عربي English Türkçe اردو فارسى
Logo
Latest News
Varieties

Dinosaur Age on Earth Ended during Springtime, New Study

Dinosaur Age on Earth Ended during Springtime, New Study
TT
TT

Dinosaur Age on Earth Ended during Springtime, New Study

Dinosaur Age on Earth Ended during Springtime, New Study

About 66 million years ago, a giant asteroid slammed into Earth, leading to one of the biggest extinction events on the planet, and ending the age of dinosaurs during springtime in the Northern Hemisphere, Agence France Press (AFP) reported.

Melanie During, lead author of a recent study, said pinning down the season of the impact may help us understand “how the remaining species survived and how they prospered later.”

However, determining the precise date of the impact, which occurred in Chicxulub, currently Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, is scientifically impossible.

According to a recent study, the asteroid’s impact, or a part of it, caused a series of disasters that were followed by climate turbulences.

These incidents ended the Cretaceous age and killed all the non-avian dinosaurs, and then the pterosaurs. The research team led by paleontologist Melanie During and vertebrate paleontologist Dennis Voeten, both from the Uppsala University in Sweden, sought to shed light on the impact and its consequence by examining fish fossils.

The Tanis site in North Dakota preserved traces of this massive extinction. According to the study, it features a collection of fossils found under the sediment of a flooding riverbed. The researchers suggest that during this phenomenon (the impact), the seiche waves crossed over 3,000 kilometers in around 10 minutes, raised the water of an inland sea in the region that has become America, and uprooted almost all types of living species.

In Tanis, the team studied fossils of three paddlefish and three sturgeons used high-resolution synchrotron X-ray scans at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, Grenoble, France.

According to the researchers, the fish died from seiche waves accompanied by a flow of glass-like balls known as spherules that were created under the impact’s heat and rained over large distances on Earth.

The fish died within 15 to 30 minutes after the impact, said Melanie During.

Most Viewed

 
 
Varieties

In Beirut, a Photographer's Frozen Moments Slow Down Time and Allow the Contemplation of Destruction

A bomb dropped from an Israeli jet hits a building in Ghobeiri, Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, October 22, 2024. (AP Photo/ Bilal Hussein)
A bomb dropped from an Israeli jet hits a building in Ghobeiri, Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, October 22, 2024. (AP Photo/ Bilal Hussein)
TT
TT

In Beirut, a Photographer's Frozen Moments Slow Down Time and Allow the Contemplation of Destruction

A bomb dropped from an Israeli jet hits a building in Ghobeiri, Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, October 22, 2024. (AP Photo/ Bilal Hussein)
A bomb dropped from an Israeli jet hits a building in Ghobeiri, Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, October 22, 2024. (AP Photo/ Bilal Hussein)

We watch video after video, consuming the world on our handheld devices in bites of two minutes, one minute, 30 seconds, 15. We turn to moving pictures — “film” — because it comes the closest to approximating the world that we see and experience. This is, after all, 2024, and video in our pocket — ours, others', everyone's — has become our birthright.
But sometimes — even in this era of live video always rolling, always recording, always capturing — sometimes the frozen moment can enter the eye like nothing else. And in the process, it can tell a larger story that echoes long after the moment was captured. That's what happened this past week in Beirut, through the camera lens of Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein and the photographs he captured.
When Hussein set up his camera outside an evacuated Beirut apartment building Tuesday after Israel announced it would be targeted as part of military operations against Hezbollah, he had one goal in mind — only one. "All I thought of," he says, “was photographing the missile while it was coming down.”
He found a safe spot. He ensured a good angle. He wasn't stressed, he said; like many photographers who work in such environments, he had been in situations like this one before. He was ready.
When the attack came — a bomb, not a missile in the end — Hussein swung into action. And, unsurprisingly for a professional who has been doing this work for two decades, he did exactly what he set out to do.
Time slowed down
The sequence of images he made bursts with the explosive energy of its subject matter.
In one frame, the bomb hangs there, a weird and obtrusive interloper in the scene. It is not yet noticed by anyone around it, ready to bring its destruction to a building that, in moments, will no longer exist. The building's balconies, a split-second from nonexistence, are devoid of people as the bomb finds its mark.
These are the kind of moments that video, rolling at the speed of life or even in slow motion, cannot capture in the same way. A photo holds us in the scene, stops time, invites a viewer to take the most chaotic of events and break it down, looking around and noticing things in a strangely silent way that actual life could not.
In another frame, one that happened micro moments after the first, the building is in the process of exploding. Let's repeat that for effect, since even as recently as a couple generations ago photographs like this were rare: in the process of exploding.
Pieces of building are shooting out in all directions, in high velocity — in real life. But in the image they are frozen, outward bound, hanging in space awaiting the next seconds of their dissolution — just like the bomb that displaced them was doing milliseconds before. And in that, a contemplation of the destruction — and the people it was visited upon — becomes possible.
Tech gives us new prisms to see the world
The technology to grab so many images in the course of little more than one second — and do it in such clarity and high resolution — is barely a generation old.
So to see these “stills,” as journalists call them, come together to paint a picture of an event is a combination of artistry, intrepidity and technology — an exercise in freezing time, and in giving people the opportunity to contemplate for minutes, even hours, what took place in mere seconds. This holds true for positive things that the camera captures — and for visitations of violence like this one as well.
Photography is random access. We, the viewers of it, choose how to see it, process it, digest it. We go backward and forward in time, at will. We control the pace and the speed at which dizzying images hurtle at us. And in that process, something unusual for this era emerges: a bit of time to think.
That, among many other things, is the enduring power of the still image in a moving-picture world — and the power of what Bilal Hussein captured on that clear, sunny day in Beirut.