Ocean life may have already been extinct before meteor fallout kills the dinosaurs?!?!

Science Daily.com is a great place to find anything recent about anything scientific. Which is great, considering the daily news probably only shows the extremely monumental things like finding a new haplorrhine  that may be on the same branch as homo sapiens sapiens or finding a new dinosaur nobody's ever seen. On September 5th 2012, a UW doctoral students named Thomas Tobin found out from ancient seashells and clams found on the ocean floor (or what was) around Seymour Island near Anartica (dating 300,000 years before the infamous meteor impact in the Yucatan Pennisula in 65 MYA). The sea life was apparently dying out before the nuclear-like fallout that the meteor caused, and they were dying because of volcanic eruptions on the Deccan Plateau in India.Tobin states these eruptions probably lasted over 100,000 years, scorching the oceanic crust and boiling those clams and snails alive. And the enormous eruptions let loose a plethora of fine particles called aerosols into the air, that cooled the planet, but also released carbon dioxide that created a long term warming period. We're worrying about the O-zone now? Think of what those clams and dinosaurs had to deal with!!! Tobin states that these aerosols only are active on a 10 year scale, while carbon dioxide is active for thousands!!! How does he know this? Tobin and a bunch of other researchers went to Seymour Island and took surface core samples and utilizing magnetostratigraphy to find changes in the magnetism over time and when the fossils were deposited. This is only a theory, but a theory in the making. Find the story here: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120905154314.htm

Curiosity scans its first Martian rock!! Yay!!

Hello fellow geology enthusiasts! So I was browsing around the NASA website trying to find stuff on the Mars missions, when I came across the Curiosity rovers accomplishments. Well, I am one of those hopeful people that think we should plan out full on missions to sectors near our planet to find Goldilocks planets and ect., but money is an issue with discovery so I'll just have to settle for this: Apparently while on it's way up to Mt. Sharp on Mars, it encountered it's first Martian rock (creatively named N165) to scan with it's chemistry scanner, called ChemCam. This camera will be shooting lasers at the rock and will be sending information about the types of properties N165 has: it will react to the ionized gas that surrounds the rock and it will send this through a telescope to try to find out what elements it has. Just imagine, finding out if Mars once was a prime place for organic life, or that it's earth and minerals might be like those on Earth, or something we've never encountered before!! Here's the URL so you guys can check out the pictures Curiosity has sent and be excited with me!! http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/multimedia/pia16073.html