Mass Extinctions and their Impact
Everyone went through a phase in their lives when we were obsessed with dinosaurs. We wanted to know everything about them, we watched the Jurassic world movie dozens of times. Or maybe that was just me? Later we went through a space phase. The difference between nebulae and galaxies, black holes and neutron stars, Moons and planets. What if I were to tell you there is a field of science that connects the two. That the universe has gears slightly beyond our comprehension, clockwork whose working is a knowledge so just out of our reach that humans spend their entire lives trying to understand one tiny, minuscule part of it.
It all started long long ago, 4.54 billion years ago in fact, when the Earth was formed. It’s common knowledge how a drop of molten matter became the planet we humans and 8.7 million other species call home. But we are not all that existed, there were so many species before us that disappeared. Where did they disappear to? Why? How? Sure, Human interference played a major role in the recent extinctions, but I’m talking about long before that, In the ages where the beasts of old roamed the lands, sixty-five million years before the first homo-sapiens as we call ourselves ever existed. There have been five mass extinctions that happened since life formed on earth, all happening at seemingly random times, no periodicity in doom.
But first we need to know what a mass extinction is. It’s an event where over 75% of all living beings die off. It always starts the same way, Comet impacts, Volcano eruptions, Continental drifts, world-wide floods, anoxia and soon, mass extinction. You may be wondering if the same fate awaits us. The answer is yes, but it’s so far away that we might as well pretend it doesn’t exist. To know when these ‘events’ happen, we need to understand why they happen. We are all well aware of how the sun moves, though most believe that the planets in the solar system move around a stationary sun; The planets are actually being pulled along for a ride as the sun revolves around the center of mass of our galaxy, The milky way.
The structure of the milky way is rather simple, a giant blob of stars in the middle and several spiral ‘arms’ reaching out from the center. You must know by now that space is pretty empty, an object moving in a straight line forever has very little chance of hitting something [assuming it isn’t influenced by the gravity of bodies around it]. So, despite the arms of the galaxy having so many stars, It won’t really obstruct the path of the solar system in any significant manner.
What actually happens is that the density of these areas are pretty high, so when the solar system goes through it, It gets slightly compressed. The solar system is enclosed in a sphere of asteroids called the ‘Oort clouds’. These asteroids usually mind their own business and stay in the clouds and on rare days that they don’t, they get trapped in Jupiter’s gravity and either collide with its moons, enters Jupiter or joins the asteroid belt. But when they are compressed by the combined gravity of these arms, they streak towards the inner solar system. This is bad because Earth is in the inner solar system.
When the asteroid(s) hit earth, they heat up the atmosphere, everything in and around over 1500 kilometers from the impact spontaneously combusts at once. Earthquakes that measure over 11 on the Richter scale occur on the opposite side of the impact, all this incite tectonic activity that reshapes the earth. Volcanoes erupt, Tsunami’s crash, general chaos ensues causing quite literally ‘hell on earth’. This starts nuclear reactions within the core of the earth, nuclear fusions to be exact, this makes the earth itself smaller, increasing water levels globally. All creatures are forced to move to higher ground. The amount of dissolved oxygen in the water is decreased by a lot creating ‘dead zones’ with little to no oxygen. All marine life in these areas die. This is more clearly explained in Napier-Clube’s “A Theory of Terrestrial Catastrophism”
“Galactic compressions cause nuclear reactions cause tectonic activity cause extinctions”
So now that we have cleared up how and why these extinction events happen, all that’s left it to find out when they happen. I mentioned earlier that five such events have happened before. Namely the Ordovician-Silurian Extinction [440 million years ago], Devonian Extinction [365 million years ago], Permian-Triassic Extinction [250 million years ago], Triassic-Jurassic Extinction [210 million years ago] and the Cretaceous-tertiary Extinction [65 million Years ago]. Paleontologists have found this through Radiometric dating methods and Tephrochronology.
You may be wondering why I keep mentioning dinosaurs. This is the point where we need to know about the remains they left behind. If the spirals of the milky way cause extinctions, and we know when these extinctions happened, and we can also make an educated guess about the path of the solar system around the galaxy; This implies that we can retrace the revolutions and place points when extinctions happened and mark reconstruct the structure of the galactic arms.
For those who don’t understand exactly how marvelous this theory is, The Mysteries of the other side of the galaxy lay under your feet. Such treatment is completely new. No one has previously suggested reconstruction of the structure of the galactic arms by using terrestrial geological sedimentary. Cause who would be crazy enough to link paleontology and astronomy.
There are a bunch of future pathways this field of research could take us, such as expanding cosmic influences on Earth’s history, advancing disaster preparedness with space rescue bases and overall re-imagination of the Earth’s geological boundaries and dynamics.
I hope you had something to take away from this article. There isn’t much about this online because it’s a relatively new concept. I have attached my references, they are an interesting read to say the least.
References:
1. Safronov, A.N. (2020) A New View of the Mass Extinctions and the Worldwide Floods. International Journal of Geosciences, 11, 251–287.
2. Kurzgesagt (2021) The Day the Dinosaurs Died — Minute by Minute, YouTube
3. https://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/questions/question18.html
4. Napier, W., Clube, S. A theory of terrestrial catastrophism. Nature 282, 455–459 (1979). https://doi.org/10.1038/282455a0
5. https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/dinosaurs-ancient-fossils/extinction/mass-extinction
6. Peppe, D. J. & Deino, A. L. (2013) Dating Rocks and Fossils Using Geologic Methods. Nature Education Knowledge 4(10):1
