Alaska Crater: Where Dinosaurs Once Roamed

Sunday, October 30, 2011



Aniakchak National Monument and Preserve is the name of a 6 miles (10 km) located in the middle of the boiler in the Alaska Peninsula. Geographers first noticed circular function on the landscape, and 1922 geological expedition confirmed the cause of depression. Several decades later, paleontologists made another discovery in Aniakchak: Dinosaurs lived in the area, and they have left behind some of its fossilized footprints.

Aniakchak is one of the 232 U.S. parks with a reserve of fossil fuels. The National Park Service offers information on these natural relics as part of the National Day of fossil fuels (October 12) Week and Earth Sciences.

Major Thematic Mapper Plus is a Landsat 7 attached to this natural color image Aniakchak National Monument and maintain 15 September 2000. Caldera is dominated by the view shed and the southern edge of blue-gray shadow of snow and ice nearby. (As the angle of the sun, this picture may cause an optical illusion known as the inversion of relief.)

A lake is located near the northeastern margin of the caldera. The vegetation is sparse immediately around the caldera, but far from the slopes are green.

The caldera formed about 3,500 years ago, when an explosive eruption blew up near 3,000 feet (1,000 meters) mountain range. The most recent volcanic activity took place the boiler cinder cones and lava flows.

Aniakchak dinosaur tracks are much older than the crater. Plants were left eating dinosaurs some 70 million years ago. Anthony Fiorillo, which is based on the Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, found the songs, and wrote them in 2004. Hadrosaurs the left, the tracks consist of small and large footprints to handprints.

Many people think that dinosaurs lived in temperate, tropical, or at least the lack of high-latitude environments such as Alaska. So how dinosaurs could thrive so far north?

The theory of plate tectonics shows that some countries are now at high latitudes, once rested closer to the equator. Thus, one explanation could be that the landform was not in the same place where the traces are formed. However, studies rock layers in the region, the area was already Aniakchak at about the same parallel of latitude 70 million years.

Although Aniakchak was about the same location (near 57 degrees north latitude), it does not mean he had the same climate. Indeed, the global climate 70 million years, considerably warmer than today. So the dinosaurs did not have to withstand the temperatures common in modern Alaska, although they had some cold conditions and possibly snow. Regardless of temperature, dinosaurs lived at high latitudes done with longer periods of darkness that night lasted nearly 18 hours during the winter in Aniakchak



For more information related to dinosaurs, visit rareresource.com.

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