“It seems we’re now pushing our home planet beyond any climatic conditions experienced during the entire current geological period, the Quaternary,” says Matteo Willeit of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “A period that started almost 3 million years ago and saw human civilization beginning only 11,000 years ago. So, the modern climate change we see is big, really big; even by standards of Earth history.”
The mass extinction brought about at the end of the 50-million-year-long Permian period, brought about the end the entire Paleozoic era, in progress since the dawn of animal life. The Paleozoic, with its ancient seas filled with trilobites, brachiopods, and strange reefs, was as starkly different from the age to come as the age of dinosaurs is from our world today.
China is swooping in on a global scale to fill a vacuum NASA has abandoned. Space stations and satellites use solar panel arrays for their power needs, but NASA abandoned the concept of stand-alone space solar after some study decades ago, ignoring the JPL’s John Mankins’ novel ideas that could transform the way humans use technology in space.
“It’s much more extreme than I ever thought,” said UC Santa Barbara geology professor emeritus, James Kennett, about signs of a major cosmic impact that occurred toward the end of the Pleistocene epoch known as the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, which postulates that a fragmented comet slammed into the Earth close to 12,800 years ago, causing rapid climatic changes, megafaunal extinctions, sudden human population decrease and cultural shifts and widespread wildfires.
“We were surprised by the intensity of the changes we saw, how rapidly oxygen is going down in the ocean and how large the effects on marine ecosystems are,” says Andreas Oschlies, an oceanographer at the Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research Kiel in Germany, whose team tracks ocean oxygen levels worldwide and fear that widespread, sometimes drastic marine oxygen declines are stressing sensitive species—a trend that will intensify with climate change.
“Everyone has heard that the dinosaurs died from an asteroid hitting the Earth,” said Princeton geoscientist Blair Schoene. “What many people don’t realize is that there have been many other mass extinctions in the last 500 million years, and many of them coincide with large volcanic outpourings.” The thousands of tons of lava would have killed anything living nearby, but the gases reached around the world.
