Let’s talk global extinction events
posted in Miscellaneous, News, Science |Hey, sounds like a fun topic on a grey, rainy, chilly morning, eh?
Okay, okay, it’s better than, say, “global thermonuclear warfare” (about which I have nightmares on a twice-a-year-basis, just like tornadoes) (the Wizard of Oz turned tornadoes into nightmare material for more kids than me, I am sure).
Way back when, in the mists of time, I took a Geology 101 class in college. It was great. I loved it. There is an alternate universe where OmegaMom decided to pursue geology as a career instead of sort of floating about for years before deciding on computers.
One of the really neat things about this Geo101 class was that the professor discussed, in great depth and detail, the controversy about the Great Extinction Event of the dinosaurs. It was interesting because the professor had been there while the controversy started, played out, and the paradigm shifted to the new, improved version of what happened. Previously, it had been thought that a period of extremely active volcanism was what did the dinos in (remember that scene of the animated dinosaurs taking the big trek in Fantasia to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring?). But right around the time OmegaMom was born, a geologist named Luis Alvarez and his son Walter proposed a new theory: that a meteor or comet impact was what had caused the extinction. They cited, as evidence, the KT boundary layer, a layer of soil found worldwide, which was chock-full of interesting elements such as iridium and (I believe) osmium and particular particle shapes that are only produced under huge heat and impact stresses (tektites).
OmegaMom was taking this intro class at the end of the paradigm shift period (it took quite a while for the geology types to actually accept such a radically different view of looking at things). It was fascinating, especially realizing that scientists could just toss every bit of “accepted” knowledge away, when presented with enough evidence, and move in a totally different direction.
The geology folk have been looking for evidence of other such things all over the place since then, and have found quite a few that seemed tied into other extinction events. This has also led to a certain amount of interest in space agencies tracking near-earth objects (and to a few grand disaster movies), Just In Case. After all, if it’s happened once, it can happen again. And what will We do (we being the human race) if it does?
Then, this week, Small Mountain University issued a press release in conjunction with a bunch of other universities.
For years, the “accepted” knowledge about the extinction of the mammoths and other large mammals that roamed the Americas and northern Europe and Asia has been that they were hunted to extinction by human beings.
But lo & behold–according to this group of geologists, there is evidence that a large something–a comet or low density meteor–whapped the Earth about 12,900 years ago, causing firestorms, devastation, and a 1,000-year mini ice age.
First off, it’s a radically different approach to the idea of the mammoth etc. die-off–so that’s interesting. Then there’s the question of how it will play out in the scientific community.
Then there’s li’l ole OmegaMom sitting here and reading that press release and accompanying news articles and realizing–with a weird gut-level oomph–that, hey, yeah, these things can happen, and it isn’t necessarily millions of years in the past or millions of years in the future. Dudes, this event, if the evidence pans out, was a mere 13,000 years ago. That’s a blink in the geologic record. It’s like yesterday!
So every once in a while, OmegaMom catches herself casting the hairy eyeball up to the sky, wondering…when? What if…?
(Like, “what if the Tunguska object had been bigger??”)
Hey, as disaster theories go, it’s got more sweep and grandeur than, say, Y2K or Peak Oil or even gl0bal warm1ng.
