Each and Everyone One of Us! (or our direct descendants)

Could it be that the environmentalists are correct and that life as we know it is headed for extinction? There are two physicists at the University of California at Berkeley who seem to agree, although their studies have shown extinction of life to be a natural order of earthly things. They believe that we are already five million years overdue for the next cycle of extinction! The last was sixty-five million years ago when the dinosaurs and other life forms disappeared. The scientists do not have an explanation as to why these extinctions occur, however there are a number of theories:

Mass extinction comes every 62 million years, UC physicists discover

"… perhaps there’s some kind of ‘natural timetable’ deep inside the Earth that triggers cycles of massive volcanism, Rohde has thought. There’s even a bit of evidence: A huge slab of volcanic basalt known as the Deccan Traps in India has been dated to 65 million years ago — just when the dinosaurs died, he noted. And the similar basaltic Siberian Traps were formed by volcanism about 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, when the greatest of all mass extinctions drove more than 70 percent of all the world’s marine life to death, Rohde said."

It is therefore only a matter of time (sometime in the next million years or so) before the next Great Dying takes place. (First published at "Scribbles", Friday, March 11, 2005.)

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