Word: extinctionism
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Science fiction? The apocalyptic vision of a doomsday cult? No, this disastrous scenario came last week from the sober pages of the journal Science. A team of U.S. and Chinese researchers studying the remains of volcanoes that began erupting 250 million years ago reported that according to radioactive dating, the...
What could have caused such indiscriminate carnage? Marauding comets, exploding stars, greenhouse warming, ice-age cooling, sea-level drops, sea-level rises, ocean stagnation, oxygen depletion--every calamity imaginable has been invoked to explain the Permian extinction. But none of these agents of doom, argues geologist Paul Renne, director of...
But the Siberian eruptions could have killed off plant and animal life in half a dozen different ways. An atmospheric mist of sulfur dioxide, for example, could have stoked lethal storms of acid rain. Carbon dioxide, injected into the atmosphere by erupting volcanoes, could have trapped solar heat, disrupting climate...
The problem with these theories, observed scientists attending a workshop on the Permian extinction held by the Smithsonian Institution last week, is that they are still highly speculative. For instance, the geological record clearly shows that a staggering drop in sea level-perhaps as much as 300 ft.--did in...
As Smithsonian paleobiologist Douglas Erwin warned his colleagues last week, it is dangerous to try to explain a complex calamity like the Permian extinction in simplistic terms. The Great Dying, Erwin believes, was produced by an interplay of many forces--"a tangled web rather than a single mechanism"--and if...