Surprising revelations about extinction on Earth

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

Illustration photo

Many researchers now believe that the 180km-wide asteroid was only part of the cause of the mass extinction at the end of the Paleolithic period, another cause was the 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 acid baths.

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: Volcanic Apocalypses, 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 at 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 of present-day Russia, a series of volcanoes buried the land under several kilometers of lava and pumped into the air so much CO2 and other chemicals that they punctured the ozone layer, while the Earth's temperature rose to the point where ocean temperatures exceeded 37 degrees Celsius.

Acid rain is destroying 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, where climate change has become a common concern and requires everyone to act together.

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

Brannen’s research is not simply alarming. One scientist told Brannen 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 during the Late Permian period and the current increase in average temperatures and sea level rise is inevitable, we can still find ways to address the current situation.

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

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

According to TPO