Panama Canal expansion dredges up historical treasures

[Judi Lynn]

Panama Canal expansion dredges up historical treasures

22 hours ago by María Isabel Sánchez

Panama Canal expansion work has uncovered an unexpected trove of archeological and paleontological treasures, scientists said, as the massive construction project winds down.

Workers who have blasted through mountains and dug up thick vegetation, have also uncovered the fossils of some 3,000 invertebrates and 500 vertebrates, as well as of more than 250 plants—including the remains of a forest consumed by fire after a volcanic eruption.

Experts hired by the Panama Canal Authority have identified remains of camels, crocodiles, the teeth of a giant shark, as well as bones of other animals millions of years old.

But the most surprising discovery, researchers said, was about the age of the very land beneath Panama, the southern end of the narrow isthmus that connects North and South America.

Evidence uncovered during the canal excavation showed that the land started forming 20 million years ago and finished around 10 million years later.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-09-panama-canal-expansion-dredges-historical.html#jCp

[emsimon33]

1. Very interesting

[madokie]

2. But

the word is only 6000 some odd years old, how does all this square with that claim.
I'm not sure I need this but here tiz anyway

[lastlib]

3. It's simple--God made it LOOK millions of years old......

..so we'd trust him.

(That's what Ken Ham said.............)

[madokie]

4. gotcha'

[starroute]

5. So does that spoil the theory about the ice ages?

Here's a Scientific American article from two years ago that discusses the same geological discoveries. It says the initial findings were controversial and the scientists expected to learn more as work on the canal continued, but the OP doesn't make it clear whether the recent digging has changed any of their conclusions.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-dating-panama-formations-cast-doubt-ice-age-origins/

Until recently, scientific theory has dictated that up to about three million years ago, the Atlantic and Pacific formed a single wide and deep sea between the American continents. As continental plates collided, a chain of islands between the two rose up, forming the Isthmus of Panama and ending what preeminent 20th-century paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson famously described as South America's "splendid isolation."

But Jaramillo and his colleagues have proposed a new model: most of Panama existed as it does today 12 million years ago, with shallow, narrow channels connecting the two oceans periodically after that. The results are detailed in a recent issue of the Geological Society of America Bulletin, with more details in press in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

The discrepancy between the two theories is no small matter. The three-million-year time frame neatly accounted for an important sequence of events that began about the same time. The current global cycle of glaciation dates to this period and might have been triggered by a transformation of the world's ocean currents, which a slender rib of land separating Atlantic and Pacific would naturally explain. New currents began carrying warmth to northern Europe and precipitation to the Arctic. The Atlantic grew saltier and warmer; the Pacific grew more nutrient-rich. Flora and fauna began traipsing between the two American continents, often extinguishing each other. In Africa a savanna formed, which may have nudged forward the evolution of our species.

So if the new theory is right, and the oceans were separated much earlier—then what triggered all of those epochal events?