Slashdot Mirror
Single Microbe May Have Triggered the "Great Dying"
An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from Medical Daily about a new theory for what triggered the
"Great Dying: " "Researchers believe that they may finally know why the event occurred, but the theory is not without controversy. There are several theories, including the possibility of a meteorite hitting the planet. Previously, most researchers believed that the Permian mass extinction was a result of a series of volcanic eruptions in what is now Siberia. ... However, Daniel Rothman from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is floating around a different theory. As he presented in a meeting for the American Geophysical Union, he believes that the mass extinction could have been caused by something much smaller. His theory is that the extinction was caused by a single strain of bacteria."
But where's the Earth shattering kaboom? There's supposed to be an Earth shattering kaboom!
He remarked in one of his essays that people completely misunderstand evolution, using teleological thinking to believe that we are in some way the "highest form" or "goal" of evolution. But in fact, in terms of biomass and effects on the Earth's ecosystems, we are still living in the Age of Bacteria.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
By reading the Wikipedia article, I have determined that it also may have been:
- A single rock
- A single volcano
- The build-up of a single type of gas
- The rising of a single body of water
- Lack of a single element in the water
Yes. A ridiculous theory. But about as plausible, after all it's just another virus...
Zombie dinosaurs chomped their way through the whole planet, then finally decomposed themselves over time. Only small mammals who could hide underground or birds that could fly away escaped those brain-lovin' undead dinos!
Ask the sharks; they saw the whole thing.
Volcanic eruptions in Siberia = entire planet dusted with nickel.
Eh, geologist comes up with geological theory. Funding running a bit low?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Which was it?
A comet!
Rothman analyzed a sample of sediment from the end of the Permian era that he obtained in China. From his analysis, he found that the rise in carbon levels was way too sharp to be caused by a geologic event like volcanic eruptions. He argues that instead, a microbe was behind this sudden rise.
Called methanosarcina, this sea-dwelling microbe is responsible for most of the methane produced biologically even today. Rothman and his team discovered that methanosarcina developed the ability to produce methane 231 million years ago. While that ability came around too late to be single-handedly responsible for the link.
Eh?
However, mathanosarcina requires nickel in order to produce methane quickly. Nickel levels spiked almost 251 million years ago, likely because of a spike in Siberian lava from the volcanoes themselves. This indicates that methanosarcina was directly responsible for producing the methane that killed off an overwhelming majority of the Earth's species.
Don't see where he proves the methane did it...
it's how you mass-extinct with it.
Nowadays you HAVE to incorporate gas-influenced Climate Change into EVERYTHING you produce.Otherwise you risk losing your grant to a malleable researcher.
Yeah right because the 100+ nations that fund the IPCC all have exactly the same political agenda and every mainstream scientist, science journal and scientific institute on the planet has been bought of by an international system of grants that doesn't actually exist. Do you realize how fucking crazy paranoid you have to be to believe that, it's the same anti-science shit you hear from creationists, anti-vax'ers, and other groups of whacko's who don't like specific aspects of the natural world and choose to walk around with their head up their arse. Geology is the only tool we have to investigate past climate, get a grip on your paranoid delusions and go read a climate science text book, particularly the chapters on paleo-climatology.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Why would we wait that long?
Most of the critters are pretty useless to us already or will be so in the near future.
*sigh*
Quite complaining & get nerding.
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Yes, evidence that backs up your idea is a good way to get a science grant, science grants have a proven track record of increasing our knowledge of the world around us.
Nowadays you HAVE to incorporate gas-influenced Climate Change into EVERYTHING you produce.Otherwise you risk losing your grant to a malleable researcher.
Yeah right because the 100+ nations that fund the IPCC all have exactly the same political agenda and every mainstream scientist, science journal and scientific institute on the planet has been bought of by an international system of grants that doesn't actually exist. Do you realize how fucking crazy paranoid you have to be to believe that, it's the same anti-science shit you hear from creationists, anti-vax'ers, and other groups of whacko's who don't like specific aspects of the natural world and choose to walk around with their head up their arse. Geology is the only tool we have to investigate past climate, get a grip on your paranoid delusions and go read a climate science text book, particularly the chapters on paleo-climatology.
Kinda like creationists claiming that you can't trust biologists because they're all in on an atheistic conspiracy to discredit religion.
The foundation of science denialism is disqualifying the actual experts from having an opinion on the topic.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
And thinking about the importance of a phylum in terms of its biomass is nothing to do with whether a biologist is American or not - it tells you the significance of that phylum in food chains. What does the AC above think the krill eat? They eat plankton. Now tell me, which is there more of? Krill or plankton? And what do plankton do? They use sunlight and nutrients (largely recycled by bacteria from decaying matter), or they use bacteria directly.
How does organic matter in the soil get broken down into a form that plants can use? Fungi and bacteria. Without plants, there would be only a few people living on the sea coasts.
Read Jay Gould. Then read some of the many books he recommends. You will then be able to make more intelligent posts on these subjects.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
And the climate change denialists have...Christopher Walter Monckton.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
RTFA again: he did, her name's Andromeda...
He does not have a theory. He has a hypothesis.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Cofactor F430
Forget the organism. This is about the advent of a novel reaction pathway, that scales on the availability of nickel. Surprisingly, geology might have something to say on that score. Any vigorous reaction pathway that bubbles madly away at an oceanic scale is almost certain to colour the infrared signature of our thin gas membrane. Imagine if everyone on the planet had an F430.
There's a lot to like about this hypothesis. I've seen worse. To determine exactly how this pathway becomes prolific at global scale would take decades of further study. It's as yet a humble beginning, of the kind that sometimes pans out.
Setting aside the lack of detail and the characterization of an untested hypothesis as a theory, if you follow the link in TFA about the dissenting opinions you'll find this gem:
Methane explosion
But just what caused that massive methane release remained a mystery. Daniel Rothman, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his colleagues wondered whether ocean-dwelling bacteria that churn out methane were the culprits.
His team found through genetic analysis that bacteria called methanosarcina evolved the ability to break down nickel and make methane as part of its metabolism about 251 million years ago. The bacteria may have exploded in population, thereby releasing the ocean's vast methane reserves. And because the bacteria add an oxygen molecule to methane during metabolism, an exponential rise in methanosarcina may have catastrophically depleted ocean oxygen levels.
So now bacteria are performing alchemy (converting Ni to CH4) and "adding an oxygen to methane" no longer produces methanol (CH3OH) or formaldehyde (CH2O), rather it is apparently just "methane with an added oxygen" which is apparently still a potent greenhouse gas.
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
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When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
Sounds a bit like H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, but involving just one planet.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
> Nowadays you HAVE to incorporate gas-influenced Climate Change into EVERYTHING you produce.Otherwise you risk losing your grant to a malleable researcher.
The vast majority of scientific funding in the US and Canada goes to people who are not working on climate change, or anything related to climate change.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
And methanosarcina are archaea, not bacteria, a fact that was three clicks away from the Wikipedia entry on methanosarcina, which is apparently too many clicks for Slashdot or Medical Daily (but New Scientist got it right). I suspect that what was actually presented at the meeting was a cogent hypothesis for how methanogens contributed to the Great Dying following an increase in bio-available nickel. What we get is the result after several application of the stupid filter that is the Internet.
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
PLEASE - let's not have any more articles from medicaldaily.com until they stop firing off 2 OR MORE auto-playing videos at the same time on every article.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
> The headline made me think that this guy somehow had it narrowed down to one actual organism.
That is difficult to envision, Chuck Norris was born so much later.
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ice cores, dendrochronology, carbon dating, isotopic ratios, and other things
Yep, lots of different kinds of evidence. And all of those tests are done from things that happen to be dug out of the earth...
I guess you could find evidence of previous climates from the genetics or geographical distribution of extant populations, but I can't think of any widely used evidence of previous climates that doesn't have 'geo-' somewhere in the title of its field.
Despite the foul odor the folks around here mostly just expel hot air.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Just imagine a Neandertal Norris for a second and compare it to the Chuck Norris of our age minus cowboy boots. They'd practically be twins
20 years later, no more dinosaurs.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
If this is correct it is the second time an organism has wiped out most existing life forms The Great Oxygenation Event is thought to have killed most existing forms of life - then single-celled organisms. It makes you wonder, could it happen again - a bacteria completely changing Earth's chemistry in a way that's incompatible with most existing life forms?
No. No, it doesn't. We have the ability to create a global extinction event at any time. It is absolutely ridiculous to imply that bacteria have more potential drastic effects on the ecosystems on Earth than humans. That we choose not to wield the vast array of means we have to do so, does not equate to the idea that those means do not exist.
Continuing, I was and am very well aware that total biomass can indicate the significance of a species to the ecosystem as a whole (but made an apparently failed attempt at humour). To imply that biomass is particularly important in determining what success in evolution is, is wrong, however.
You intentionally introduced the word phylum, thereby lobbing quite a number of species on the same pile. If one looks at biomass of distinct species, krill and humans are numbers one and two. More importantly, the specializations of different bacteria species means that any individual species is by far not as versatile, resilient, stable, long-living and powerful as humans are. If you disagree, I'd like to hear which specific species we are dwarfed by.
Jay Gould is not a supporter of traditional evolution theory. He supports the punctuated equilibrium based upon evidence in the fossil record. The basic idea is that animals do not gradually adapt to an environement. Instead, some mutant freak for some reason becomes dominant in an area. This is often because of a radical change in that environment. Richard Dawkins highly opposes these views: despite the significant evidence Gould produced, it cannot prove that traditional evolution did not occur for the same reason that no one can prove there is no God.
Single Microbe May Have Triggered the "Great Dying"
It's the strain from Andromeda. Michael had it all figgered out.
Coincidence
Yes
But then again, we have no idea..
Options are:
1) METEOR!!! - hit the earth, causing huge cataclysmic weather effects.
2) ICE AGE!!! - cooled everything down to horribly low temperatures in a flash (few hundred or thousands ofyears).
3) GENETIC MUTATION IN BACTERIA!!! - rare killer viruses killed everything accidentally.
4) GENETIC MUTATION IN VEGETATION!!! - plants discovered a new way to be less nutritious and fend off the herding-hordes
Any hypothesis will have to come up with reasons why small dinosaurs, small mammals, and lizards, lots and lots of lizards survived, and not the bigger dinosaurs, that's why I think ice age or mutation in vegetation are the likeliest options.
Perhaps the nickel was present and widely distributed pre-methanosarcina explosion, and they 'ate' it all, so there's little left now.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Good point – but in fact a dictionary does show about half a dozen meanings for "theory", one of which is a synonym for hypothesis.
It's a real problem that many people seem to think that "theory" has only that one meaning, and don't understand that in science it more often means an established body of knowledge generally derived from a number of well-verified hypotheses.
The universe was intelligently designed. Unfortunately God was in a hurry so he coded it in Java.
You're right. Chuck Norris doesn't evolve.
The implications for Darwinists are serious.
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He doesn't need to - ecosystems adapt to him.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'll see your Wells and raise you a Watts:
"Let me tell you what happens if this thing gets out," she said quietly. "First off, nothing. We outnumber it, you see. At first we swamp it through sheer numbers, the models predict all sorts of skirmishes and false starts. But eventually it gets a foothold. Then it outcompetes conventional decomposers and monopolizes our inorganic nutrient base. That cuts the whole trophic pyramid off at the ankles. You, and me, and the viruses and the giant sequoias all just fade away for want of nitrates or some stupid thing. And welcome to the Age of Behemoth."
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelagibacter_ubique
Actually Agent Smith compared us to a virus, rather than a microbe
It's the smell!
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
in science all theories are supposed to have a null value for validity until proven valid/invalid.
in pure science if a scientist presents a conflicting point of view or theory, based on whatever evidence, it should be investigated to determine its validity.
the guy was refering to the fact that anyone who thinks they have a counter argument to climate change has much trouble getting funding and get shutdown, without any determination of validity, because climate change has very much become a politicized topic, and it is a dogma of sorts in the world outside actual climate research.
the scientists are all too willing to "do science" and perform research, even into counter arguments, because it all advances knowledge on the subject.
its the funders, the politicians, the people obliquely involved, the general public, and by your reposnse you yourself too, that have fallen into the dogma trap, and cut things off that dont agree with their already preconceived notions.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
addendum: and if you dont think there's politics (not red/blue, but ass kissing, researching whats "hip/popular", etc) involved in getting funding for research, you're horribly deluded.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Yeah, confined to the ocean and only in temperate surface waters. We can take 'em ;-)
Roll-over video ads in multiple locations are hyperevil. Not on slashdot, but elsewhere. Its like browsing an anger minefield.
This is perhaps the most profoundly stupid theory I have ever heard. It merits a special trophy in the creator's names. A subset of the darwin awards.
It wasn't a theory, it was fiction. The idea that earth microbes could infect a space alien with different evolution and possibly different chemistry is ludicrous, but far less so than the ideas that Klingons could mate with Earth people, or denizens in a galaxy far, far away would look anything like us. Or the idea that machines could think like Asimov's robots.
Have you read Stranger in a Strange Land? There's very little science fiction that doesn't require a huge effort at ignoring impossibilities and unliklihoods.
Free Martian Whores!
Its locked in water-ice deposits called methane hydrates. Its mainly an annoyance to oil companies because these appear as fake oil deposits in seismic records. Hydrates also lock up high pressure gas which is dangerous to drilling if you do not properly anticipate them. Otherwise these natural gas deposits are far more expensive to produce than land shale-gas. So they are not on the economic radar yet and may be the fossil fuel of the 22nd century.
These are also mentioned a potential problem for climate change. As the world warms these could melt and release methane into the atmosphere. Methane is twenty times stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide per weight of gas. So some scientist suggest a runaway disaster of more heat releasing more methane causing more heat, etc. This has postulated the cause of a previous mass extinction in the geologic record.
Ugh. The double auto-play videos at that site should disqualify it for propagation in any Slashdot stories.
Doesn't really help. You see round these here parts we generally build our windmills outside.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Here is the Mona Loa methane graph. Scientists dont understand why yet. First, sunlight destroys it in around 20 years. CO2 takes much longer to come out of the atmosphere. Second, geochemists may not understand all the methane sinks yet, e.g. the ocean.
Mass extinctions are fairly common throughout history - and we're chump change on the scale of such things.
For example, the Strait of Gibraltar is closing right now (on a geological scale - mere thousands of years), which will isolate the Med. This will cause the Med to evaporate in just a few centuries, leaving the most Hellish wastland imaginable temperatures in the basin will exeed the boiling point of water. That will in turn play merry Hell with all of Europe's climate, and likely worldwide climate.
Shit like that happens all the time (on a geological scale). We're small potatos, our hubris aside.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I see no reason why both theories couldn't be correct, just under different circumstances. The traditional theory where some mutations are benign or helpful, spurring reproduction, and the far more numerous mutations which will kill the organism or make it hard for it to reproduce.
Then an asteroid hits or the earth rapidly warms/cools or some other catastrophe, most species die but a few species that may well have been on the brink of extinction finds its new environment friendly and thrives, while mutations that might have been benign in the old ecology are now a hindrance, and some traits that were hindrances before (e.g., the organism's size or lack of same) are now helpful to it.
It seems that both would fit at different times, and there may well be other types of evolution that are similarly possible that no one has yet hypothesizd about.
Free Martian Whores!
It makes you wonder, could it happen again - a bacteria completely changing Earth's chemistry in a way that's incompatible with most existing life forms?
Maybe it's not a strain of bacteria. Maybe it's us.
Anyway, whatever happens, I'm quite sure the Tardigrades will survive it.
>> Chuck Norris doesn't evolve.
> He doesn't need to - ecosystems adapt to him
Oh wait... then the problem arised in Soviet Russia!
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Wow, splitting hairs over synonyms that are used interchangeably in every day speech! Keep it up and one day you'll be a scientist at MIT too!
I was. And we knew the difference.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
There are no other categories. All attempts to define god in a meaningful, non-contradictory fashion have been shown fallacious.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
With regard to the United States, there are easily 100 dictators with the same political agenda: damaging the United States.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
YOUR MOVE, ATHEISTS!
True.
Of course it could happen. You said it yourself it has happened before. What kind of silly question is that?
It's called a rhetorical question. It's a popular linguistic technique in some circles. ;-)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Since when have archaea been bacteria?
Well, for several centuries, in the understanding of the general public. The verification that they're very different sorts of critters dates back only a few decades. The proposed splitting of bacteria and archaea orginated in the 1970s, and it became fully accepted by biologists during the 1990s.
Thus, the media and the general population have had only 20 to 30 years to adapt to this new classification, and that's not nearly enough time. They also keep talking about the extinction of the dinosaurs, several decades after zoologists officially reclassified the birds as a branch of the dinosaurs based on rather extensive evidence.
About all we can do about this is educate people. Mocking them for confusing archaea and bacteria won't have much effect; they'll just dismiss you as a jerk and ignore you. So try to explain the mistake, rather than ridiculing it, and you may have more success.
(Our little pet dinosaur, a blue-crowned conure, just flew onto my shoulder. She says "Squawk!" Actually, it sounds like she's saying "Iraq!", trying to get into a political discussion. She doesn't understand that we're talking about archaea, either. But she and her relatives may understand the issue before a lot of the human population does. ;-)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.