TOHOKU UNIVERSITY
Researchers in Japan, Sweden, and the US have unearthed evidence that low volcanic temperatures led to the fourth mass extinction, enabling dinosaurs to flourish during the Jurassic period.
Large volcanic eruptions create climatic fluctuations, ushering in evolutionary changes. Yet it is the volcanic temperature of the eruption that determines whether the climate cools or warms.
Since the emergence of early animals, five mass extinctions have taken place. The fourth mass extinction occurred at the end of the Triassic Period – roughly 201 million years ago. This mass extinction saw many marine and land animals go extinct, especially large-body, crocodilian-line reptiles known as pseudosuchia. Approximately 60-70% of animal species disappeared. As a result, small bodied dinosaurs were able to grow and prosper.
Scientists think the fourth mass extinction was triggered by the eruptions in the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province – one of the largest regions of volcanic rock. But the correlation between the eruption and mass extinction has not yet been clarified.
Using analysis of sedimentary organic molecules and a heating experiment, current professor emeritus at Tohoku University, Kunio Kaiho and his team demonstrated how low temperature magma slowly heated sedimentary rocks, causing high sulfur dioxide (SO2) and low carbon dioxide emissions (CO2).
The SO2 gas was distributed throughout the stratosphere, converting to sulfuric acid aerosols. The instantaneous increase of global albedo caused short-term cooling, which could have contributed to the mass extinction.
Kaiho and his team took marine sedimentary rock samples from Austria and the United Kingdom and analyzed the organic molecules and mercury (Hg) in them. They found four discrete benzo[e]pyrene + benzo[ghi]perylene + coronene -Hg enrichments.
The discovery of low coronene in the first enrichment was particularly revealing. The second, third, and fifth mass extinction had high coronene concentrations. A low concentration indicates that low temperature heating caused high SO2 release and global cooling.
“We believe the extinction was the product of large volcanic eruptions because the benzo[e]pyrene + benzo[ghi]perylene + coronene anomaly could only be seen around the time frame of the mass extinctions,” said Kaiho.
Kaiho’s team is now studying other mass extinctions with the hopes of further understanding the cause and processes behind them.
JOURNAL
Earth and Planetary Science Letters
ARTICLE TITLE
Volcanic temperature changes modulated volatile release and climate fluctuations at the end-Triassic mass extinction
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
12-Jan-2022
So cooling led to the mass extinction, and then the dinosaurs flourished. It’s not spelt out in the text, but the diagram shows the dinosaurs diversifying as the climate warms up again due to CO2 increase. Since dinosaurs were cold-blooded reptiles (as far as we know?) it would make sense that they’d flourish when it got warmer.
Dinosaurs were dinosaurs – not reptiles although reptiles did exist at the same time. It is believed that dinosaurs were warm blooded in a similar (not identical) fashion to birds (which are the direct descendants of dinosaurs) today.
Silly question…when something is a direct descendant of something, is it not true to suggest the original animal(at least the smaller ones in the case of dinosaurs) did not die out but developed…?
That is my understanding. Most dinosaur lineages just died out. A few developed into birds via various transitions. The same applied to reptiles. E.g. ichthyosaurs and pterosaurs died out but crocodilians and lizards didn’t.
Identify your oldest ancestor you know … are you merely an extension of them?
See the problem you currently may not even be the same race as your oldest ancestor because you have a number of suppliers of genes down thru generations.
A new species is even more genetically diverse and that comes about by a number of mechanisms that usually aren’t linear and progressive but rather abrupt and usually with trial and errors including dead ends. We don’t call it developed because that implies a smooth transition but rather we talk about ancestory.
Phylogenetically every group is also a member of its ancestral groups. Humans are African great apes, great apes, apes, the group containing Old monkeys and apes, the group including that group, plus New World monkeys and tarsiers, primates, the groups containing the orders most closely related to primates, mammals, amniotes, tetrapods, lobe-finned fish, bony fish, jawed fish, vertebrates, chordates, etc.
Skipping many clades, we are primates, mammals, vertebrates, deuterostomes, bilaterians, animals, opisthokonts and eukaryotes.
Dinosaurs are reptiles. That they were warm-blooded doesn’t make them non-reptiles. Birds are dinosaurs, hence phylogenetically reptiles.
Birds and crocs are the only surviving archosaurs, ancestors of crocodilians and dinosaurs. Their hearts are different from other, cold-blooded reptiles, ie lepidosaurs (lizards, snakes and tuataras). Croc hearts have been down-rated with a hole to adapt to aquatic life. Their ancestors were terrestrial.
“The lungs of birds have long been known to move air in only one direction during both inspiration and expiration through most of the tubular gas-exchanging bronchi (parabronchi). Recently a similar pattern of airflow has been observed in American alligators, a sister taxon to birds.” Archosauria
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3628916/
Theropod and sauropod dinos also had air sacs in their bones, like birds, which are the former.
Ornithishians, not so much, despite their name, which comes from their hip bones.
“Croc hearts have been down-rated with a hole to adapt to aquatic life”
I would like to hear more about that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crocodilia#Circulation
Four heart chambers, like birds.
Pterosaurs most likely had four-chambered hearts, too, so could have been warm-blooded to some extent.
And that’s why technically chicken tastes like alligator.
Taxonomy revised. And accepted. Way less threatened/endangered species.
From what I have read birds are not dinosaur descendants. The line that led to birds diverged early on from the line that led to dinosaurs. The bird line developed flight. The dinosaurs remained terrestrial creatures. There were never any flying or aquatic dinosaurs.
No flying Dinosaurs? Pterosaurs.
No aquatic Dinosaurs? Plesiosaurus. Mosasaurus. And so on…
https://www.bing.com/search?q=aquatic%20dinosaurs%20list%20Mosasaur&FORM=QNAELC
Seems you need to read more…
The marine reptiles you mention were not dinosaurs. Far from them. Mosasaurs were lepidosaurs, not even archosaurs. They were related to lizards and snakes. Plesiosaurs are even farther removed diaspids.
The position of turtles remains controversial, but genetics suggest that they’re closer to archosaurs than the sister group to both saurian lineages (lepidosaur and archosaur).
I think we should keep in mind that these phylogenetic trees are not based on genetics and do involve a lot of guess work.
Where possible, they are based upon genetics. We don’t have plesiosaur DNA, but anatomy tells a lot, and the fossil record for marine reptiles is good.
The terrestrial ancestor of mosasaurs looked like a lizard.
Birds are dinosaurs. There were lots and lots of feathered dinosaurs with anatomies practically identical to birds, but non-volant.
Dinosaurs not only fly, but were and are aquatic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesperornis
You have been badly misinformed.
Dinosaurs and birds are phylogenetically reptiles of the archosaur branch, shared with crocodilians and extinct pterosaurs.
This is just part of academia’s hypothesis that basalt flows are responsible for mass extinctions. VE8 eruptions, no problem, large basalt flows pile up in one area of the world over a few hundred thousand years, oh no!
Meteors/comets probably caused each mass extinction.
There’s no evidence for impacts in most mass extinctions.
“The instantaneous increase of global albedo caused short-term cooling, which could have contributed to the mass extinction.”
So which is it — it did cause the extinction or could it have caused the extinction? Make up your mind.
As for “The instantaneous increase of global albedo …”, I think someone doesn’t know the meaning of instantaneous.
It’s nice that they conclude that CO2 isn’t associated with past mass extinctions but they’re also mired in the correlation is causation paradigm.
Except, they don’t have correlation…
They leapt right from assumptions to causation. Now, they’re looking to bugger the other extinctions.
“As for “The instantaneous increase of global albedo …”, I think someone doesn’t know the meaning of instantaneous.”
Whoever wrote this explanation sounds a little confused. Slowly heating rocks to produce SO2 is not instantaneous.
Also, the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province is composed almost entirely of basaltic rocks, whose magmas are the highest temperature magmas, hence “low temperature magma” makes no sense at all.
It’s somewhat likely they are confused. but I try not to underestimate. Often there is a purpose for what appears an odd use of a adjectives and adverbs, and it’s usually to up-play rather than downplay.
You note why it’s inappropriate, so what’s the possible reason? Well, one possibility is that’s it it’s better sale for a theory implying a timeline similar to an asteroid strike than tectonic plate movement. In fact, I would think anything on the latter’s side of a median of the two can’t survive the argument for adaptability, even if the argument could survive large increase in volcanic activity of a particular sort also lasting for a long period.
The only answer is that “instantaneous” is the Hail Mary play for it’s serious consideration.
Hmmm, I shouldn’t have said it’s the “only” answer. That was my play to win acceptance of my theory.
See what I mean?
I didn’t mean to do this.
Really.
Ah, no!
Their, cough cough, explanation banks on increasing SO₂ levels in the atmosphere. A claim that itself is puzzling.
Sulfur dioxide washes out of the atmosphere very quickly.
Their graphic depicts SO₂ forming into H₂O₄, which also washes out of the atmosphere quickly.
Apparently, they’re using concepts where very severe volcanic eruptions send volcanic ejecta reach up into the stratosphere and does cause cooling for a brief time.
An individual volcano can affect the Earth’s temperature by around half a degree. It seems like you’d need a lot of volcanoes to create enough cooling to trigger a mass extinction. Anyway, apparently everyone does not agree that mass extinctions were triggered by volcanoes.
link
The temperature of the volcanoes could have some effect perhaps but surely the main thing would be the number of volcanoes.
What else could trigger mass extinctions? My favorite is the Great Oxygen Catastrophe.
The bottom line is that volcano temperatures could, by themselves, cause a mass extinction is highly speculative to say the least.
Why do I smell a warmunist theologian trying to concoct a theory where the CO2 control knob didn’t get turned up even though a bunch of volcanoes were erupting? Cold volcanoes emitting sulfates that somehow reached the stratosphere!
Maybe it’s just the YouReekAlot! connection that I smell?
“Why do I smell a warmunist theologian trying to concoct a theory where the CO2 control knob didn’t get turned up even though a bunch of volcanoes were erupting?”
It’s probably because the authors mentioned CO2 in their article, the addition insinuating that CO2 has some effect on global temperatures. Without any evidence, I might add.
It’s an either/or situation for them. It’s either SO2 cooling, or CO2 warming, that controls the Earth’s temperatures. It’s so simple, isn’t it. Simple things for simple minds.
I realize the continents all used to be in different places but …
The Earth does not heat up or cool off uniformly. Most extinction narratives rely on the planet getting too hot or too cold. The problem is that apparently it’s very hard to budge the ITCZ from its normal temperature. That implies that there would always be somewhere on the planet that would be just the right temperature for whatever critters existed at the time.
It wasn’t just high heat during the Permian, but poisonous gases.
Yes, and then there’s the theory that my beloved trilobites were done in by ocean acidification. link
A plausible hypothesis, but of course they had been in decline since the Ordovician.
That’s the bingo statement!
What is frequently unmentioned when a volcanic cause to a major extinction discussion is where volcanic traps erupted for millions of years before the extinction occurred.
Nor are volcanic trap eruptions known for injecting SO₂ into the stratosphere.
Another missed concept that makes “instantaneous” look/sound very out of place.
I’m fed up with these ridiculous ‘studies’ looking for instantaneous causes of extinctions. Species evolve over long periods, and they can go extinct over long periods too. A million years is barely a blip in the long term record, but just think how much evolution can take place over such a period of time.
Dinosaurs went extinct, right? But only some dinosaurs truly went extinct, others evolved into species that we don’t think of as being dinosaurs.The evolution of dinosaurs into birds would have taken place over a long time, and some volcanoes changing global temperature by half a degree for two or three years are not going to make much difference – some dinosaurs’ breeding cycle could have been as long as that, and they would have been hard pressed to add an average of one feather each while the volcanoes’ effect lasted.
In the same vein, the dinosaurs that did go extinct could have taken a long time (but still only a geological blip) as they gradually lost out to predators and/or competitors.
These ‘researchers’ see things happen in one blip, and mistakenly think that they have to find an instantaneous cause. It may make nice headlines and bring in grant money, but it makes no sense.
One thing that always puzzles me is how the big dinosaurs actually moved and how the big flying dinosaurs actually managed to fly. I look at how difficult it is for our biggest birds to actually take off today and they appear to be much smaller than the flying dinos. Who knows, maybe gravity has increased over the years but as that is not my field I have really no idea. Anyone??
Tony,
Your “big flying dinos” were pterosaurs and similar – they were reptiles.
The dinos that morphed into something we would recognise as birds were small – no bigger than chickens in general.
No, however, I don’t know how those giant pterosaurs ever got off the ground! Used wind currents to soar and glide once airborne – yes. Got into the air in the first place? No idea! Maybe – like albatrosses – they only made landfall on cliffs that would allow them to leap off and gain lift on currents, up-draughts etc.
The large pterosaurs took off by leaping.
Pterosaurs, like dinosaurs and crocs, were archosaurs. They’re on the dino side, pretty closely related to them, but with different hip joints, a key diagnostic trait for dinos. The ankle joint differentiates the dino line from the crocodilian side of Archosauria.
Pterosaur jump up:
https://youtu.be/-b4kAycprQg
Interestingly, that’s how the flying draco lizard does it today and it’s predator the paradise flying snake also. They are really more like gliders though.
True, but bats take off on four feet, like pterosaurs. Birds have to get by jumping with just their hind feet.
Albatrosses are evolved to fly for very long periods of time, without the bird wasting energy.
To our perception, they’re a little clumsy taking off, landing and flapping…
Yet, they can fly for days without seeming to move their wings.
To suggest that earth’s gravity has increased over time is to suggest that its mass has increased, so I’d say no.
When something hit pre-life earth to form our moon, there may have been a net mass gain or loss that was significant, and there is a slow gain from meteors I suppose, net of lost atmosphere.
In the relevant timeframe Triassic-to-present I don’t think that there could have been an accretion of mass sufficient to substantially change the value of g.
Maybe there was a more dense atmosphere that aided the aerodynamics?
Earth gained mass in the moon-forming collision. The impactor was Mars-size.
Mesozoic air was only slightly denser, with a bit more O2 and a lot more CO2, but still in trace amounts. Gravity then was effectively the same as now.
But azhdarchid pterosaurs could fly in today’s air, aerodynamic and biomechanical studies have shown.
“…dense atmosphere…” see Levenspiel for an interesting review. Somewhere he also did another on higher atmospheric oxygen content allowing pterosaur muscles to be stronger….In either case we have to be concerned about where the atmosphere went….
http://levenspiel.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/DinosaurW.pdf
Interesting.
What sort of cataclysmic event could deplete the atmosphere by 50-75%? A series of massive solar flares? Some kind of supermassive object passing through the solar system nearly impacting earth?
What sort of proxies could we use to estimate Cretaceous atmospheric pressure in order to test the hypothesis?
If the dense atmosphere was a real thing, and something occurred to strip away more than half of the atmosphere, it cannot have been a slow reduction over eons since it isn’t occurring still. It would have to have been a truly catastrophic event which it would seem would necessarily leave some massive physical clues. If such an event did occur, it is easy to imagine it causing a mass extinction.
There must be some solid arguments for rejecting this hypothesis considering that the author failed to get it published for so long. I suppose that the biggest argument is that no evidence exists to support the hypothesis other than that it would resolve some mysteries. In that sense not much more of a hypothesis than to posit demons that swallowed up the atmosphere.
I’m curious to hear what evidence exists that would falsify this hypothesis.
I believe it is now thought that Dinosaurs had flux capacitors allowing great movement.
“I look at how difficult it is for our biggest birds to actually take off today and they appear to be much smaller than the flying dinos.”
Yes, some of the flying dinos being reported on lately were huge. Something like a 40-foot wingspan. They supposedly lept into the air to launch themselves. Imagine seeing one of these things today.
Pterosaurs are closely related to dinos, but not members of Superorder Dinosauria.
Big birds with long wings struggle to take off because they can only jump with their hind legs, not with muscular forelimbs as well.
I noted that tidbit in a comment of yours upthread. I had not realized that the flying Pterosaurs used four feet to launch, instead of just the two hind feet.
Good stuff! 🙂
The dinosaurs did not fly. Those big flying dinosaurs were actually reptiles. Neither were there any aquatic dinosaurs.
You’re right that pterosaurs aren’t dinos, but close.
Dinos most certainly did fly and were aquatic. They still are. Most birds fly, but some aquatic and terrestrial groups have lost that ability. Some divers, however, like penguins, fly through the water.
I remember seeing a show in which somebody tried to build a life size model of a pterosaur and make it fly. He was able to get his model to take short flights.
Perhaps a bit off topic but some time ago I read a question about large dinosaurs. The claim was that today’s giraffes have such high blood pressure, to get blood to their heads, that it seems to be at about the physical limit for organic beings to contain. If so, how did the really big dinosaurs, with significantly more head elevation, function?
Less stress?
What? You mean swans, geese, raptors and condors?
Each bird evolved a takeoff style that suits their environment.
A couple of years ago, I walked out my front door and jumped before I walked to my car.
When I looked at the sound, a bald eagle was already clearing the tops of 60′-70′ tall trees.
It only took a few seconds and the eagle didn’t seem to struggle. It turned out that there was a dead opossum thirty feet from my door and the eagle was feeding when I walked out the door.
They’re immense birds when one is very close and they are flapping those wings.
Nor should one forget the atmospheric CO₂ back during the dinosaur era. Dense CO₂ concentration levels might’ve made flying easier.
The non-avian dinosaurs perished very quickly, due to a huge impact on the Yucatán. Some birds survived by being small, eating seeds or being on Antarctica, like the ancestors of water fowl. But most bird species were wiped out, too.
John, while walking many transects across the stratigraphy of the Mesozoic Neuquen Basin, in Argentina, I was struck by the (geologically) rapid transition from Mesozoic to Cenozoic: going up-section from Neuquen Group, filled with fossilized dinosaur bones AND many large petrified tree trunks, into the Malargue Group, without either the dinosaur or tree remains, the transition from Dinosaurs to No Big Dinosaurs appears to have been very (geologically) rapid. Note that there is a slight unconformity in some places but not everywhere.
Yup. Everywhere where it exists, the transition is like that. Now and then someone claims a big Cenozoic dino fossil, but they’re always shown false.
Here’s a fossil record from that terrible day:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanis_(fossil_site)
It stirred controversy at first but further work, despite the WuWHOFlu, has quieted doubts.
A bit before my time but I see the geologists are still grappling with the nomenclature of our current Meghalayan Age-
Geologists Have Redefined the Present Age, Calling the Last 4,200 Years the “Meghalayan Age” (msn.com)
Never heard of it but Prebles Lumpers and Splitters here we go again.
I thought it was the MeghanHarryan age now.
Lol
OK, observa, out of curiosity I read the “Meghalayan Age” reference and think “geologists” are confusing Anthropology with Geology. The appearance of human construction is not based on geology, other than the end of the last glacial cycle of the Ice Age we live in, start of the Holocene at 11,700 years ago, was favorable to living things to flourish.
The Meghalayan is the youngest “age” or “stage” within the Holocene epoch. The other two age/stages are Greenlandian and Northgrippian. The entire Holocene only covers 11,700 years. so IMHO subdividing it is just an exercise in subdivision – “because we can”.
It’s named after Meghalaya, a state in India that was carved out of Assam as a homeland for non-Hindu peoples that used to be called “hill tribes”. Amazing scenery, especially if you like waterfalls.
Despite superhuman effort by its anti-human proponents, the “Anthropocene” isn’t recognised as an epoch yet because they haven’t found any sedimentary units that actually show unambiguous signs of human activity.
“The instantaneous increase of global albedo caused short-term cooling, which could have contributed to the mass extinction.”
This was during a warm global climate, and we are living in icehouse global climate- our temperatures would be very cold in comparison.
Or one would have had tropical plants living polar regions, and tropical plants can’t survive our most our temperate zones during season other than summer.
So it seems very short periods of cooling could cause mass extinction events.
And such short cool periods temperatures is what we regard as frightening future global warming prediction temperatures.
Now I’m confused. Does this mean we are doomed from climate change even if we are vaccinated and had a booster shot?
Yes, of course.
I’ll take the Ivermectin – A Japanese pharmaceutical company, Kowa Co, said on Monday that the drug ivermectin has an “antiviral effect” against Omicron and other Covid-19 variants- https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/ivermectin-has-antiviral-effect-against-omicron-and-all-other-mutant-strains-covid-19
“I’ll take the Ivermectin”
I would take Ivermectin before I would take the new anti-virals. Ivermectin is a known benefit to treating covid, whereas the new anti-virals are unknowns are far as side effects go, so I would take Ivermectin, which is just as effective against covid as the new anti-virals.
The adverse effects of Ivermectin are known (virtually nil). The side effects of the new anti-virals are unknown. So I’ll go with the proven drug Ivermectin if I get infected.
I just happen to have a supply of Ivermectin and hydroxychloriquine on hand if infection occurs. There is also at least one study that says the allergy medicine Benadryl is effective against the covid virus, as is hydroxyzine, another allergy medicine. I have access to both of those drugs,too.
My problem, if I get infected with covid, is which one of these medicines I should take first. Not really though, I would take the Ivermectin first. I would probably take the hydroxyzine along with it as it has no ill effects on me, and I might even add in some Benadryl to boot. Three drugs doing their thing against the covid.
Early treatment is the key to defeating covid. Don’t sit at home and hope to get over it without medication. The longer the virus is in your body, the more damage it is doing to you, even if you have a mild case. Get that virus out of you as soon as possible.
I’m just getting over CV and I took nothing. It really lasted 2.5 days and the symptoms were mild sore throat for two days and fatigue for one day. The third day started slow but by afternoon I was almost symptom free. A cold is worse than what I had. Everyone is different and if I had something to take I would have (Iodine mouthwash, IVM, etc) but I was away from home base and didn’t have access to anything.
Everyone in my family has had it now and for everyone it was a couple day event at most. I’m 71 and was stabbed 3 times. I think taking something that will mediate it at first symptoms is something you should do, but if you don’t or can’t I wouldn’t be too concerned.
The thing about covid is it does little damage to some people and is devastating for others, and we can’t tell how someone will react until they get infected.
So to be on the safe side, I would treat even a mild covid infection.
Covid is a complicated disease. We don’t know nearly enough about it yet, but we’re getting there.
Kowa – no fines
Vs
Pfizer – fined billions for fraud and lies.
There are very strong interests in quite a few parts of the world that are extremely determined to save you from the mistake of taking Ivermectin. Their humanitarian efforts, of themselves, could be life threatening.
Yes, the demonization of therapeutics by the Powers-that-Be is a huge scandal and a crime against humanity. No telling how many people would still be alive if we had focused on therapeutics and treating people early in the disease stage.
And no doubt, there are millions of people suffering from the after effects of the covid infection which might have been prevented had they been treated medically in the proper way.
Covid-1, which appeared around 2003 and then disappeared, still has people suffering from the after effects of this disease. That might also be the case for some of those infected with Covid-2. This may be an additional health crisis caused by the covid-2 virus.
Big Government, Big Pharma and Big Medical have the blood of countless innocent victims on their hands.
The dinosaurs didn’t have Tony Fauci or Joe Biden.
That’s why they lasted so long… until Faucisaurus came along and wiped out all the dinosaurs.
but Pfizer does
I am struggling with this.
When I first read the headline, it sounded to me like they were saying that the volcanoes themselves were low temperature.
Reading it again, it seems they are talking about low temperatures caused by volcanoes.
I don’t see where you arrive at that interpretation Mark.
They’ve got imagination if nothing else
But what triggered the volcanoes?
Would swarm(s) of large meteorites for example have this effect!? Blasting a series of holes thru the crust over a large area.
Given that meterorite strikes are an ongiing process with the occassional big one just a matter of time.
The CAMP was a natural rifting event, starting the break up of Pangaea by opening the Central Atlantic between Africa and Europe in the east and North America to the west.
Plate tectonics, such as in the Rift Valley today, with its string of lakes. During the CAMP, seawater flooded in.
More mass extinction events are indigenous to Earth, not extraterrestrial, like the end Cretaceous.
I’m convinced that meteor strikes are behind the major extinctions, strong enough to rupture the earth’s crust and initiate major volcanism and catastrophic climate change. The survivors then evolve to fill new niches with more adaptable species. Seems to be part of a plan of some kind.
Only one was surely from an asteroid or comet strike. Attempts to pin the Permian on impacts have failed.
A celestial event, a gamma ray burst, has been proposed for the Ordovician, but without compelling evidence.
You don’t need meteor strikes to initiate volcanic activity. It’s an integral part of plate tectonics, and goes on all the time. We’re lucky to be living in a time when there’s not a really big flood basalt event happening. Instead we’re stuck living in an ice age.
“We believe”
I prefer people who think, don’t you?
“Bolide impact triggered the Late Triassic extinction event in equatorial Panthalassa
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4937377/
There are other possibilities.
That’s a possibility for the first, Mid-Norian stage of the Late Triassic extinctions, limited to marine radiolarians. The next two stages, End-Norian and Rhaetian, can be attributed to the CAMP with some confidence. The Manicouagan impact on Quebec also happened in the Mid-Norian, but didn’t seem to affect terrestrial diversity much.
From the article: “Large volcanic eruptions create climatic fluctuations”
Agreed.
“Scientists think the fourth mass extinction was triggered by the eruptions in the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province – one of the largest regions of volcanic rock. But the correlation between the eruption and mass extinction has not yet been clarified.”
Ok. So you don’t really know.
“Using analysis of sedimentary organic molecules and a heating experiment, current professor emeritus at Tohoku University, Kunio Kaiho and his team demonstrated how low temperature magma slowly heated sedimentary rocks, causing high sulfur dioxide (SO2) and low carbon dioxide emissions (CO2).”
So what are we talking about here, large volcanic eruptions that throw material high into the Earth’s atmosphere, or magma slowly heating rocks up which creates SO2 that drifts into the air? Was it necessary to account for CO2 here?
“The SO2 gas was distributed throughout the stratosphere, converting to sulfuric acid aerosols. The instantaneous increase of global albedo caused short-term cooling, which could have contributed to the mass extinction.”
Note the phrase “short-term cooling”, and the term “could”.
Mount Pinatubo eruption was a VEI-6 eruption on June 15, 1991, the second-largest terrestrial eruption of the 20th century, and this cooled the Earth’s temperatures by about 0.5C for about two years.
Mount Pinatubo caused no worldwide mass extinctions. Most people didn’t even notice the difference unless they were a meteorologist.
““We believe the extinction was the product of large volcanic eruptions”
How does this equate with slowing heating rocks to release SO2? Large volcanic eruptions are not slow acting.
It seems that a single volcano can wipe out a century’s worth of warming, at least temporarily. It would seem that the warm side is safer as volcanic eruptions come as they will.
“demonstrated how low temperature magma slowly heated sedimentary rocks”
That is nothing new. Low temperature…. low energy.
It does seem a fair stretch to conclude that correlation is causation with this theory. However, if mercury was used in arriving at the correlation, one must question how the mercury analysis was conducted; determination of mercury in rocks or soils is not a simple task due to its non-reactivity with most other elements.
I say this from experience conduction radon and mercury surveys in geothermal exploration and in attempts to possibly track progression of what was known as the Anaheim Volcanic Belt. Those elements are not easy to detect, nor once detected can their source be uniquely established. Methods may have evolved of course that I am not familiar with.
Had cold fusion been successfully demonstrated I might be a bit more accepting of cold volcanoes. That never happened.
I always shudder when I see cartoons such as the one with about a million-fold exaggeration of the thickness of the earth’s crust relative to planetary diameter. It usually means another long argument will eventually ensue as I try to demonstrate to someone who has seen it that if they draw a sphere of the size of that diagram to represent the earth, that they don’t own a pencil capable of drawing a line thin enough to fairly represent the crust to scale.
Unless the authors can show that the magmas that “slowly heated sedimentary rocks” intruded gypsum, anhydrite, or iron sulfide rich shales, or that the magmas themselves were anomalously rich in dissolved sulfur, where is all the S02 coming from? Slow heating occurs when magmas intrude rocks at depth (>10km) and NOT via eruption at the surface. Sulfur dissolved in hydrothermal solutions from rocks at depth most likely will be precipitated in a mineral phase once the solution cools as it approaches the surface and/or mixes with cooler groundwaters. The experiments they conducted where they slowly heat sedimentary rock samples with no consideration of the ambient pressures, rock/fluid interactions, and complex migration pathways do not reflect real geologic conditions.
For fun have a look at :
2 billion species to zoom in on interactively !
https://www.onezoom.org/
Not known yet if the mass extinctions are indicated…
Hundreds of millions of years before humans evolved and then discovered and developed fossil fuels from mineralized plant and animal waste, we managed to cause mass extinctions from hydrocarbon poisoning and climate change so that we would have coal, gas, and oil. [/sarc /duh]
Oxygen dropped from 37% to 16% during this period.
O2 was never that high in the Mesozoic Era, nor that low. For the high, you’re thinking of the Carboniferous Period.
Junk science can be fun, and profitable.
low temperature heating
That’s beautiful 😻
So Paleoclimate research has now been reduced to a single word: volcanoes??
It gets warmer? That’s one kind of volcanoe. It gets colder? Then it’s the other kind.
There’s a pattern here. They’re ignoring the ocean. Why? Are they confusing it with Joe Rogan, or Donald Trump?
Inspiring to see such brilliant intellects at work!
The third extinction, the Permian-Triassic, actually took place during an ice age (remember them??):
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep43630
don’t worry, it’s not like that could happen tomorrow without any warning or anything
oh wait
Ask Mann
He “proved” there is no ocean cycles just volcanoes
Sarc\
Not even a good correlation, yet they’ve already promoted their pet theory to proven causation.
Complete amateur failure, right from their first extinction assumptions.
As we have seen through human history, cooling is always bad.
The 4th extinction was bad
The 6th will be very bad for us, as we head into glaciation
Back to the subject at hand…the Triassic-Jurassic extinction.
Students of the topic generally attribute its cause to the results of massive volcanism that led to the formation of the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province as do the authors of the cited study. Most consider that increased CO2 led to global warming and ocean acidification and doom eg https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-15325-6
The current study says that it wasn’t CO2 what done for Triassic critters but SO2 ; it caused ocean acidification and global cooling and doom !
So was it CO2 and global warming or SO2 and global cooling?
The answer is more research funding.