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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."
Cool story bro
How is that possible? I thought that the earth was created only like 10,000 years ago.
(I kid, I kid, please go easy on me)
is that this all happened in the last 6,000 years or so.
And everybody says that it will be only cockroaches and republicans that will survive. There are useful items that will remain and recover.
Honestly, I think we get a little too hyped about this prehistoric stuff. I mean, if this was 65 million years ago, you will never truely know what was going on unless you invent a time machine. Yes, I know, they've scientifically proven that a celestial body did indeed impact the Earth, and yeah, a bunch of stuff died. Now, take these intelligent human beings that study prehistoric times. Given the fact that it actually requires an abundance of gray matter to figure stuff like this out, as well as a lot of time to do the research and field work, these individuals could easily be tasked to do something important. Something like finding a way to replace gasoline effectively, or curing cancer. Just an opinion, but probably off topic. At any rate, algae and bacteria are obviously going to bounce back faster than everything else. They are simple organisms. Algae may not be single celled, but it's a hell of a lot simpler than a fish. Just an observation.
"Chance favors only the prepared mind." -Archimedes
[Grumble] Kids these days [/Grumble]
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
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