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Algae First To Recover After Asteroid Strike
pickens writes "The asteroid that impacted earth 65 million years ago killed off dinosaurs, but microalgae bounced back from the global extinction in about 100 years or less. Julio Sepúlveda, a geochemist at MIT, studied the molecular remains of microorganisms by extracting organic residues from rocks dated to the K-T extinction (in this research referred to as Cretaceous-Paleogene), and his results show that the ocean algae community greatly shrunk in size but only for about a century. 'We found that primary production in this part of the ocean recovered extremely rapidly after the impact,' says Julio Sepúlveda. Algae leave certain signatures of organic compounds and isotopes of carbon and nitrogen; bacteria leave different signatures. In the earliest layers after the asteroid impact, the researchers found much evidence for bacteria but little for algae, suggesting that right after the impact, algae production was greatly reduced. But the chemical signs of algae start to increase immediately above this layer. A full recovery of the ocean ecosystem probably took about a million years, but the quick rebound of photosynthesizing algae seems to confirm models that suggest the impact delivered a swift, abrupt blow to the Earth's environment."
If there is another strike I for one welcome our new microalgae overlords.
Cruise TT
Well, if the scum are the quickest to recover ....
It definitely did not take 100 years. I saw the satellite footage of earth after being struck by the asterioid/comet in the Discovery Channel. It took less than 5 minutes. In fact mammals that survived evolved into full fledged humans by the end of the program, less than 25 minutes later. It would have been sooner, but the evolution took many breaks and went into statis to accommodate the advertisers. It was really kind of Stephen Jay Gould to have provided for punctuated equilibrium, otherwise the Discovery Channel would not have been able to insert these commercials.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
How does one 'bounce back' from *extinction*?
To cure cancer and finding new source of clean energy? uh?
Dear
Pics or didn't happen!
How is this trolling? I kept it on topic, and I'm not after responses. Stars.
"Chance favors only the prepared mind." -Archimedes
algae rock.
also, #ifndef OVERLORD_STR #define OVERLORD_STR algae
i, for one, welcome our new OVERLORD_STR overlords
#endif
weinersmith
behave so badly. When I die, I will come back as slime, beating you all to the punch by about 500 billion years!
Seagoon: Shut up Eccles!
Eccles: Shut up Eccles!
Scientists can't even agree on what to *call* this so-called event:
K-T extinction
Cretaceous-Tertiary event
K-Pg event
Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction
Kreidezeit Weltschmertz
This proves that the Word of His Noodly Beneficence is the Truth.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
You'd liberate far more of these people if you could somehow nuke slashdot. Yeah, yeah, I know you'd have to destroy kuroshin, digg, and every other internet forum - users would just migrate there for their fix. And the software to create internet forums would need to be taken down too - good luck - try and destroy something with an open source license, it would be like trying to eradicate herpes. And then you'd need to eliminate pr0n. And every computer game. And chess. And cards. And paper. Never mind.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
There is lots of skepticism that the asteroid strike "killed off [the] dinosaurs." I saw a study where a microbiologist claims that many factors contributed to the death of the dinosaurs, but mostly it was disease, a competing lifeform that grew rampant well after the strike. I don't remember his name because it was a TV show, but I'm sure you can track it down.
In the meantime, this is all I have to offer from the Google:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/04/29/new-study-casts-doubt-on-the-asteroid-strike-theory-of-dino-extinction/
At this point, because of the data we have available in the sediment record, the idea of the dinosaurs being destroyed by the asteroid strike is almost mythology. Keller's work has gone a long way to confirming that we still don't really understand exactly what happened.
--
Toro
Anyone with a swimming pool could have told them about the ability of algae to come back from extinction.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I find it interesting that this article is written as if the theory of an asteroid strike causing a mass extinction had been proven as a fact. Theory != fact! C'mon people.
That's nothing.
My bathroom has a skylight which is nice to have and all. However, once I clean (scrub) the toilet bowl and then disinfect with Clorox bleach, green algae starts to show up again. Tough little buggers! I think they've adapted to the punishment I inflict on them.
Life is not for the lazy.
I'm impressed by the surgical precision of the scientists in their research into a 100-year window embedded in time roughly 65 million years ago.
Why Vegan? No other food choice has a farther-reaching and more profoundly positive impact on all of life on Earth.
I wonder if they classify blue-green algae-cyanobacteria- as algae or bacteria for the purposes of this article
[Grumble] Kids these days [/Grumble]
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
And all this time I thought it was cockroaches that was the most resilient.
I say things which affects my Karma negatively. (and I don't care) For instance; All religion is false.
No, you did not keep it on topic. The thread is talking about the speed of algae recovery after an extinction event, whereas your thread is about enslaving scientists and forcing them to work in politically correct areas of research.
I wish journalists would be more diligent about actually citing the relevant paper from which the news releases are derived. If it is on the web, is it *that* hard for people to stick a link in there?
Anyhow, I haven't read the paper because I can't get the full article yet, but if some of the recovery they are interpreting after the Cretaceous is related to dinoflagellates (which can be detected as dinosteranes in organic geochemistry work), it wouldn't be surprising that they bounced back fairly quickly: A) many of them form highly resistant cysts as part of their life cycle, and those cysts can survive for years before "hatching" and going back to business as usual, B) many dinoflagellates are heterotrophic or mixotrophic -- i.e. they eat things or they eat things at the same time as using photosynthesis. As a result they could probably survive better than many other planktonic "algae" that are exclusively autotrophs (i.e. photosynthetic). This expectation is confirmed to some extent by the observation of relatively few dinoflagellate extinctions across the K/T boundary compared to many other planktonic organisms.
Umm, let's see. As everyone owning a swimming pool can attest (as well as oceanographers studying algae bloom), algae can proliferate in a matter of days. The only thing they need is seawater and a bit of light (filtered light through a layer of clouds would do nicely). Basically, what this says is that sunlight was blocked to an extent that it strongly influenced algae growth for about a century. Geologists may call this a swift abrupt blow, but I wonder how humanity would fare in a 100-year impact winter. There would be few plants left to eat, leave alone to feed livestock. And I'd be surprised if other aspects of the ecosystem recovered as rapidly as the algea's minimal requirements.
Hi, I'm a paleontologist. So, you actually are asking a very important question, but its a question that every scientist must answer practically every day. Why should we get paid to study what we life? Well, simply, we don't. There are plenty of great scientists out there who don't get grants or jobs because what they do isn't relevant to enough people. Maybe its relevant to 20 other people out there, but not enough of the general public. The mark of a bad scientist is a scientist who can't figure out a workable scientific project and sell public institutions (like NSF) on it. Good scientists, overall, only exist as long as they can find useful things to study.
But what makes paleontology relevant to our daily lives? The study of mass extinctions is really important: we can't do the experiment of killing 50% of the earth's biota or clouding the skies for ten years to see how life responds. But, as humans, we are radically altering ecosystems with negative effects which may not play out for thousands of years. We need to understand, having already killed off a massive number of species, how life on earth will respond. Furthermore, understanding the oceans, particularly unpreserved organisms like soft-bodied algae, is important to understanding the processes which control the atmospheric content and the supply of nutrients to larger sea creatures. For example, we know species richness recovery from the KT was delayed in some places for periods much longer than a century. Some thought that was due to a prolonged lack of food. Now we know that the algal production started up so quickly, we know that can't be due to a lack of food; maybe its something else (like a wrecked ecosystem structure).
If you need to know any reasons why understanding the past is important, look up the papers of Jeremy Jackson or David Jablonski. They'll set you straight.
Well that's great for the Algae.
"And everybody says that it will be only cockroaches and republicans that will survive. There are useful items that will remain and recover."
Hey hey hey hey! Cockroaches are a very important part of multiple ecosystems. There's 4,000 species of them, only about 30 or so are actually associated with human habitations and even then only a small minority are actual pest species. Republicans on the other hand are all pests and serve no important role in any ecosystem, and indeed unless culled will turn any ecosystem into a toxic wasteland filled with 99.8% disease-infested slum and 0.2% gated McMansionvilles.
" There's an asteroid heading towards the planet ! Quick, retrain everyone to be astrophysicists "
Naah, that's all silly liberal crap!
If it makes money, it can't be bad. It's absolutely got to proven bad, in a court of law, with a corpse of the right social class and clear undeniable evidence. And then *maybe* we can do something about it - with voluntary compliance and self-policing, of course.
(I suppose the sarcasm-impaired might need an alert about this post. But if they're THAT thick, no warning I could give would suffice. Isn't it amazing that "conservation" shares its root with "conservative"?)
Thanks for the references of Jeremy Jackson and David Jablonski, though there were several useless hits on both.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Didn't you see Jurassic Park?
L'esperienza de questa dolce vita (The experience of this sweet life) - Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
This is a valid question and should not be marked "troll". It is a question that deserves a serious answer.
Another paleontologist has already answered it well, but I'll give my take as a fellow paleontologist.
The main point I make in the classes I teach is based on an old saying:
"Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it".
In the case of life, that history is mostly one of extinction -- the destiny for >99.9% of species that have ever lived. Humans are a species of life, so do the math, but wouldn't it be nice to "beat the odds" for a while?
Life on Earth has been through a heck of a lot, so I suppose the extinction statistic isn't surprising. There have been some very bad days on Earth -- days that are on par with Dr. Strangelove "doomsday" scenarios, but naturally caused. From paleontology we know that life will survive in some form even when things are extraordinarily bad, although it takes a while for the global ecosystem to get back on its feet afterward, which is what the cited paper is about.
Would we know about these natural hazards to life on Earth if it were not for paleontology? Probably many of them, yes. There are other ways to get at them. But it is only via paleontology that we can get a sense of the effects on life -- the response to the stress. As I also point out in classes, even if it were practical to whack a 10km asteroid into the Earth to see what would happen, it is an experiment we would not want to run. Fortunately we have a bunch of experiments that were already run, and it is more than just impacts:
What happens when ocean currents change configuration?
What happens when the oceans become more strongly "stratified" into layers ("Strangelove oceans")?
What happens during volcanic eruptions 100x greater than any in historical times?
What happens when sea level goes up or down?
What happens when half of whole continents are covered with glacial ice sheets?
What happens when whole groups of organisms become extinct?
What happens when atmospheric temperatures or compositions abruptly change (e.g., the Paleocene/Eocene Thermal Maximum)?
All of these are highly relevant questions to the long-term survival of humanity because they could happen naturally or, in some cases, analogous processes could relate to human activity. They are tough questions to answer, but we are fortunate to have access to previous changes that far exceed what we expect in the near future. If we are going to become extinct like most other species have, I'd rather go out knowing that I tried my best to understand and cope with the world that I live on rather than dying out because I was ignorant of my environment and the implications of decisions related to it. This is stuff we need to know. Ignoring it is like living in a house while knowing *nothing* about how to maintain it.
You can always question the priorities of a field of study as obscure as paleontology: is it more important to invest in, say medical science or the development of new energy sources instead of paleontology? You ask this question specifically, and you are right to ask it. Even though paleontology bears on the long-term survival of humanity, which is kind of important (!!), it might be hard to justify with so many urgent problems. I agree that medical science and energy are more important. But my answer is a fairly simple one: have you actually looked at how much money is invested in paleontology versus those other subjects?! ;-) The relative financial priorities aren't out of line, as near as I can tell.
PS: as it turns out, quite a few of the mass extinction events in Earth history are associated with changes in ocean circulation and phytoplankton productivity, which sometimes results in the deposition of organic-rich marine sedimentary rocks. A well-known exam
That was so long that my ass got numb...I think I shat methane hydrate. Whoopsie! See you next mass extinction!
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Pillaging the environment doesn't really "make money"
It's more akin to "borrowing", and then blowing the dough and leaving your kids to pay back the loan...with interest.
We know, for an absolute certainty, that amphibians, reptiles, and mammals (or mammal-like creatures) survived this catastrophy. So why is it a big deal that algae came back within 100 years? I am completely mystified why anybody would even think this was a question. Mice were already running around. Why is it a surprise (to anybody with a brain) that algae should also?
I think the journalists should take a reality check ...
"were able to document several thousand years of the K-P event in short 150-year-long time-steps" ... so, the minimum resolution was 150 years, but they know the recovery took only 100 years; the K-P event took several thousand years ??
They can tell from a single data point that algae bounced back faster, or that algae did not bounce back faster ? How about the "dip in sterane levels " in the clay deposits "right after the meteorite hit is evidence" that something changed the course of a river or ocean currents ? How did fish survive after a 100 years "dip" in algae levels ?
Exactly!