Ancient History

"Map of the Salish Sea & Surrounding Basin, Stefan Freelan, WWU, 2009"
Per http://staff.wwu.edu/stefan/salish_sea.shtml the Salish Sea Map was produced using a Geographic Information System (GIS) and publically available spatial datasets for elevation, bathymetry and hydrology. 

BACK IN THE DAY: This week we had the opportunity to learn about some ancient history of our region. Specifically, about Salish Sea geology and about some of the life forms that inhabited land and water in the area.

I'll let the kids tell you a bit more about it, Annabelle's up first ... 

Thursday, Oct. 13, we went to the Mukilteo historical society meeting to listen to a presentation given by our uncle Jim (Haggart). The presentation was about what the Salish Sea was like 75 million years ago, and the creatures that lived there, mainly ammonites. Ammonites were small marine creatures with a shell that has a swirl in it. In the swirled shell the ammonite has many small chambers to hold gas or water, allowing it to change its buoyancy. Ammonites had many different variants. Some ammonites had more spike-like shells, while others had tall spiraled ones. It was very interesting learning about what these creatures were like and where you can find the fossils. It’s certainly fun learning about how fossils are found and what we can make of them. Jim also touched on how we, as humans, will once day be a fossil layer too. Imagine, years in the future, the inhabitants or visitors of Earth will find fossilized cell phones and speculate about our society, just like we have with the dinosaurs and other fossils ourselves.

And here's CJ's report ...

My uncle, Jim Haggart, is an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia. He has a Bachelor's degree in Biology from the University of California, Davis, and, according to his profile at UBC's website, is a specialist in Mesozoic stratigraphy and paleontology, having undertaken research on successions of western North America, northern Europe, and east Asia. On 10/13, we got to visit one of Uncle Jim's presentations at the Rosehill Community Center, which is up north in Mukilteo. Jim's presentation was about life in the Salish Sea (which includes Puget Sound) about 75 million years ago, which was a very interesting subject.

When I walked in the unfortunately tiny room (the maximum capacity was just 45!), some of the first things I noticed were some shell fossils (and one modern shell) that were on a table near one of the corners of the room. I got a chance to ask Jim what creatures had the shells, and he said that the swirled shell fossils belonged to creatures called Ammonites, and that the modern shell resembling the fossils belonged to their present-day counterpart, the Nautilus. I later got a chance to ask Jim what differentiated the Ammonites and the Nautilus. He said that the Ammonites actually split off from the Nautilus about 475 million years ago, during the Ordovician. However, apparently, the reason the Ammonites died off, while the Nautilus continued into the modern day is apparently due to reproductive differences. While the Nautilus would lay eggs to distribute their offspring, Ammonites would use plankton to reproduce. However, using plankton to reproduce proved to be problematic for Ammonites during the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction about 66 million years ago.

According to the presentation and Jim's profile at the UBC website, Uncle Jim primarily studies prehistoric molluscs, such as Ammonites and earlier Nautilus. 
A while later, Jim talked about how the atmosphere during the Cretaceous period was very, very different, and had about 20-30 times more CO2 in the atmosphere than in the present day. The sea level was also higher, and there were little to no icecaps either. According to Jim, fossils are key to learning what Earth and life on Earth was like during the Cretaceous period. Sometimes, even things like ancient dinosaur tracks, while they are not complete fossils, can give some insight into what life lived in any given area.

One fossil that Jim talked about was the Courtenay (spelled that way) Elasmosaur, named for the town it was discovered in, Courtenay, California. According to the Courtenay Paleontology Museum's website, a man actually found the fossil of the Courtenay Elasmosaur in 1988 with his then-12-year-old daughter. According to the CPM's website, after months of investigation and correspondence with scientists such as the late Dr. Betsy Nicholls at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in southern Alberta, their discovery proved to be the first Elasmosaur recorded in British Columbia — the first of its kind west of the Canadian Rockies.

One more thing I would like to tell you about is getting fossils out of rocks. According to Jim, getting a fossil from a rock on a mountain or in a canyon into a museum is no walk in the park. Apparently, retrieving a fossil from a rock can take anywhere from 5 short minutes to hundreds of hours, depending on the tools you use, where the fossil is in the rock, and how efficiently you are working. Regardless of how long you take, you get to spend every second of that time working hard with your tools, trying to retrieve the ancient remains of some long-extinct species.

If possible, I would like to see Uncle Jim give a speech about prehistoric life again, and I look forward to the next time that will happen.
Online sources:
https://www.eoas.ubc.ca/about/associate/J.Haggart.html
http://edmondsbeacon.villagesoup.com/p/mukilteo-historical-society/1581520/309265
http://www.courtenaymuseum.ca/fossils-dinosaurs/the-elasmosaur-find/

Also that evening, near the beginning of the meeting, a member of the Mukilteo Historical Society gave a short history lesson about Mukilteo, such as talking about some of the city's earlier residents, and also brought up an old Abstract of Title, which grants somebody ownership over some land. For Example, Morris Frost and Jack Denny were both owners of a certain property in Mukilteo's past.

The map at the top of the post is from a Web page of Professor Stefan Freeland of Western Washington University. On the page, he also has a link to a number of other great resources, incuding a NOAA Salish Sea activity book.

WILD IS THE WIND: The Washington and Oregon coasts are being hammered by high winds for the past couple of days, as the remnants of typhoon Songda have hit our shores. Rain from the storm has been soaking Seattle and other Puget Sound area cities, and there have been some strong wind gusts, as well. Yesterday, I watched the transformer near our house arc and explode. It was pretty spectacular - and it left us without power for a couple of hours.

According to a Tweet from the National Weather Service ... 

NWS SeattleVerified account‏@NWSSeattle

#Seattle has tallied two consecutive days of record rain totaling 3.11". That's over an inch more than July thru Sept totals combined. #wawx

The worst of the storm is supposed to hit this afternoon, at about 4 p.m. Winds are predicted in the 55 mph range. This evening also happens to be when we are scheduled to go help provide a meal for 45 homeless youth. We'll see how that goes. Here's hoping the power holds out! 
  http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/.e/interactive/html5-video-media/2016/10/14/West_Coast_Storm_Forecast_Winds.mp4