Miocene

I was only feeding him the shells.

In that case, now let's all get back to the Miocene age.

You go.

I'll wait here.

Now researchers have dated Mammoth Cave's rock beds to the Mississippian period, approximately 320 to 360 million years ago.

However, the passages of Mammoth Cave did not start forming until about 10 or 15 million years ago during the Miocene Epoch, when streams and rivers flowing over the surface allowed water to sink in and enter the rock beds through small cracks.

At this time, the region was covered by a shallow sea, and sediment was deposited on the sea floor.

Over time, the sediment was compressed and hardened into limestone.

The volcanic field responsible for the lava dams, the Uinkaret Volcanic Field, on the north rim west of the Torawap Fault, is part of a broader belt of late Cenozoic volcanism that extends across the southern margin of the Colorado Plateau.

This volcanism is related to the tectonic extension that has been stretching and thinning the crust of the basin and range province since the Miocene.

And the boundary between the relatively stable Colorado Plateau and the extending basin and range is marked by a series of faults, including the Torrewap and Hurricane faults, that have been active during the Quaternary and may still be active today.

The Winkaret Field includes more than 100 cinder cones, several of which sit directly on the canyon rim.

It's a very nice journey through all of these things because it's a scale that we find it hard to conceive of, I think.

But I want to just zoom in on three geological historical parts, which is the Eocene, the Pliocene and the Miocene.

Can you give us, to a lot of people, including myself, I can't really visualize what that is.

Can you just give us a little sort of snapshot view of what these are?

This is telling us that we've pretty much got a pliocene climate, a returned pliocene, locked in already.

That's the best we can hope for.

If we go further back in time to the Miocene, maybe 16, 17 million years ago, We come to a time when carbon dioxide levels are maybe 600 to 800 parts per million, bearing in mind we're 450 now, and we're going to be up at those levels in the not-too-distant future.

There, you're looking at almost an ice-free Earth.

You joked about the archaeological record.

Their best record is from Miocene spores.

So like, honestly,

you're not that far off.

Researchers have dated Mammoth Cave's rock beds to the Mississippian period, approximately 320 to 360 million years ago.

However, the passages of Mammoth Cave did not start forming until about 10 or 15 million years ago during the Miocene Epoch, when streams and rivers flowing over the surface allowed water to sink in and enter the rock beds through small cracks.

At this time, the region was covered by a shallow sea, and sediment was deposited on the sea floor.

Over time, the sediment was compressed and hardened into limestone.

And I was thinking about ways that we can look at body mass but remove those biases and some questions we can answer more directly.

And I found this fascinating paper from 2023 looking at competition for meat among large reptiles and mammalian predators in the Miocene of South America.

And their results were basically there's very low levels of competition.

Reptiles eat most of the meat, especially at large size, so it's this really weird, depauperate predator community.

They're basically outcompeted by reptiles for those dominant predatory niches.

Then, all of a sudden, in sort of the late 90s into the 2000s, this new picture took over where marsupials were bad predators, and they were just incapable of filling predatory niche space at all.

So that's why we see in Miocene, South America, which was also dominated by marsupials and their close relatives, and in terms of their mammal fauna, a very low diversity of predators relative to prey, and then the same thing in Australia, both today and in the Pleistocene.

And so you kind of got this sort of opposite argument that as a result of that, the mammals can't fill that niche space and then the big reptiles just kind of passively fill it.

These are natural formations.

If we wind the clock back about 10 million years to the Miocene epoch, the entire Visoko Valley was a deep freshwater lake bed.

Over millions of years, vast quantities of sediments, clay, sandstone, various conglomerates washed into this lake from the higher elevations.

Those sediments settled out of the water column and compacted into very distinct horizontal layers on the lake floor.

They deliberately blur the lines between genuine scientific inquiry and theatrical public relations to completely bypass traditional peer review.

By the time the academic demands a retraction, the headline has already circulated the globe.

So what does this all mean? We have journeyed from the geospatial math of the claims to the Miocene geology of the hills, through the medieval radiocarbon dating of the tunnels, into the bioenergetic wellness chambers, past the submarine radio beams, and deep into the heart of post-war Bosnian economics.

What it means is that the Bosnian pyramids represent a profound failure of communication within the scientific community.