6/8: Unfathomable happenstance that we are here asking questions how we came here: 6/8: Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds, by Thomas Halliday.
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 23 April 2023
⏱️ 9 minutes
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6/8: Unfathomable happenstance that we are here asking questions how we came here: 6/8: Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds, by Thomas Halliday.
https://www.amazon.com/Otherlands-Journey-Through-Earths-Extinct/dp/B097CL2BVX/ref=tmm_aud_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr1
The past is past, but it does leave clues, and Thomas Halliday has used cutting-edge science to decipher them more completely than ever before. In Otherlands, Halliday makes sixteen fossil sites burst to life on the page.
This book is an exploration of the Earth as it used to exist, the changes that have occurred during its history, and the ways that life has found to adapt―or not. It takes us from the savannahs of Pliocene Kenya to watch a python chase a group of australopithecines into an acacia tree; to a cliff overlooking the salt pans of the empty basin of what will be the Mediterranean Sea just as water from the Miocene Atlantic Ocean spills in; into the tropical forests of Eocene Antarctica; and under the shallow pools of Ediacaran Australia, where we glimpse the first microbial life
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBS I On The World. I'm John Bachelorette and I'm traveling backwards in time with Thomas |
| 0:09.7 | Halliday, the author of Other Lands, a journey through Earth's extinct worlds. A new book |
| 0:16.3 | that allows you to go back and back and back and always asking yourselves, how did we get |
| 0:22.1 | here from there? We go now to the Permian 253 million years ago, which is right before an |
| 0:30.0 | extinction event. So what is around us now is about to go through a crisis. However, what I've |
| 0:37.8 | written down is that it was both a dusty world and a wet world with megaman sowns. Where do we |
| 0:46.0 | look, Thomas, for the best fossil record at this point, 253 million years ago? |
| 0:52.6 | Well, there's great fossil records from all over the world in the Permian, particularly Russia and |
| 0:57.6 | South Africa, but one of the lesser known sites, which I think really is very ecologically |
| 1:04.1 | insisting, is a basically a Maradi, which is in modern-day Niger. And so, as you say, there's this |
| 1:10.6 | megaman-soon system. So all of the Earth's continents, all the Earth's landmass is in a |
| 1:15.7 | single supercontinent at this time, Lonesome Pangaea, or Pangaea. And it is roughly sea-shaped, |
| 1:22.8 | and so with this body of water out to the east, what then happens is that as the seasons turn and |
| 1:32.7 | the northern hemisphere warms up, you then get roughing winds from the south to the north, |
| 1:41.4 | and it deposits acutumate. It sucks out the water from the Tethys Sea and deposits it over the |
| 1:50.2 | land. And so you get this extreme wetness. And then conversely, when the seasons turn again, |
| 1:54.5 | the monsoon system moves the other way and deposits the water on the southern side. |
| 2:00.2 | So, Niger at this time is right on the edge of an inland sort of desert system, where |
| 2:08.5 | it itself is very dry, but we have records of what you call a playa lake, which is a sort of end-point |
| 2:16.4 | lake of a river system that would seasonally flow and seasonally dry up. So, no water ever flows |
| 2:21.8 | out of it. It only evaporates away to nothing when the weather is in the dry season. And so the organisms |
| 2:27.9 | that are there are, these are some of the early vertebrates to have properly adapted to a |
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