Flex Mentallo

Unfortunately we have just passed the Thanksgiving/Christmas feast season and the great Gator methane release is eminent. Sounds like a mass extinction event to me!

'The situation that we find ourselves in today and the rapidity with which climate change is happening and ever increasing, that the 63 percent of all human-generated carbon emissions have occurred in just the last 25 years since the Industrial Revolution began. And we have scientific reports that show there's actually a 40-year time lag from when those emissions are released into the atmosphere and when we actually feel the effects.' Dahr Jamail, investigative journalist and author And to think, it might all have been so different...

Fascinating stuff. Imagine the polar ice caps melting as a result and then possibly evaporating? In fact, they are. A recent study by researchers at NASA and the University of California has found that a section of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is melting at an alarming rate and could raise global sea levels by up to four feet. Meanwhile, the Arctic is also showing the strain of global warming, with an ice-free Arctic summer predicted by 2016, according to research by the U.S. Navy. This research comes as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that April 2014 ranked as the hottest April on record, tying with April 2010. It also follows the recent release of the National Climate Assessment that says that signs of climate change are all around us. This would also release tons of methane trapped in permafrost, which is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Snowball Earth is a compelling, though controversial theory based upon the evidence of glacial deposits in tropical latitudes in the distant past. 650 million years ago, life only survived because photosynthesis could take place even beneath ice sheets, because these would have been translucent. Life survived by the barest of margins. It is also theorized that the gradual thawing of the ice triggered the great Cambrian explosion of life across the globe.

SNOWBALL EARTH

Myllokunmingia, recently discovered in China, may be the granddaddy of all fishes - and therefore, of us.

When most were wiped out in a series of extinctions, it was relatively scarce vertebrate creatures that survived.

Hallucigenia is aptly named.

The so-called 'Cambrian explosion' is a time when life was suddenly seen in great abundance and variety that approaches the current population of earth. Before this, life seems to have been relatively scarce. These Cambrian creatures were extraordinary.

The shale, actually fine sediment laid down in shallow seas, uniquely captured the forms of delicate non-vertebrate creatures.

They were discovered in Canada in 1886, and Charles Doolittle Walcott collected over 60,000 specimens in a series of field trips up from 1909 to 1924.

The fossils of the Burgess Shale, like the Burgess Shale itself, formed around 505 million years ago in the Mid Cambrian period.

The largest extinction took place about 250 million years ago. It is known as "The Great Dying", and all life could easily have been extinguished. An estimated 96% of all species were wiped out in massive volcanic upheavals. Lava covered entire continents. Ironically, the dominant reptiles of that day had more in common with mammals than dinosaurs. Easy to confuse Inostrancevia here with a sabre tooth cat!

This was the latest of five great mass extinctions, and at least 20 lesser extinctions. The dinosaurs got their chance because of a previous extinction, in fact. And of course, because they died out, around 60 million years ago, birds which descended from theropod dinosaurs and the mammals inherited the planet. Otherwise we'd still be voles! For a time, birds ruled the Earth. The link to dinosaurs is readily apparent - they are aptly named 'terror birds'.

That's fascinating. I had not heard of that variation on the theory! I'm glad you posted it, because I was later going to cover Extinction events.