| was far larger than many of today's seas? (or indeed some of
| today's seas are _fragments_ of the ancient lake)
|
| Edit: I guess it has more to do with salinity and whether or not
| the body of water is connected to the ocean?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I know, that at one time, the Mediterranean Sea was just a
| gigantic (dry) below-sea-level valley.
|
| Then the Straight of Gibraltar popped a cork, and there was the
| world's most awesome waterfall, for a long time.
| mabbo wrote:
| > world's most awesome waterfall, for a long time
|
| Apparently it was more of a big ramp and rapids. And it was
| maybe as short as only one (wildly incredible) year.
|
| > This flood would have descended a relatively gentle ramp into
| the Mediterranean basin, not as a giant waterfall
|
| > later estimates of the size of the Strait of Gibraltar
| channel implied that it would have taken much less, potentially
| less than a year until reconnection
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanclean_flood
| [deleted]
| kibwen wrote:
| Anyone interested in this should also read the most ambitious
| XKCD ever, "Time", which is about 3,000 panels long:
| http://geekwagon.net/projects/xkcd1190/
| didgetmaster wrote:
| The headline claims that a lake estimated to be 34 million years
| old was the largest ever on a planet billions of years old. Seems
| a little presumptuous.
| mabbo wrote:
| I don't think it's entirely unreasonable.
|
| It's the largest we have any evidence of ever existing, and
| it's also stupendously large- where and how could a larger lake
| have existed?
|
| Just because we don't know _everything_ doesn 't mean we can't
| be pretty certain of _anything_.
| posterboy wrote:
| > where and how could a larger lake have existed?
|
| It exists somewhere in the gap of your logic. The undeying
| complaint is against the superlativ, and not against
| "largest" but "in Earth's history", which equates to
| _everrr_.
|
| It's clearly click-bait.
| solveit wrote:
| I mean, the article says it formed as Africa and Europe came
| together, and that's not the only time continents collided to
| form larger landmasses. Certainly we've had larger
| supercontinents that could've accommodated larger lakes.
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