Plate Tectonics

This week the topic of interest of the Fist of Science Corp. is plate tectonics. This process may sound familiar to many of our readers, but to those of you who are unfamiliar, here is how it works. Deep within the center of the of the earth, the superheated magma swirls around solid  inner core. This heat wants to escape and balance out the colder magma at the surface(note: colder magma, does not mean COLD, it just means not as hot, this stuff still melts solid rock like its butter on warm toast)

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This CONVECTION (10 point vocab word right there) moves the rigid Lithospheric plates around causing them to crash into, pull away from or rub up against one another. These interactions are the reasons why we surface dwellers are plagued by earthquakes, volcanoes and the like.

The first pieces of  this theory were brought to our attention in the early 1900’s by Alfred Wegener (pronounced Veg-ner,  He’s German, don’t judge). This first step was the theory of Continental Drift. What he realized was that there were fossilized flora and fauna that were found on all continents in ways that did not make sense, it was almost as if the continents were once one supercontinent. On further investigation, he realized that the continents fit together, rather like puzzle pieces. However, he had no clue as to how the continents moved.

Many years later, based on the discoveries of patterns on the ocean floor that indicated global polarity shifts, and the given age of different parts of the seafloor, some rather knowledgeable guesstimations were made. The hypothesis is theory of Plate Tectonics which was explained in paragraph 1, so we won't repeat ourselves.

So to recap, Wegener looked at continents and questioned why they fit together and have similar features, but are not attached; he had not clue why. Then some scientists had this CRAZY, but well educated guess that the mantle was actually swirling around and moving massive chunks of the crust. The interactions of these chunks are what cause natural disasters and other problems like that.

Finally one final word of advice from our sponsor in regard to Plate Tectonics, Don’t Talk About the Mediterranean, It's super complicated and even the Science of the Fist of Science does not fully comprehend.

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The Earth's History, a brief summary

THE HISTORY OF THE EARTH,

With fun summary at the end, to clean up all the details we missed;D

This also does not contain any information regarding humans, as we are rather insignificant on a time scale.

Approximately 4.6 Billion years ago, yes that is correct, BILLION, a massive cloud of space dust, created in the aftermath of a supernova, began spiraling and swirling together to eventually form a Mustafar like planet that was nothing like the planet that we call our “Big Blue Marble” today.  This lifeless rock was covered in oceans of magma, and the atmosphere toxic. Overall it was an unpleasant place to live, to say the least. However, over time, the planet cooled, and liquid water began to form. Slowly, oceans began replacing magma, and something almost magical was in the works.

Nearly 800 million years later, something miraculous occurred in these vast oceans, something completely alien began to form: the first life. Now these first cells weren’t anything impressive (each consisted of one cell only), but they were the start of a long chain of events that eventually lead up to the present day.

So about 3.05 Billion years later, after a long waiting time of  continental movement and lots of submerging and emerging volcanoes, the Cambrian Era arrived which brought evolved life into the world! About 544 million years later, the Fist of Science would be created, but that is currently somewhat irrelevant. So in this canvas of 544 million years, lots of quite literal ‘life’ changing events happened.

Okay, so to summarize in a poorly written sentence, star goes boom, Earth looks like Mustafar, First life, Life boom, FISHES, Land-life, DINOSAURS, Everything dies, Ice age, humans, FIST OF SCIENCE.

There are those who disagree with this “theory” to read the argument, and see their point of view look at this helpful Wikipedia article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation%E2%80%93evolution_controversy

The Fist of Science

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