What America looked like 400 million years ago

What did North America look like 400 million years ago in the Silurian Period? It was the paleo-continent of Laurentia, long before it collided with Gondwana to form Pangea. In the Silurian, Laurentia was covered by shallow seas abundant with life, that died to form the beautiful limestone and dolomite cliffs we see at Niagara Falls. Let's learn a bit of earth history and the Latin and Greek etymologies that define these phenomena!

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#geology #planetearth #science

[polyMATHY_Luke]

🦂 Support my work on Patreon:

📚 Luke Ranieri Audiobooks:

🤠 Take my course LATIN UNCOVERED on StoryLearning, including my original Latin adventure novella "Vir Petasātus"

🦂 Sign up for my Latin Pronunciation & Conversation series on Patreon:

[antheusmain]

Omg I am obsessed with Continental Drift and the history of our tectonic plates and climate of our sweet little planet. Plus being a student in Greece, heavily focused on Ancient Greek and Latin studies, this is literally the best combo I could have expected from this channel. Awesome work!

[newq]

This is great! I'm a geology student and a latinist (I took three semesters of Latin in college!) so this is right up my alley! Having a background in classical languages is helpful in any science. But man, this was such an intersection of two of my biggest interests! Thank you, Luke!

[RoyalLudwig]

You explained this 10x better than any of my profs... and they even told me I shouldnt learn latin or ancient greek as it wouldnt have any use in modern science??? Greetings from Germany. I'll definitly learn latin and ancient greek after I finished learning spanish!

[SFGJP]

Fantastic as usual, Luke! I love the etymology tangents, just 👌

[iberius]

Pangaea in particular I find to be extremely fascinating.

[aaronmarks]

Man, what I would give to have a time machine and go back to spend just a few months studying the flora and fauna of one of the ancient periods in Earth's history. Like, a season in the Paleogene tropics <3

[sereysothe.a]

I found your vids while taking latin 3 in high school and now you've got me hooked on geology 😭

[tizgerard_]

Saluti dall'antica Neapolis, Luke :) sei un grande! Continua così!

[coreywho]

Just discorvered you from your Metatron collab and you are fantastic dude! Great content. I hope you guys work together again. Glad to be a new subscriber

[gabor]

5:08 How do ferrous rocks tell you where they were formed? The magnetic field of the Earth constantly changes, so how do you dicide between "this rock formed over there" and "the magnetic field was oriented this way at the time"?

[WolfgangSourdeau]

I would add a fews details : the organisms involved in the sedimentation of CaCO3 are called "Coccolithophores". Those microscopic algaes are part of the phytoplanktons and are an essential part of the carbon cycle : both as a CO2 sink and as the victims of the ocean being a sink itself. Ocean's capture of CO2 makes the ocean water more acidic, which tends to prevent Coccolithophores from forming their shells (coccoliths).

[irenelapreziosa]

Che meraviglia! Grazie per questo video così interessante e rilassante ✨ ❤

[nathanbinns]

If I ever invent a time machine and then accidentally go back to the time BEFORE dinosaurs, I will be very upset (not that there weren't some cool animals back this far as well, mind you)

[daciaromana]

It's crazy to think that for most of earth's 4.5 billion year history, complex multicellular organisms had only just arisen 500 million years ago. That means that for most of Earth's history, we were all just a bunch of bacteria (for around 3.5 billion years).

[satanofficial]

"Rocks are rocky. But not bullwinkle-y."
---Albert Einstein

[francisdec]

Funny that 🤠 states like Kansas and Colorado are situated where the bottom of the ocean once was. But Texas is both 🤠 and has a coast ⛵ but you don't think much about it for some reason 🤔

[iberius]

Why would a prehistoric period be named after a British Celtic tribe?

[markvoelker]

There is a sunken continent, you know. It’s not Atlantis. It’s Zealand, of which only its peaks remain above water today, as the north and south islands of New Zealand.
Also, there’s Doggerland, the sunken province of Europe which is now the North Sea.
And about 5.6 million years ago, the Mediterranean dried up when the Strait of Gibraltar closed off, forming an unearthly basin resembling a gigantic version of the Dead Sea or Death Valley, where temperatures reached 180F and the atmospheric pressure was about 1.7 atm at the bottom of the basin about 3 miles below sea level. This is called the Messinian Salinity Crisis.

[rmanchego]

Wow, this was very cool, but went way too fast!