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December 18th, 2020, by Tim Radford Tavurvur, Papua-New Guinea: Volcanic eruptions may go a long way to explain mass extinctions. Image: By Richard Bartz, via Wikimedia Commons Life on Earth has been through mass extinctions before − every 27 million years. Blame it on celestial clockwork. Instead, the planet and the solar system could be caught up in some deadly astronomical cycle. They argue that every 27 million years, a high proportion of land-dwelling species − birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians − disappear from the fossil record at around the same time. And this disappearance seems to coincide, again according to geological evidence, with devastating eruptions of volcanic lava and violent asteroid collisions that would have had the effect of darkening the skies, lowering the temperature, depleting the ozone layer, then stimulating a greenhouse effect and starting extensive fire and acid rain. ....
| UPDATED: 15:13, Tue, Dec 15, 2020 Link copied Sign up for FREE for the biggest new releases, reviews and tech hacks SUBSCRIBE Invalid email When you subscribe we will use the information you provide to send you these newsletters. Sometimes they ll include recommendations for other related newsletters or services we offer. Our Privacy Notice explains more about how we use your data, and your rights. You can unsubscribe at any time. Mass extinctions are a worryingly frequent event on Earth, with five major catastrophes striking in the last 500 million years alone. The Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction 66 million years ago is perhaps the most famous of these events as it put an abrupt end to the reign of the dinosaurs. The extinction was caused by a six-mile-wide asteroid striking in the modern-day Gulf of Mexico, killing about 70percent of all life on land and in the seas. ....
Non-marine animals (amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals) have apparently experienced at least 10 distinct episodes of intensified extinctions over the past 300 million years. Eight of these extinction events are concurrent with known marine mass extinctions, which previously yielded evidence for an underlying period of 26.4 to 27.3 million years ago. In new research, a team of scientists from New York University and Carnegie Institution for Science performed an analysis of the ten recognized non-marine mass extinctions and detected a statistically significant underlying periodicity of 27.5 million years; they also found that these mass extinctions align with major asteroid impacts and devastating volcanic outpourings of lava called flood-basalt eruptions. ....