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Galactic Origin For 62M-Year Extinction Cycle?
Hugh Pickens writes "Cosmologist Adrian Mellott has an article in Seed Magazine discussing his search for the mechanism behind the mass extinctions in earth's history that seem to occur with a period of about 62 million years. Scientists have identified nearly 20 mass extinctions throughout the fossil record, including the end-Permian event about 250 million years ago that killed off about 95 percent of life on Earth. Mellott notes that as our solar system orbits the Milky Way's center, it oscillates through the galactic plane with a period of around 65 million years. 'The space between galaxies is not empty. It's actually full of rarefied hot gas,' says Mellott. 'As our galaxy falls into the Local Supercluster, it should disturb this gas and create a shock wave, like the bow shock of a jet plane,' generating cascades of high-energy subatomic particles and radiation called 'cosmic rays.' These effects could cause enhanced cloud formation and depletion of the ozone layer, killing off many small organisms at the base of the food chain and potentially leading to a population crash. So where is the earth now in the 62-million year extinction cycle? '[W]e are on the downside of biodiversity, a few million years from hitting bottom,' writes Mellott."
you're so f**king right man. this article is f**cking stupid. i get you cause i drank a barrel of wine earlier too. OBVIOUSLY, the gas cloud is orbiting the milky way at 62 million year intervals and we're the ones standing still. IDNTRTFAWIDTBYDE (i don't need to read the f**king article when i'm drunk too because you didn't either)
Which is precisely why Coke kill a pony for every can they make ;)
Ah, the well known Pony Preservation Principle.
We live, as we dream -- alone....
theory about 20 years ago. However that one suggested the reason for the mass extinctions was because the stars in the galactic plane are much closer together so the likely hood of being in close proximity to a supernova and all the incumbent radiation that entails is much higher. This also explains why occasionally mass extinction skips a beat. Of course the 2 scientists who postulated this theory were promptly laughed at and ridiculed by the scientific community in that very grown up way that scientists do.
Cold fusion anyone?
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
All this has happened before and will happen again.
Research my ass.
I've just got the research report about your ass, and you're not going to like the findings.
Take a look at wikipedia's graph of extinctions from the article about the history of life. I haven't done any actual signal analysis on this data.
I would buy that there is a bit more energy in the per 62 million years signal, but I wouldn't call it clockwork-like regularity. If they came up with a p-value of 0.01, I'd say that there must be something happening, but I would expect a little more consistency out of a big cosmic event like the one they're describing.
http://xkcd.com/326/
I'm starting to think we just have too much knowledge these days. I've lost count of the number of 'discoveries' that are already known, both in IT and the wider areas of science and beyond.
Sorry, somebody already thought of that.
Probably the Simpson's.
Why not just put it in your Low Budget HDV Filipino Horror Movie in NYC.
A recent paper shows that this may indeed by the case
Given that Svensmark's team has been granted an experiment slot at CERN, at least many of those in the Physics community believe it's a plausible hypothesis. There is research out there demonstrating some causal link between cloud cover and Cosmic Rays. Science is all about reaching beyond what is known. It would be pretty a pointless exercise otherwise.