Lately, I’ve been thinking about the Ordovician-Silurian extinction. Thinking about it a lot.
Earthly extinctions come and go, but this one was particularly nasty. Among the five great extinctions, this big “Poof-Gone” ranks No. 2 on your hit parade.
It happened 445 million years ago. That was long before our favorite asteroid crashed into earth at 40,000 mph a mere 66 million years ago and killed off all the dinosaurs. Every school kid knows this as the K-T extinction.
Smug, smarty-pants kids refer to it by its other name for extra credit, the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction. They also earn them a sucker punch to the solar plexus during recess.
The Ordovician-Silurian extinction was a wipeout of much greater magnitude than the K-T extinction. But it still ranks behind the Permian-Triassic extinction event. That one was called “The Great Dying” and was caused when magma from deep inside our planet — let’s say Tolkien’s Middle Earth — erupted into an immense volcanic explosion in an area we know as Siberia.
I won’t get picky with boring details but I just read an article in which some scientists believe that the Ordovician-Silurian extinction was NOT caused by big changes in the oceans during a time when the Earth’s land masses were bunched together in a supercontinent, known as Gondwana.
A new theory has it that this great extinction was caused by a gamma-ray burst that originated somewhere in our Milky Way galaxy. Unfortunately for the marine species, the Earth was directly in its path, as this theory goes. One day the fish were just moseying around completely unaware that a super massive star in our own Milky Way galaxy had run out of its nuclear fuel and the star’s core had collapsed on itself.
In one second, maybe two, the collapsing star had fired two high-energy jets of gamma radiation at nearly the speed of light from each of its two poles. How much energy, you ask? Oh, about as much energy as our sun will emit in 10 billion years.
A similar wipe-out could happen tomorrow. Thing is, we wouldn’t know what hit us.
A gamma-radiation explosion is the most intense event in the universe. Suppose the collapsing star is 200 light years from us. Earth would be vaporized if it took a direct hit.
But let’s suppose the collapsing star is 400 light years away — which you would think would be a safe enough distance. The killer beam would sterilize all life on the side of the Earth that was hit directly by a gamma ray jet.
Don’t fret too much. Astrophysicists do not believe there are any massive stars about to collapse anywhere near Earth. And the odds that Earth would be smack dab in the path of a super-hot jet flying at nearly the speed of light are immeasurably small. But you never know.
As I was learning about this new theory about the Ordovician-Silurian extinction, I came across another possibility and one that would not cause humanity’s demise, or at least not immediately for those of you who understand the human race.
This threat comes from our very own sun.
I’m certain that you highly intelligent readers of MoorAndMore know what causes the Northern Lights or Aurora Borealis, right? I’ll just mention two terms — solar flares and coronal mass ejections — and I’ll get on with it.
This time we are talking about charged electrons and protons (not gamma radiation, thankfully) flying 93 million miles from the sun into the Earth’s magnetic field. Once again, the Earth would be directly hit by a wave, this time of charged particles — but nothing big, mind you.
The particles would interact with the earth’s magnetic field, which always diverts these particles to the atmosphere above the North and South Poles. And we get treated to pretty dancing lights. At night.
Back in 1859 — 100 years before Alaska and Hawaii were admitted to the union — the sun literally belched a coronal mass ejection that resulted in an enormous geomagnetic storm.
To be accurate there were two belches. But it was the second one on Sept. 2 that would make headlines for its spectacular display.
Imagine being a cowboy on the lone prairie sitting in a circle with buddies around the campfire eating beans. (Insert that scene from “Blazing Saddles”). Suddenly the sky turns Alabama crimson red with an intensity “so bright one can easily read (newspaper) print,” according to the Rocky Mountain News. People were stunned at the sight.
“Nothing could exceed the grandeur and beauty of the sight; the effect was almost bewildering and was witnessed with mingled feelings of awe and delight by thousands,” went the newspaper’s account. “Significant portions of the world’s 125,000 miles of telegraph lines were also adversely affected.”
The newspaper met its own demise in 2009, by the way. Probably due to greed, not gamma rays, but I digress.
Imagine what would happen to our modern-day array of communication satellites, the internet and WiFi if another coronal mass ejection would occur similar to the one in 1859. Pretty bad, right? Well, it gets worse. Brace yourself.
These exceptionally intense showers of high-energy particles from the sun increase the atmospheric concentration of carbon-14. Back in 2012, graduate student Fusa Miyake was carefully studying the faint growth rings of a 1,900-year-old Japanese cedar, looking for signs of surges of carbon-14 in the cedar tree’s rings.
She found a 12 percent jump in carbon-14 around the year 774 A.D. that suggested an enormous solar event. Such events not only cause jumps in carbon-14, but also significant spikes of beryllium-10 and chlorine-36 in ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland.
Evidence of other big spikes in these elements have been confirmed in the years 7176 BC, 5410 BC, 5259 BC, and 993 AD — all of which were of such an intensity that they put the 1859 event to shame.
In fact, Miyake discovered the carbon-14 stored in tree rings corresponding to 1859 barely surged at all.
The entire world communications network would be fried if anything resembling a geomagnetic storm of, say, the event of 7176 B.C. happened today.
Perhaps the only fatalities would be astronauts aboard the space station. All those charged particles flying into the station by the trillions per second would instantaneously burn them to a crisp.
What about the rest of us on Earth? It’s a good thing that the Earth’s magnetic field is a darn good shield. I’ll leave it at that. After all, there were humans around in 7176 BC and they lived to see another day.
Oh, they might have endured some changes in Cryptochromes (CRY1, CRY2) or a slightly messed up pineal gland, or a disturbance of their circadian rhythm. You lose sleep, but nothing lethal.
Just so you know, as a sidelight, there were certainly Homo sapiens running around naked 631,000 years ago when the Yellowstone super volcano cut loose and ruined much of what would be later known as North America. Some say an eruption of the Yellowstone super volcano is long overdue; others say we have a long way to go before a large chunk of America is turned into charcoal, and Canada too. But you never know.
In comparison, the eruption of the Toba super volcano in Indonesia some 69,000 to 77,000 years ago represented a climate-changing event. This blast –the biggest on earth in the last million years — led to what is known as a volcanic winter when volcanic ash covered the sky and unrelenting darkness over a span of years.
Darkness killed vegetation, which in turn killed things that eat vegetation, including humans. There is a theory, lately debunked but fun to consider, that the Toba eruption came close to wiping out the human race.
My genetic ancestry test reveals that my ancient kin were just leaving Africa 77,000 years ago on foot. No sunshine ultimately meant no pierogi, kapusta or kielbasa. But, yet here I am.
So, yes, a lot of what-if doomsday scenarios abound. You name it: big ticket events like asteroid strikes, super volcano eruptions, geomagnetic storms, or nuclear war, can happen at any time.
It just goes to show you, it’s always something! If it’s not one thing, it’s another!
Take Soviet Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov for instance. It was September 26, 1983, and Petrov was on duty watching the United States on his radar screen when he saw what looked like five Minuteman ICBMs soaring towards the Soviet Union.
Months earlier, President Reagan had announced his “Star Wars” plan to shoot down Soviet missiles. Not only that, Reagan was sending nuclear-tipped missiles to West Germany and Great Britain.
So, Petrov could have been right to think Reagan’s brinkmanship had escalated to a first-strike nuclear assault.
But Petrov had a hunch that something wasn’t right and did not report the incoming U.S. missiles. Others in his military unit agreed. It had to be a false alarm.
Good thing because in the space of days or weeks following the eventual nuclear exchange, the human race could have been cut in half.
But maybe, just maybe, we are in the midst of another human-made mass extinction — this one lasting centuries.
If you recall there have been five great extinctions. We are in the midst of an epoch called the Holocene that started 11,700 years ago with the melting of the glaciers and the advent of human civilization all the way to today.
So far the Holocene has been kind to mankind. But has mankind been kind to the Holocene? Nope.
During the end of the Ice Age, the range of ups and downs of atmospheric temperatures have been pretty stable.
That is, until now.
Let’s consider a notion that the spread of mankind around our planet is itself an extinction event. It has a formal name — the Anthropocene. Scientists belonging to the Anthropocene Working Group believe that we are in the midst of a long, drawn-out extinction event and we humans are most certainly the cause.
A couple days ago, the Washington Post carried a nifty story about members of the Anthropocene Working Group who are working to extract deep layers of sediment from a special lake just outside of Toronto, Canada, called Crawford Lake.
Not to get too technical, Crawford Lake’s unique sedimentary features makes it an interesting bellwether of global change over the last 11,700 years. In short, the study of Crawford Lake’s sediment is to travel back in time.
One paragraph left a big impression on me, “The sharpest sign of (human-induced) change was a surge in radioactive plutonium that started in Crawford Lake’s mud around 1950. The element rarely occurs naturally on this planet; it could only have come from nuclear weapon tests happening thousands of miles away.”
I was 2 years old in 1950 and didn’t know something strange was going on.
At least my African ancestors 77,000 years ago could see that they couldn’t see. For them, it was still dark at noon for a darn long time.
Creatures are going extinct at the hand at man. No doubt about that. Do the research yourself.
So when will it be our turn to go extinct?
I’ve finally arrived at my point for writing all this: Practice kissing. Kiss your wife. Kiss your kids. Kiss your neighbors, if they consent. Kiss anybody. Because (punch line coming) there may be a day when you will have to kiss your a** goodbye.