GondwanaTalks is a multilingual blog on nature, earth, climate and life
Asbestos: Geology of a sinister mineral
13/09/2024
Asbestos is a natural mineral. It is extracted from rocks that formed deep within mountain ranges and in subduction zones, brought to the surface after millions of years of uplift and erosion. This product of nature turned out to be miraculous. It is fireproof, indestructible, eternal. Eternit, the well-known Belgian asbestos-based product, was...
In times when marine life exploded into greater biodiversity than ever before, all southern continents had merged in one enormous landmass, a supercontinent called Gondwana. It didn't sprout from mythology like Atlantis and other mysterious vanished lands. But its once great mountains, the fierce climatic changes that scourged it, the land ice,...
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Or read about an alternative hypothesis of human evolution, e.g., how humans started walking upright as they waded and climbed (weren't we hunters?), ancient whales that had legs and now lie in the Sahara, and what Cousteau said about the sea, habitable exoplanets (do they look like Earth?), the Smoke-that-thunders in Zambia and how rivers change course, why so many people live in earthquake-prone areas like Turkey, the new black gold of Ukraine and how it links up with the Dust Bowl in America, my meeting with Jane Goodall in 2022 and how our paths crossed, which new volcano is about to erupt in Naples, Europe's Yellowstone and other unknown European volcanoes, why Tonga didn't cause climate cooling, those times when the Mediterranean dried up, the Tethys ocean that now lies in the mountains, what the Incas knew about the geology of Machu-Picchu, and, returning to Italy, how precious Carrara marble, chosen by Michelangelo, once lay on a tropical seabed.
About six million years ago, almost all the water of the Mediterranean Sea evaporated as it became cut off from the global ocean. In a geological blink of an eye, the sea level dropped until only a few seething lagoons remained, at a depth of roughly 1,500 to 3,000 meters below mean sea leve, causing a huge ecological crisis. But then great natural floodgates opened in the Strait of Gibraltar and through a mega-flood the basin refilled with seawater. Read on.
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— One of the first GondwanaTalks articles —
Lapis lazuli: Via the Silk Road to Tutankhamun.
An article by Kathelijne Bonne
From high mountain peaks to the pharaohs.
How precious stone lapis lazuli found its way from the world's most ancient mines to Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece, and to the canvases of the great painters, has been documented extensively. Discover how lapis lazuli formed, as it crystallized in seams of precious rocks in the midst of plate tectonic turmoil.
Background picture: Géry60 on Foter.com / CC BY-ND
What is Gondwana?
The inspiration came from the great, lost continent of Gondwana. Gondwana was the land area in which all southern continents were once united into one great supercontinent. When it formed, life had exploded into a myriad of life forms and had risen from a mainly microscopic bacterial world to a world in which animals and plants came to dominate. When Gondwana fell apart, and continents drifted away, new, isolated life forms emerged, of which the peculiar fauna and flora of Australia are the best, but not the only, example.
GondwanaTalks is an online magazine on the natural world, for a wide audience.
