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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."
I should have never given Dick Cheney that time machine. I was not aware of the mischief he was capable of.
From the learning-from-history dept??
WTF are we supposed to learn from this, "Don't set the fucking volcanos off"?
If only the US had signed the Krakatoa-Pompeii Treaty, we wouldn't be getting fucked to death by these massive volcanic flows!!
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
"90 percent of all marine life and nearly three-quarters of land-based plants and animals went extinct"
And all this time I thought it was nine-tenths of all marine life, and 75% of land-based life that went extinct.
Mmmm baked vegetable and meat medley.
The sad part is that we'll be part of the main course....I'll have Geek au gratin please with a side of elephant home fries.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
When people climb tall mountains, they have to deal with lower oxygen. (Some people bring oxygen with them, but some don't). ...16% oxygen in the atmosphere doesn't sound like it would kill all those people...
It might not kill people who are trained to deal with the differences in the levels. For the elderly, for those that have weakened immune systems, and for young children these changes might have consequences.
People train at altitude for months to get their bodies prepared for thin air. I have a feeling that dinosaurs might not have had the chance (or possibly even the evolutionary ability) to make those changes over a short period of time.
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.
The dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago, you twit.
m ian.htm
We're talking about the Permian Extinction - which, by the way, no-one actually calls the "Great Dying".
I could tell y'all about it but it would be a duplication of effort. Do yourself a favor and read something:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/darwin/exfiles/per
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian_extinction
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
N.B., The perentage of oxygen in the atmosphere doesn't change with altitude; the barometric pressure does, which reduces the amount of oxygen you can get per breath.
From the article:
Studying a 1,000-foot thick section of exposed sediment, Ward's team found evidence of a gradual extinction over about 10 million years followed by a sharp increase in extinction rate that lasted another 5 million years.
Huh?
A Gradual extinction over 10 million years? Yeah, That's gradual all right.
The best part is the "sharp" increase over five million more years. So what he's saying is that a hell of lot of stuff died over 15 million years? Wowfuck.
If we've got 10 to 15 million years of fossil fuel to burn, I say screw it.
"Dear? you can turn up the heat now"
feh.
"...In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true..."
> Luck favors the bold. - Virgil
> Luck favors the well prepared. - Pasteur
Luck favors the lucky.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It's certainly not the first time Vulcanism* has been implicated in a mass extinction - the Deccan Traps, for instance, have been implicated in the KT event that is thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 Million Years ago. There's even a school of thought that says the Chicxulub event may have triggered a major convulsion in the Traps - double jeopardy, if you will.
Except that the earth is only about 4000 years old and fossils were put there to test our faith, right?
* I nearly typed 'vulvanism', but that's a different story.
Screw you all! I'm off to the pub
Article doesn't blame Americans for anything... You know other countries have factories, oil, pollution, etc ?
Well, you know there are other countries at least ?
There's no place like 127.0.0.1
MyBlog
Then why do people like you care about news like this, when you claim the world is only a few thousand years old? You have to decide what to believe in: creationist or scientific lore.
In either way, assuming you are a supporter of the latter theory you should also know that global warming can have several different reasons.
The global warming that has happened since the widespread introduction of the car and petroleum products in the energy industry, as well as industrialised cattle farming, is real, in a very short time span. This is a thing we can do something about, but can't due to greed.
The global warming from natural reasons work on a much longer time span. This, on the other hand, is something we can't do anything about, and here GWB sure can't be blamed.
Just because the global temperature varies in a very long time span of thousands of years does not mean that the man-made environmental catastrophy that is happening is not real.
It certainly couldn't have been caused by nature...
To summarise, Nebraska is well known for its ash deposits - mined for cleaning products like Ajax - but no-one knew where it all came from.
Then in 1971, Mike Voorhies found a mass grave of prehistoric bones - sabre-toothed deer, zebra-like horses etc. - all killed by something big 12 million years ago. They were all buried under volcanic ash up to 3 metres deep.
One problem - no-one knew where all the ash came from.
Now Yellowstone was known to be pretty active, with its geysers, boiling mud-pools etc. but they couldn't find a caldera, ie. an actual volcano cone anywhere in the park.
But fortunately NASA were testing some high altitude photography techniques and decided to take some pictures of Yellowstone, thoughtfully dropping some copies off at the Visitor Centre. It was then that they realised that in fact Yellowstone is ONE BIG CALDERA - i.e. a 'superplume', 9000 square kilometres of crater left from some humungous explosion a long time back.
In Bill Bryson's words, "imagine a pile of TNT about the size of an English county and reaching 13 kilometres into the sky, to about the height of the highest cirrus clouds, and you have some idea of what visitors to Yellowstone are shuffling about on top of".
He goes on, "The Yellowstone eruption of two million years ago put out enough ash to bury New York State to a depth of 20 metres ..."
And then there's the last supervolcano eruption in Toba, in northern Sumatra, 74,000 years ago. Studies of ice cores in Greenland show that at least 6 years of 'volcanic winter' followed, and that humans probably were at the brink of extinction, with maybe only several thousand of us at any one time for thousands of years after (which maybe explains our relative lack of genetic diversity).
Yes, volcanoes are more than fire and magma - every now and then there're some *really* big ones.
I suggest you read the papers here and here before continuing. Actually, I suggest that EVERYONE ON SLASHDOT read those papers; they will open your eyes.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
It is not obvious to me that changing oxygen levels would be all that destructive. We've known for a while that oxygen levels in the Triassic (following the "Great Dying") where some of the lowest in Earth's history. We have also known that oxygen concentration in the Carboniferous (50-100 Myr earlier) were some of the highest (perhaps 180% of modern value).
In the Carboniferous, what you see (in addition to extra nasty forest fires) is an explosion of gigantism among diffusion limited organisms. Such organisms, mostly insects and amphibans, have respiratory or circulatory systems that are limited by the ability of oxygen to diffuse through them. With higher O2 levels, such animals can develop larger body plans and clearly did in the Carboniferous. By contrast, falling O2 levels would probably be an evolutionary pressure towards dwarfism and smaller body plans.
After the Permian mass extinctions, we do see very few large animals. This might be associated with low O2 levels, but it might also be the results of an ecosystem so disrupted that it can't support large predators.
However, it would be hard to hang the extinctions on oxygen alone since oxygen levels seem to have fallened over a much longer period of time than the extinctions, and would not have affected all organisms equally. Perhaps coupled with volcanism and global warming it is enough, but personally I doubt it. I am inclined to favor models that talk about volcanism or other causes leading to stratification and toxicity in the oceans. If you are going to kill >90% of all oceanic species, it would seem that the best bet is to make the oceans unlivable for them.
However, this debate is likely to continue for a long time and we will no doubt hear many other theories before it is all done.
"The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles...hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worlwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages...And we think some plastic bags, and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet...the planet...the planet isn't going anywhere people... we are!" ~ George Carlin
I read the article "carefully" but I don't agree with their theory on the subject:
"Some of us have been toying with the idea that dinosaurs evolved to be a low-oxygen adaptation," resulting from this era, Ward said. "We know birds can live at much lower oxygen concentrations than we do, and we and think there were similar lung adaptations in dinosaurs."
Yeah, birds can live at lower oxygen levels because they fly at altitude on a regular basis. They also come down to the ground for various reasons. That way they are cross-training at different altitudes and thus able to adapt to varying conditions.
As far as I am aware MOST dinosaurs did not have the ability to fly. And supposedly if you weren't near sea-level you weren't going to live. So, the dinosaurs were not cross-training at differing altitudes and probably did not gain the same sort of breathing abilities that birds did.
I think it was quite a leap for the scientists in this article to make. Then again IANAS.
I filtered through gollum123's article submission to find any political bias .. he's clean. Although I still believe that global warming is a big problem that we must do something about,. I cannot deny that nature itself is as big a problem:
All we can do is work on the stuff we can control. We cant control earthquakes, tsunamis from those, hurricanes etc.. we need to keep focussing on prediction and reducing emmisions. If we get taken out because the sun suddenly goes supernova (which shuoldnt happen) and blows the f*$@ out of the whole solar system, we can live with that ... or if an indistructible massive depleted uranium asteroid slams into the earth
By the way, I think we should be spending more money on probes like ESA's Rosetta that studies th sun than on Huygens which merely tells us about how we could kill ourselves off with freexing cold ethane rain just in case we cant kill ourselves off on this world ...
We learned to talk less than 100,000 years ago.
We've only been recording and passing down history for about 6,000 years. There may have been some damn mighty civilizations before then, but all knowledge of them is lost. (No Atlantis comments from the peanut gallery, it was a made up country Plato concocted for use in one of his books, and if he'd suspected people would have taken it seriously, he probably would have killed himself in despair)
We've already managed to drive a number of species to extinction, and filled the planet with toxins that are killing us off by various means, cancer among them.
A lot of people think we're likely to make the planet uninhabitable for our species withing a few generations.
Oh well. Whatever we do, we can't sterilize the planet. So long as there's enough bacteria and food left to keep going, it will evolve. We many not even be the first sentient species to evolve on this planet. There may have been something before us that polluted the world to the point where they died off. Our oil fields may very well be their landfills.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
here are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production- with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas - parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia - where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.
The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree - a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars' worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.
To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world's weather. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. "A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale," warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, "because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century."
A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.
To the layman, the relatively small changes in temperature and sunshine can be highly misleading. Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin points out that the Earth's average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about seven degrees lower than during its warmest eras - and that the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average. Others regard the cooling as a reversion to the "little ice age" conditions that brought bitter winters to much of Europe and northern America between 1600 and 1900 - years when the Thames used to freeze so solidly that Londoners roasted oxen on the ice and when iceboats sailed the Hudson River almost as far south as New York City.
Just what causes the onset of major and minor ice ages remains a mystery. "Our knowledge of the mechanisms of climatic change is at least as fragmentary as our data," concedes the National Academy of Sciences report. "Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions."
Meteorologists think that they can forecast the short-term results of the return to the norm of the last century. They begin by noting the slight drop in overall temperature that produces large numbers of pressure centers in the upper atmosphere. These break up the smooth flow of west
The rest of the ecosystem would probably not be so flexible.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
OK. yeah. sort of right. for a given value of right.
It's the equivalent of teaching newtonian gravity at high school so that later you can learn einsteinian gravity at university, and then demolish the whole thing in your PhD thesis.
the fringes of the atmosphere are thinner in oxygen than the lower reaches. of course for practical purposes (Everest/Chomolungma) there's less difference in percentage than higher up, and pressure is the overriding factor.
OK, OK, I'm Anal Retentive. sue me.
Screw you all! I'm off to the pub
The average temperature during the dino age was 3-5 degrees above what it is now; they seemed to take it ok. Now we are going to blame a big volcano for global warming? How about the ash it would put up and block sunlight (hmm, cooling) and cause respiratory problems. How about all the great gasses it released, such as CO2, SO2, and whatever else volcanos belch up.
I do not disagree that the planet may be getting warmer, but labeling an ancient volcano as killing off most life as global warming is just sensationalistic. The crap that is getting put out as "science" when it comes to global warming is starting to push the fringe of being reasonable. Didn't some guy say that we should all stop eating meat so we cull most of the cows so their methane gasses would no longer contribute to greenhouse gasses?
This place is getting nuts, and I haven't found any Vogon ships recently.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Now it's bad enough when we get local pertebations in weather that screw up the growing season. With global warming we start wandering into realms where the entire WORLD's growing patterns change. When you have millions of people starving in one country, while a previously uninhabited place starts being able to grow food like crazy, you get global wars as we all pile onto the new places like toddlers fighting over a cookie.
And if that weren't bad enough, where you have millions of starving people with compromised immune systems, epidemics aren't far behind.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
No, but reptiles are more efficent than mammels or insects are with thier breathing. An Iguana for example can go 15-20 minutes underwater.
t io n.html
s po nse%20to%20278.pdf
It's not about cross-training, it's about how respiratory systems work. And since birds came out of Dinosaurs, it's likely that thier respiratory system is more like birds than Mammals are since Mammals split off before the Dinosaurs evolved and for that matter, the Reptiles crawling around right now evolved before the evolution of dinosaurs are pretty much stayed where they are.
So, lets take a look at Aves.
http://www.biology.eku.edu/RITCHISO/birdrespira
"The avian respiratory system delivers oxygen from the air to the tissues and also removes carbon dioxide. In addition, the respiratory system plays an important role in thermoregulation (maintaining normal body temperature). The avian respiratory system is different from that of other vertebrates, with birds having relatively small lungs plus nine air sacs that play an important role in respiration (but are not directly involved in the exchange of gases).
The air sacs permit a unidirectional flow of air through the lungs. Unidirectional flow means that air moving through bird lungs is largely 'fresh' air & has a higher oxygen content. In contrast, air flow is 'bidirectional' in mammals, moving back & forth into & out of the lungs. As a result, air coming into a mammal's lungs is mixed with 'old' air (air that has been in the lungs for a while) & this 'mixed air' has less oxygen. So, in bird lungs, more oxygen is available to diffuse into the blood."
http://arnica.csustan.edu/jones/Research/pdf/Re
"We disagree for two reasons. First, we examined the comparative physiology literature and determined that maximum oxygen exchange rates of some extant reptiles overlap the oxygen consumption rates measured in some mammals during activity. Specifically, exceptionally active reptiles with multicameral lungs (for example, monitor lizards and sea turtles) have values of VO2 max that overlap or approach the oxygen exchange rates measured in similar size mammals during activity. Therefore, the septate lung in those reptiles must be capable of sustaining rates of gas flux characteristic of endotherms. However, mammals and birds "typically" have a greater VO2 max. Therefore, we addressed the question of what modifications in the oxygen transport system of an extant reptile would be necessary to support higher rates of oxygen consumption.
Inadequate preservation of the soft-tissue components of the oxygen transport system precludes accurate assessment of the aerobic potential of theropod dinosaurs. However, on the basis of metabolic patterns in extant reptiles and our theoretical analysis, we find that the notion that nonavian septate lungs constrain high oxygen flux rates is not supported. Our analysis suggests that modifications in lung structure were not a prerequisite for supporting higher oxygen consumption rates. In the mammalian and archosaur lineages that evolved endothermy, higher oxygen consumption rates could have been supported through changes in ventilatory mechanics and increases in blood oxygen content and cardiac output."
So it's not about the "cross-training" it's about how the lungs and blood works.
Those folks before the PT Extinction Event might simply have not been able to deal with the lower O2 levels and they all geeked it, while the habitable area decreased.
And yet, postulating the existence of an entire civilization based on absolutely zero evidence is kind of... pointless. At least in the God-existance debate we have spiritual texts.
I was there was a 'buzzer' tag.
The majority of Scientists believe that human behavior 'contributes' to the already naturally occuring phenomenon of Global Warming. Humans are not the root cause, humans simply assist the process in speeding up, even slightly.
One thing most all of those scientists agree on is that Global Warming is happening. That shouldn't be part of the argument anymore.
The only thing that should be argued, tested, made into theories is what we, as humans, can do to slow or otherwise alter the course of Global Warming. One thing many Scientists believe is that we need to radically change our behavior in order to decrease our contributions to Global Warming.
This includes, but is not limited to, discovering cleaner sources of energy production and changing the design of cities and metropolitan areas to have a lower retention of heat. Right now, there are many ideas about how to go about doing that.
The final soltution to the possibility of the Earth losing the ability to support human life is to work towards being able to leave our planet, terraform or design methods to survive on planets that are nowhere near 'Earth Normals'. Colonization of our Solar System and then Extrasolar planets is what will allow our species to continue and thrive.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
It compressed the inhabitable area on the surface while that and other things were happening that effected the oceans, and at the same time we have contiental shifts greating deserts and squeezing out the shallow seas.
It was a triple-witching hour for extictions.
Time of widespread regression of the seas.
Gymnosperms (seed plants) replaced many spore bearing plants.
Widespread accumulation of evaporites. More of Permian salt deposits than of any other age
Waters were hypersaline
Mass extinction at the end of the Permian
Trilobites all disappeared
Rugose and tabulate corals all disappeared
Blastoids all disappeared
Fusulinid forams all disappeared
3 Extinctions
Actually 2 or 3 events
End-Capitanian (Mid Permian)
End-Changsingian (LatePermian)
End-Olenekian (Triassic)
According to Chambers Dictionary, floe is probably from the Norwegian flo, meaning layer. The Old Norse is flO. The O character should really be a lower-case 'o' with an overbar, or a long-o, but that's not easy to represent here.
Flow is a noun in Scottish, meaning a morasse, a flat moist tract of land, a quicksand, a moorland pool, a sea basin or sound. This one is from a slightly different Old Norse root, though rather similar to the previous. The Old Norse is flOa, meaning to flood, with Icelandic flOi, a marshy moor, and Norwegian dialect floe, a pool in a swamp.
In Old English, the verb to flow, as appears in your example, was flOwan. I believe that the connection with this and the Scottish noun is through the Old Norse verb.
Paul
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate
Earth is more complex than anyone can comprehend or understand, it will outlast humans by a long shot, nothing we will do will kill it.
That sounds like a challenge!
Now, where did I hide the plans for my doomsday device...
You can't take the sky from me...
Global warming definitely happens naturally. That doesn't mean the current global warming is natural, or entirely natural, or that we can do nothing to stop it.
The consensus of scientific opinion seems to be moving more and more towards the current warming happening much faster than historical ones, and mankind being partially responsible.
Problem is, by the time we wait for conclusive evidence, it may be too late.
Slashdot needs a moderation choice "-1: Huge block of unformatted text".
You can't take the sky from me...
Green house efficiency is characterized by the magnitutude and bandwidth of absorption in the infrared spectrum. On a PPM to PPM concentration comparison, Methane is about 22 times more effective at trapping infrared radiation than CO2. That the infrared absorption characteristic is independant of its longevity in the atmosphere. Methane oxidises in the presence of O2 and has residence times measured in decades. CO2 uptake by plants and oceans is much slower, with residence times measured in centuries. Long-term sequestration in carbonate sediments happens on scales measured in millenia.
The wikipedia entry is likely more clear than me.
Whoever modded the parent as troll really is an idiot, or, perhaps, doesn't know what "Troll" means (of course, the two aren't mutually exclusive).
We Christians called it "the flood"...and it wasn't 250 mil. years ago.
How do we know how fast warming occured before? We don't even know how fast the cooling occured. We know the average rate that it occured at, but we don't know the detailed rate it occured at. Comparing 100 years of daily data to 100 million years of millenial data is not a good way to compare.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
So we know the ferocious potential of lava flows now. Why can't we use active lava domes to destroy nuclear waste? Wouldn't that do the trick? I always wondered this, but was too afraid to ask the teacher for fear of being laughed at. Sad, I know, but does anybody know the potential for this type of thing?
No, if impugn the work of scientists simply because it would fit your political agenda, and give no counter evidence to support your conspiracy theories, then yes, it is flame bait.