From Newsgroup: sci.bio.paleontology

I saw a youtube video yesterday on how the world may
have looked like during the Devonian.

Then I started thinking of technical journal articles.

And I thought.

A technical journal article would have a lot of technical
jargon in it but:

It would also have a lot of hedging in it saying things
like 'maybe', 'we do not know', and then maybe even
portray alternate theories with the idea of then presenting
their own.

Nonetheless the Youtube video seemed to me with the tone:
HOW DARE YOU EVEN REMOTELY THINK THAT WE ARE NOT OMNISCIENT
AND PERFECTLY EXACTLY KNOW HOW LIFE IN THE SILURIAN WAS EXACTLY
LIKE!!! OUR PRETTY PICTURES CLEARLY PROVE THAT WE ARE OMNISCIENT
BEINGS!!!

This made me long for technical journal articles a bit more.

There was a suggestion in the video about the nature of the
land before and during the Silurian with the phrase like 'BARE
ROCK, BARE ROCK' repeated several times and this almost made
me want to try to register to post there, but I decided to
go for usenet.

There is something called 'regiolith' on the moon and that
is a different word than 'dirt' or 'soil'. Nonetheless the
moon has no life on it. The Lunar 'regiolith' has a lot
of particle sizes in it that tends to make it like Earth's
'dirt' or 'soil' in a lot of ways.

Therefore the Earth's land may not necessarily have been
'bare rock' prior to the Silurian.

Now Wikipedia says that the Earth's oceans are on average
two and a quarter miles or three or four kilometers deep.
Nonetheless the Earth's 'land area' is something like
about 30 percent of its surface area. In theory one could
speculate that rain and wind could wash or blow finer particles
into the ocean if there were no plant roots or fungus to
reduce erosion.

Nonetheless a significant part of the Earth's surface
have a lesser amount of roots or fungus in the present
due to lack of water, and there are some places
adjacent to the ocean. They still have heavier larger
particles in those areas, often called 'beaches' or
'deserts' and this is called 'sand'. This is different
from what in common English usage is generally called
'bare rock'.

Beyond that some processes of 'weathering' of rock
may not necessarily involve life. For instance water
might enter a crack in rock in winter, and then freeze.
This might shatter rock producing smaller materials with
repreated freezing and thawing.

From geology or fossils, perhaps some 'sedimentary rock'
might have formed from ocean sediments. But all of them?

Is it reasonable to say that the Earth's 'land area' might
not necessarily have all been 'bare rock' prior to the
Silurian?


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