A deputy sheriff's dash mounted camera captures his tornado chase. Racing just minutes behind the monster storm he looks for damage and victims.
Dep. Robert Jolley, "It was big and ugly."
He is stopped, briefly, by a fallen power line.
Dep. Robert Jolley, "We had to keep stopping, moving debris, out of the roadway, things like that."
At about this time, he sees the tornado begin tearing through the rural community of Bridge Creek.
Beneath the storm, Robert Williams and his family climb into a closet and brace themselves for the very worst minutes of their lives.
Robert Williams tells his family's story, "We set down and grabbed the door, and shut it, and held on to it as tight as I could. It snatched the roof off, and pulled the mattress up, and pulled all the kids up. I saw them go up; at the same time the walls fell; my wife was holding on to me, fell over and sliding with the house. The trailer I guess blew up on this thing, and slid over the top of us, and then it pushed us over that there, somewheres. It killed my wife and had me trapped on the back of the house."
Williams' wife died in his arms.
Robert Williams, "She couldn't say nothing. I just held her head in my hands, cause that's all I could get up, and tears rolled down her face, and she died, and that was it. Tough, tough, tough. Tough time for everybody. "
His daughter, Amy Crago, her husband, Ben Molton, and their ten month old baby girl, Aleah, vanished.
Amy Crago says, "We were all together, and we all rolled a little bit together, and then we just all went different directions. I don't know what happened to my baby during it all, but I didn't pass out through the whole thing, I remember it very well, and I was in the air, and all the debris was hitting me and you can't imagine how bad that hurt."
The tornado tossed Amy Crago and her baby hundreds of feet in different directions. She says, "I went to one house and I reached in one window and got a shirt and put it on my head, cause it was bleeding, and I finally found a lady and she took me down to where the police were and the police, I was just trying to get my baby, I thought my whole family were dead."
"I just knew everybody was dead and I was all alone. I was so happy when they found her. It's just a miracle. There's surely nothing else you can say about it... "
Amy Crago —
Eventually Amy got a ride to a hospital. That's about the time deputy Robert Jolley arrived and saw Amy's father. He says, "I saw one man walking in the road way say he lost his daughter and granddaughter, so this is where I immediately started looking."
At the scene of the tornado he describes what happened when he went looking for the baby, "We got down here to where all this debris is up against the trees. Something caught the corner of my eye. I looked and I couldn't see anything. And when I looked again, I could see there was a baby, curled around the base of the tree, down there, had her little face in the mud."
Deputy Jolley's dash mounted camera captures the rest. "She actually looked like a rag doll. She was dirty. Her ears were packed with mud, her eyes were packed with mud. When the baby started crying, I felt great, felt wonderful. I kept the baby with me for about 45 minutes, before I could find EMS, and I turned her over to them."
Baby Aleah was reunited with her mother in a hospital. Now they are staying in a motel with her dad. She says, "I just knew everybody was dead and I was all alone. I was so happy when they found her. It's just a miracle. There's surely nothing else you can say about it."
Amy lost her mother; her husband is in critical condition, but alive. And except for a few bruises baby Aleah is doing just fine.
The person who found Amy's baby was ______.
Amy's father
B. Robert Jolley
C. the lady
D. a doctor
Disaster struck 250 million years ago, when the worst devastation in the earth's history occurred. Called the end-Permian mass extinction, it marks a fundamental change in the development of life.
The history of life on the earth is replete with catastrophes of varying magnitudes. The one that has captured the most attention is the extinction of the dinosaurs and other organisms 65 million years ago between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods--which claimed up to half of all species. As severe as that devastation was, it pales in comparison to the greatest disaster of them all: the mass extinction some 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period. Affectionately called "the mother of mass extinctions" among paleontologists (with apologies to Saddam Hussein), it yielded a death toll that is truly staggering. About 90 percent of all species in the oceans disappeared during the last several million years of the Permian. On land, more than two thirds of reptile and amphibian families vanished. Insects, too, did not escape the carnage: 30 percent of insect orders ceased to exist, marking the only mass extinction insects have ever undergone.
But from catastrophes, opportunities arise. For several hundred million years before the end-Permian event, the shallow seas had been dominated by life-forms that were primarily immobile. Most marine animals lay on the seafloor or were attached to it by stalks, filtering the water for food or waiting for prey. In the aftermath of the extinction, many once minor groups-active, predatory relatives of modern-day fish, squids, snails and crabs —were able to expand. Some completely new lineages appeared. This ecological reorganization was so dramatic that it forms a fundamental boundary in the history of life. Not only does it demarcate the Permian and Triassic periods, it also establishes the close of the Paleozoic era and the start of the Mesozoic era. The modern tidal pool reflects what lived and what died 250 million years ago.
Over the past few years, exciting new insights into the causes and consequences of the end-Permian mass extinction have poured in from virtually every branch of the earth sciences Some of these findings include detailed studies of rapid changes in ocean chemistry, more thorough documentation of extinction patterns and new analyses showing that large volcanic eruptions occurred at the Permo-Triassic boundary.
How much do mass extinctions contribute to the evolution of a group, as compared with long-term adaptive trends? For example, sea urchins are ubiquitous in modern oceans but were relatively uncommon during the Permian. Only a single genus, Miocidaris, is known for certain to have survived the extinction. Did Mioeidaris survive by pure chance, or was it better adapted? Would sea urchins today look any different had it not been for the end-Permian extinction?
To resolve such questions, we need to learn more about the causes of the catastrophe and how those species that survived differed from those that disappeared. The key sources for this information are rock layers and fossils. Unfortunately, samples from the late Permian and early Triassic are notoriously difficult to come by. The fossil record across the boundary is plagued by poor preservation, a lack of rock to sample and other problems, including access. An extensive drop in sea level during the late Permian limited the number of marine rocks deposited on land, and many areas where the best rocks were preserved (most notably, in southern China) have been relatively hard for some geologists to reach.
As such, it has proved difficult to ascertain just how quickly life was snuffed out or if the deaths were subject to any regional variations. Some creatures, especially those sensitive to changes in the environment, died off rapidly, as shown by Erik Flugel and his colleagues at the University of Erlangen, who arri
A. two thirds
B. half
C. 90%
D. 30%