Earth Recovered Quickly From Extinction Event

jmoloug1 writes "Traditional theory is that the earth took up to 10 million years to recover from the dinosaur extinction event. However a newly discovered site has revealed that this estimate may be way off. CNN has the article describing how quickly a tropical rain forest grew after the catastrophic event 65 million years a go."

Comments

Re:Krakatau

[Austenite]

Yes, but Krakatoa didn't cause extinctions of species, except in the (relatively) local area. The re-population by migration is nearly instant, on a geological timesecale. I mean, you're only talking 120 years. Perhaps if we'd found that a new ecosystem consisting of previously un-evolved lifeforms had developed around Krakatoa in the last 120 years, then your point about finding the right fossils might be valid.

Nonlinear Relationship

[4of12]

Yeah, but Krakatau was still limited in magnitude, despite being the largest recorded eruption in civilized history ( I think Toba in Sumatra was the largest if you include less civilized history.)

I think the rapidity with which life regenerates has a lot to do with the magnitude of the event.

The supervolcanoes, despite their devastating effects, don't seem to be quite as potentially catastrophic as collisions with space debris.

A sufficiently large comet or asteroid really could wipe out so much of higher life forms that Earth might have to re-start with single cell organisms.

Re:Krakatau

[MadAhab]

I think you're right. There's no reason to think that life would have been so devastated. Species, yes, but remember that everything that dies leaves an expansion niche for something that survives. It's possible, of course, that you wouldn't have much diversity for a while, but as surviving species expanded into different kinds of enviroments (previously made unavailable due to competing species), you'd see differentiation rather rapidly.

Re:Krakatau

[j_w_d]

It's interesting to consider the issues about this. I had never considered that vegetation populations would be slow to recover from the K-T event. You would think that after the primary dust load had settled, vegetation would start to rebound. That would imply no more than decades for the earliest paleocene plant communities to begin to re-form. The most successfull early colonists would be forms that were not dependent upon external polinators. There would be a period following where plant populations partially dependent upon animal and insect vectors to spread and reproduce waited until the necessary vectors appeared, or the plant species adapted or became fully extinct.