Surprising revelations about extinction on Earth

Most of us know that the meteorite that hit Earth off the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago wiped out the dinosaurs, but that's not the whole story.

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Many researchers now believe that the 180km-wide meteorite was only partly responsible for the mass extinction at the end of the Paleolithic, with another cause being volcanic fields active at the same time in what is now India, which covered the Earth's surface with lava and turned the oceans into acidic pools.

And that’s just the latest crisis that threatens to destroy life on Earth. According to the New York Post, in his newly published book, “The End of the World: Apocalyptic Volcanoes, Deadly Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Extinctions,” scientist Peter Brannen traveled across North America to find out what we know about the moment when life on our planet was destroyed in order to reconstruct the story.

It's a story that begins 450 million years ago, at the end of the Paleozoic Era, when global warming caused sea levels to rise 30 meters, flooding continents.

Along with the Hudson River in New Jersey (USA), the cliffs in Palisades show us that 201 million years ago, at the end of the Triassic, the Earth's rotation affected the amount of sunlight shining on the Northern Hemisphere, causing the Earth's temperature to drop dramatically, leading to the destruction of nearly three-quarters of life on the planet in just 20,000 years.

It was a truly cataclysmic event, coming just 50 million years after Earth's worst extinction at the end of the Permian period, when 90% of life was wiped out.

The Late Permian period brought deadly conditions: on the continent that is today Russia, a series of volcanoes buried the land under lava several kilometers deep and pumped into the air a quantity of CO2 and other chemicals that punctured the ozone layer, while the Earth's temperature rose to the point where ocean temperatures exceeded 37 degrees Celsius.

Acid rain destroys forests and some scientists predict climate conditions so dire that super typhoons with wind speeds of over 800 km/h could blow toxic gases across continents.

Extinction events can be linked to dramatic changes in Earth’s climate, often linked to changes in the carbon cycle, especially when volcanism is involved. This connection has enormous implications for the world today, as climate change becomes a common concern and requires action.

“According to our observations, releasing huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere rapidly has happened many times in geological history, and the results are never good,” said Brannen.

Brannen’s research is not simply alarming. One scientist told him that if we were in a new era of extinction, in addition to the large animals that humans have always hunted, such as tigers and elephants, even basic creatures such as mice would die out.

Even though we are emitting CO2 10 times faster than the Late Permian period and the current increase in average temperatures and sea levels is inevitable, we can still find ways to deal with the current situation.

Another researcher told Mr Brannen: “We can’t give up human culture to prevent all the horrors” and that it would be more likely that “quality of life would decline” for most people than that we would become extinct as a species.

Even if the Northern Hemisphere were to be deprived of sunlight once again, we could raise the Earth's temperature enough to save life from another ice age.

According to TPO