Volcanic Warming Eyed in 'Great Dying'

gollum123 writes "AP writes on an article in the journal Science where an ancient version of global warming may have been to blame for the greatest mass extinction in Earth's history. 'In an event known as the "Great Dying," some 250 million years ago, 90 percent of all marine life and nearly three-quarters of land-based plants and animals went extinct. Researchers think the answer is Massive volcanic flows in what is now Siberia, and believe the extinctions were caused by global warming and oxygen deprivation over long periods of time."

Comments

Yesterday we had the great freeze...

[bwcarty]

now we have the great dying.

This bit o' work by Robert Frost seems appropriate now:

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice

Slashdot...News for Nerds. Stuff about death.

Humans could deal with 10%

[Engineer-Poet]

There are human populations living at altitudes where the partial pressure of oxygen is about half that at sea level (Peru, Tibet). Even more interesting, the two populations seem to have two different adaptations to the altitude and there may be another adaptation original to Ethiopia. I doubt that we'd have any difficulty engineering ourselves with the physiological changes required to handle such conditions even if they occurred over the next century.

The rest of the ecosystem would probably not be so flexible.