Catastrophe - Episode 3 - Planet of Fire

Jun 03, 2021

this city the people in it in fact all life on the

planet

is here just by chance 99 of all the species that ever existed were wiped out in a series of global

catastrophe

s that changed the course of evolution but without them we wouldn't be here today 250 million years ago the largest volcanic eruptions the

planet

s had ever seen almost wiped out all life on Earth this is the story of Fireball Earth I always thought that our rise to becoming the dominant species on the planet must have been quite a process orderly progression from one species to another, but it wasn't, it was an arbitrary and often brutal process, a case of survive or die, it's difficult to comprehend the immense time scale of the event that formed us, so let's imagine the history of the Earth during the four and a half billion years of existence.

It was compressed into the 24 hours of a single day, every minute is three million years at midnight the planet was born in 1202 we suffered our first

catastrophe

The Earth collided with another planet Thea our planet was almost destroyed but in its wake life began thousands of years passed million years Then, at 8:27 p.m. m., the Earth was encased in ice for millions of years. Primitive life in the oceans was pushed to the edge when the ice melted. Life took its biggest evolutionary leap from single-celled organisms to multicellular organisms and then things calmed down, but not for long. 10 40 p.m.

More Interesting Facts About,

catastrophe episode 3 planet of fire...

On our clock, 250 million years ago, once again all living things faced extinction, it is a period of prehistory called Permian and the Earth faced the greatest catastrophe it has ever seen. A cataclysmic event started a chain reaction that wiped out 95 percent of all animal and plant species on the planet. It was the darkest hour on Earth, according to scientists like South African paleontologist Roger Smith. The extinction of amphibians was as dramatic as a mass extinction since the beginning of life on Earth there has been no other that has come close to 95 percent of the species on Earth, both on land and in sea, disappearing in a very short space of time, it was the worst extinction massive event ever experienced, but without it, the world we recognize today would not exist if it had not been for those few survivors, those few animals that were preadapted or capable of overcoming that great drought, we would not have had life on Earth, why it happened is a mystery that It has baffled scientists since evidence of the catastrophe was first discovered almost half a century ago.

If it could be solved, it could shed new light on our understanding of the evolution of life on Earth in South Africa, a three-hour drive from Bloemfontaine. Roger Smith is visiting an area that was once teeming with animals. We're here in the Karoo Basin in South Africa and it's a vast land of semi-arid bushland, lots of canyons, lots of copies of these flat-topped copies, but 250 million years ago this would have been a very different place. Rainfall in the mountainous areas fed rivers the size of the Mississippi that meandered slowly across the plains. It was a fully developed stable ecosystem.

Small herbivorous creatures called dictadons thrived here and ran through the vegetation. Huge herds of cow-sized herbivores called designants grazed the plains, but this flourishing world was also home to a cruel killer more than 150 million years before T.-Rex appeared. The gorgonopsian was the most efficient carnivore on Earth, armed with interlocking serrated teeth. This ferocious animal was the main predator of the ancient world. The creatures were doomed, none of them survived the mass extinction, an event so devastating that life itself was nearly wiped out. It would be a mystery if it weren't for clues buried in rocks like those in South Africa's Karoo Basin, beneath this thicket.

Paleontologists have unearthed rocks from this turbulent era. My job as a geologist and paleontologist is to read rocks and understand how they form. were deposited and to understand what happened to life through the ages, sedimentary rocks like this are now characterized by layers, each layer represents a moment in time when deposition was occurring, the oldest layers were at the bottom and the younger layers at the top of these rocks. They are like a time machine that takes us back 250 million years when Smith climbs the Rocks, reaches the layer that records the moment when the Permian world was annihilated, who is sitting on top of the Permian and this particular interval shows us something very dramatic. in the rock log below me we have green and blue-gray rocks that strongly suggest that the environment was humid.

These rocks testify to the near death of our planet. The gray and green rocks were formed by floods and are full of fossils, we are told. that this part of the world was once moist, lush and full of life, but just above this layer it's a very different story, suddenly everything turns red and that redness is an indication of rapid drying, drying and warming. These red rocks reveal a sudden and dramatic rise. in temperature and marks the moment when life on Earth almost came to an end. Fossils tell us that at this point there is virtually nothing left on Earth and we are entering a dead zone.

This layer marks the moment when the world changed below the gray line Rocks full of fossils full of life up in the Red Rocks nothing life had almost ceased to exist and not only here The Dead Zone was a line of death that traveled through around the world and could be found on all continents, this meant that global warming and mass extinction were global 250 million years ago the Earth's temperature skyrocketed out of control something huge on a planetary scale raised temperatures 10 degrees and ended virtually all life on Earth it is 10 40 on our clock in the history of the Earth 250 million years ago our planet was in climatic free fall the sudden and dramatic global warming changed the course of evolution on Earth caused a mass extinction so devastating that scientists thought it must have been caused by something extraordinary an impact from outer space could it have been an The asteroid impact would have sent billions of tons of dust high into the atmosphere, destroying the Sun, stopping plant growth, reducing temperatures and causing the food chain to collapse.

The extinction would have occurred in a matter of days and weeks, but that is not the story the rocks tell us. For the past decade, Professor Paul Wignall and researchers at the University of Leeds have been examining rocks from the dead zone around the time of the devastating mass extinction, collecting thousands of samples and taking hours of video on their expeditions to Greenland. These rocks paint a more complete picture of extinction than the South African rocks that reveal a history of extinction on land and sea. Extinction is like the biggest fossil crime scene of all time, so the best thing about Greenland is that we have a great crime scene history.

There's a lot of information to collect if you want, so it gives us an extremely detailed record of what happened, probably one of the best records from that time frame. Additionally, these Greenland rocks ruled out the idea that an impact caused the extinction, one of the most obvious clues would be that the extinction should happen extremely quickly within days and weeks after an impact, everything will essentially die within a matter of years, so which should be clear when we see it in a fossil record. We should see only an abrupt line or termination and that is not what we see.

Instead, the Wignall rocks show that the extinction occurred over a period of 100,000 years, too long to be the result of a meteorite impact. The Greenland team's discovery meant that something else had to happen. have caused the catastrophic Extinction and geologist Mike Benton believes he knows what he believes the disaster began deep beneath the Earth's surface. If not an impact, then the next most obvious type of instantaneous dramatic catastrophe is initiated by volcanic eruptions of some kind, so obviously you look at it. For some centers of volcanic eruptions fueled by immense pressure deep within the planet, shooting molten rock and toxic gases high into our atmosphere, scientists could find evidence of intense volcanic activity that took place just before the mass extinction, Then it could be the smoking gun they would have been searching for deep in the frozen wastes of one of the most remote corners of the earth.

Siberia is an important clue: a vast expanse of ancient lava flows that form a bleak landscape called the Siberian Traps. The Siberian traps of a style of volcanism that we do not know. that we see on Earth today represent the largest style of organism that Earth has ever experienced or produced Earth's ancient volcanic eruptions dwarf anything we can witness today at the end of the Permian period millions of cubic miles of magma accumulated beneath the crust Siberia throughout the region began to swell upward and then, like a giant blister, the Earth erupted, expelling large amounts of lava, flooding the area under a sea of molten rock, it is a type of volcanic eruption called flood basalt, here was the force behind the extermination 250 million years ago.

Siberian flood Basalt released enough lava to cover an area the size of the United States under a mile of molten rock Siberia has lost its cooling, but Iceland remains one of the most geologically active places in the world here Mike Benton is investigating the terrible impact even a small There could be a flood basalt. We are here in the middle of a lava field in Larki in Iceland because this is a very well-documented historical basalt eruption that can act as a good analogy for Siberian traps. In 1783, a vent eruption occurred here that lasted approximately eight months, this 18th century incident offers a unique insight into the devastating power of a flood battle.

For eight months, the larki event devastated southern Iceland, but it was small compared to the Siberian eruptions, yet it was still a disaster. Volcanoes produce three things. Lava is one that will kill things locally but produces ash and, most importantly, gas. Now the lava travels a relatively short distance. The ash will go further flying through the air, but what really kills are the gases. The Larkey eruption produced huge amounts of sulfur dioxide, a gas that has a deadly impact on the environment when mixed with water it creates sulfuric acid that falls to Earth in the form of acid rain that has a terrible effect, as recorded people in Lucky where they reported that it burned people's eyeballs and made it difficult for them to breathe because it congested their lungs, livestock suffered skin injuries and burns, and plants died.

The entire food chain began to collapse and that was just the beginning. Some of the sulfuric acid did not fall back to Earth, but remained in the atmosphere in small droplets. Sunlight reflected away from the planet cooled the cooling of its surface after the Lark eruption was catastrophic, killing more people than the immediate damage caused by sulfuric acid, creating very cold winters for two or three years after the eruption, not only in Iceland but in much of northern Europe. people reported crop failures and death as a result. Benton's analysis of the fortunate eruption has shown that the cooling effect produced by volcanic sulfur dioxide is deadly and that the effects can be felt thousands of miles away.

Imagine how devastating the Siberian traps must have been sprung. They spewed gas and lava for eight months and covered an area of about 200 square miles of molten rock, but the Siberian traps erupted for nearly half a million years and produced nearly 3 million square miles of lava that is 200,000 times larger than larki. Using Larki as the Benton model can begin to reconstruct the chain of events that turned the Siberian eruptions into a global killer began with a major eruption. The most likely sequence of events begins with these massive eruptions in Siberia with lava spreading over thousands of square kilometers of landscape and causing destruction and devastation wherever they went, then came the real killer like larki, the eruptions released billions of tons of dioxide of sulfur in the Earth's atmosphere, first turned into acid rain and bleached vast areas of the Earth, then created volcanic winters that caused global temperatures to plummet.

Around the world, climate change killed plants and the food chain fell apart. Where the plants failed. Herbivores such as synodonts died of starvation. The traps were about to make things much, much worse. Foreign psychologist Paul Wignall is surrounded by thevictims. Fossils found in Greenland rocks testify to the devastating effects of the Siberian eruptions. The first thing that begins to suffer in the entire fossil record is the plant record that we started with. seeing a change in the composition of the plants and we also began to see the appearance of some very strange mutated spores. Fossilized plants reveal a world struggling to adapt to climate change.

They also record the effects of a second deadly volcanic gas, carbon dioxide. of leaves and a series of small holes on the surface of the leaves actually control how much carbon dioxide there is. Plants need carbon dioxide to survive. They absorb it through small holes on the back of their leaves. The more carbon dioxide there is in the plant, the fewer holes the plant needs to absorb it. When scientists studied fossilized leaves dating back 250 million years, they discovered a sudden and dramatic reduction in the number of breeding holes. It seemed that at the beginning of the extinction carbon dioxide levels increased and that meant One thing is that the Siberian Trap eruptions must have released billions of tons of CO2.

Scientists estimate that the amount of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere at the time of the eruptions was 20 times greater than it is today, more than enough to seriously affect the global climate. Warming gone crazy The result of these Siberian trap eruptions was a global temperature rise of at least five degrees Celsius and they occurred episodically, so it is possible that there were repeated pulses and the repetition of the five degree temperature rise may seem like little to us. , but it had a huge impact on the Earth's climate. Warming the Earth's atmosphere affects how rain is generated and determines where it falls by raising the Earth's temperature.

Volcanic CO2 fundamentally altered global climate systems in equatorial regions. It simply stopped raining in South Africa. The Karoo Basin felt the full impact of this climate change. Its lush floodplains became a scorching desert. Paleontologist Roger Smith studies how this rapidly changing landscape affected the people of the Kuru and has just discovered the skull. alien from one of the victims of dasanodon is one of the last large cow-sized herbivores of the Permian period and at this level which is just below extinction this probably represents the last gasp of the Permian herbivores global warming marks an evolutionary dividing line in Earth's history animals and plants suffered drought and famine, 35 percent of them perished, but the consequences of the Siberian traps were just beginning, rising global temperatures triggered a domino effect that unleashed the next terrible wave of extinction, this time in the oceans, it is 10:40 at night.

Earth's Clock 250 million years ago, massive volcanic eruptions released millions of tons of gas that first cooled and then heated the ancient world. This oscillating climate killed millions of animals and plants. Extinction ruled the earth. This was the terrible first phase in the extermination of practically all life. on Earth but a critical moment in the history of human evolution thanks until now the oceans had escaped unscathed but that was about to change paleontologist Paul Wignall has found evidence of the next deadly phase of the mass extinction fifty thousand years later of the beginning of the Siberian eruptions, death of the oceans.

This is a very good example of rocks we get from Greenland. The evidence is, firstly, that they are very black, which is typical when there is no oxygen around, but even more telling are these lovely golden stones. The crystals that we can see on the surface and this is pyrite or fool's gold and we would only find them if there was no oxygen at the bottom of the sea. They can only form in an environment that lacks oxygen. Its discovery in 250 million year old rocks means only one thing, somehow, the Earth's oceans had lost their oxygen.

Clearly, something important was happening that had not been discovered before. What we could see was a sudden lack of oxygen at the end. Permian mass extinction. There is a completely new extinction phenomenon. Then we realized that we were now seeing a very different way of killing life in the seas. Lower oxygen levels in the water cannot explain why so many different species died. It's a mystery, research in Green Lakes National Park in upstate New York. has helped solve marine geologist Lee Camp has discovered the process he believes was responsible for the disappearance of almost all marine life 250 million years ago.

We are here at Green Lake because we see this as a microcosm of the ocean that may have existed. at the end of the permit at the time of this big mass extinction, it's a really unique habitat here, which is unusual in terms of most lakes. It's like a typical lake on the surface, but lurking underneath is this poisonous water. The lake looks normal, but below. surface is dying just like the ancient Permian oceans the stagnant circulation of water has stopped for the last five years. The camp and Penn State University divers have been monitoring the lake's slow death.

At the bottom they have found strange colonies of purple sulfur bacteria and an organism that only lives in water rich in a highly toxic gas called hydrogen sulfide, a vital ingredient in the production of fool's gold discovered in rocks at the bottom of the Greenland sea some time ago. 250 million years ago, it appears that what is happening in this lake is happening in the Permian oceans once the oxygen is depleted. The level drops to the point where there is no oxygen left, then organisms that cannot handle oxygen begin to thrive and these organisms have a waste product, hydrogen sulfide, which is poisonous to the air that plant equipment breathes. company is investigating the increasing levels of hydrogen sulfide in the lake, they do this by measuring the growth of purple sulfur bacteria recording the changing depth at which it can be found they know when they found it when they pull up pink water we are looking for the pink water because that is indicative of where these purple sulfur bacteria live, so this is our marker of where these organisms have a very large population density.

There are so many in there that they create this pink water underneath this toxic layer of pink water. Animals that breathe oxygen cannot survive. Camps are laid out whose depths change. water can be found in Green Lake ready ready oh yeah that's rotten eggs that's kind of nasty it's covered the oxygen levels in the lake drop the amount of poisonous hydrogen sulfide increases and pink water can be found closer to the surface means that poison is rising Through the water, killing all the oxygen-breeding animals that live there, the Green Lakes are just a few small pockets of water, but imagine it on a global scale if we took a satellite photo of the Permian Ocean, the regions that are green.

Today it would have been pink as seen from space due to the abundance of purple sulfur bacteria fields. The Green Lakes research gives us an idea of what was happening in the world's oceans at the time of the mass extinction, rocks from the same period tell us that it was a global phenomenon, the oceans and seas were deprived of oxygen and saturated with poison. Something important must have happened to trigger the removal of oxygen in Green Lake. It is caused by stagnant water. The water stopped circulating and recently researchers discovered that the same thing happened 250 million years ago.

This happened on a global scale. Normally, oxygen dissolves in seawater at the surface and is then carried by currents that circulate between the equator and the poles. Sunlight at the equator heats sea water as this warm water moves poleward, cools, and sinks carrying its dissolved substances. The oxygen fell with it, allowing the oceans and their inhabitants to breathe. This same process was happening 250 million years ago, then the Siberian traps appeared and raised the Earth's temperature by 5 degrees Celsius. The importance of this for the world as a whole and particularly for the oceans is the The way it affects the circulation in the world's oceans is a bit like leaving a fish tank on the window in bright sunshine: the water there warms, loses its oxygen and essentially stagnates, so if you magnify it to an ocean scale, that's effectively what you think is happening in the oceans at the end of the premium evidence suggests that 250 million years ago the rapid global warming created by Volcanic gases heated not only the atmosphere but also the oceans, oxygen stopped circulating and stagnated, becoming breeding grounds for poisonous hydrogen sulfide.

By producing bacteria, warming led to the development of hydrogen sulfide buildup in the deep ocean, which built up to such large concentrations that it invaded the shallow part of the ocean and displaced all air-breathing organisms in those environments and The change brought about by the Siberian traps had already killed about a third of all land species by raising the temperature of Earth's oceans, then caused the death of virtually all life in the sea. and he wasn't done lurking at the bottom of the oceans was another killer that would wipe out virtually everything else on Earth in Iceland.

Geologist Mike Benton is searching for clues to this latest deadly wave of extinctions. There is a mystery to understanding how the production of carbon dioxide occurred and the sudden increase in a global temperature of about five degrees could have caused such a catastrophic event. A sudden rise in global temperature of about five degrees would not kill life in the catastrophic way we see. Something else must have caused that massive scale of extinction that we know occurred. At that time, the gas released from the Siberian traps triggered global warming that wiped out species first on land and then in the oceans, but then temperatures rose again by another five degrees, the result was a catastrophic second wave of extinction in the earth, scientists know that carbon dioxide. released by the traps caused the first global temperature jump, but the second jump remained an enigma.

They needed to find something even stronger than CO2 that could have accelerated global warming on an unprecedented scale and they found the answer to this mystery hidden in the depths of the planet. ocean off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, about a mile offshore. Dr. Ira Leifer, a climatologist at the University of California, is on his way to monitor an unusual phenomenon. He is looking for another greenhouse gas, not carbon dioxide but methane. This area is where the methane comes from the depths. inside the Earth It rises through the Earth's crust until it reaches the sea floor and then through the water column to reach the sea surface as bubbles meet.

These bubbles seep into coastal areas around the planet, but this one's proximity to Southern California has given scientists a unique opportunity. To monitor it closely, University water students dive to the source of the leak, collecting samples of the gas as it escapes from the sea floor. Methane is a very potent greenhouse gas, perhaps 20 to 25 times more potent in a molecule. per molecule than CO2, that means that if we add one molecule of CO2 to the atmosphere and one molecule of methane, the methane has 25 times the effect, the amount of methane released by leaks like this one in Santa Barbara is too small to explain the 5 additional.

A temperature increase of several degrees was recorded towards the end of the mass extinction, but there is another source of the gas that could cause large quantities of a substance to live in the depths of the ocean, the most unexplored and least understood part of our world. called methane hydrate: methane gas frozen in cold water at the bottom of the sea today it is estimated that there are 30 billion tons of methane locked in ice at the bottom of the sea if it became gas there would be a global disaster Ira Lifer thinks that this may be exactly what happened 250 million years ago A while ago, if we consider this mass extinction as comparable to a genocidal crime on an unimaginable scale and we ask ourselves who are the criminal suspects, who are responsible, we would look at the evidence and in At the top of the short list would be methane hydrates because their large size and instability are known.

Frozen methane is ultrasensitive to heat. Raising its temperature even a couple of degrees can destabilize it and trigger the release of this powerful greenhouse gas. If theatmosphere warms for some particular reason, the ocean will heat the methane hydrate. will release methane this will warm the atmosphere, leading to warmer temperatures and even more methane hydrate by releasing its methane into the atmosphere a positive feedback loop 50 million years ago billions of tons of volcanic gases produced by the Siberian traps triggered one of these cycles Global temperature by 5 degrees the world warmed enough to thaw frozen methane hydrate at the bottom of the oceans and release billions of tons of potent greenhouse gases into Earth's atmosphere the temperature rose another five degrees the world was now 10 degrees centigrade warmer unable to adapt to extreme and rapid climate change, 95 percent of all life ceased to exist, but five percent survived and those survivors are the ancestors of all life on Earth. 250 million years ago, a vibrant, lush ecosystem teeming with life quickly transformed into a barren desert. world for the planet's dominant species there was no hope of survival the planet had been brought to its knees by savage volcanic eruptions that turned it into a

fire

ball The Earth eruptions released toxic gases that created global climate chaos and killed almost all living beings during something like Gorgonopson would have seen a world that would be changing the various animals it ate would become rarer, they were getting much hotter, terminal times for the Gorgonoxians and all those around them, as well as for fearsome predators like for most of the living. things was the end of the line but in evolutionary terms it was a new beginning catastrophes can restart the evolutionary clock, that means that Evolution the whole direction of evolution maybe changes because the dominant species disappear and then other species that were taking a role less significant These are synodonts.

They have been a favorite snack of gorgonopsians, but by burrowing underground they kept out of the reach of their predators and it turned out to be a useful habit when climate change burned the tubers and roots from the Earth's surface. underground provided them with water and food in the Karoo Basin of South Africa, paleontologist Roger Smith has made a remarkable discovery: we are looking at a burrow dug in the Early Triassic and we know it from the fossils that have been found in the ends of these cars , so they are cyanodon during the final permia extinction event and it is very likely that that was one of the reasons why they were able to survive the great drought at that time.

After the mass extinction, dinodons became one of the dominant species without them. Being here today, one of those signed online eventually became a mammal and if it hadn't been for the Survivor through the synodont line, mammals wouldn't have existed or evolved and neither would we, so we have a lot to be thankful for. to the cyano dance for 250 million years. Life once suffered a devastating blow and survived with new species and new ecosystems, but the same type of catastrophe that gave our first ancestors their chance could repeat itself. Eruptions like Larki occur on average every 20 million years.

Really big eruptions like the Siberian Traps. They are rare. They occur every few hundred million years, but they happen. It might surprise people to realize that the Earth can cause extreme devastation and of course there is nothing that humans with all their technology can do to counteract that, so if there was an eruption. Today, at the scale of the Siberian traps, it would be difficult to know how large numbers of humans could protect themselves from them, so it is very likely that there would be incredible death and destruction, no one would be safe, the threat to the future of humanity might not be a natural phenomenon.

For the first time in history, the dominant species on Earth is disrupting the delicate balance of its own ecosystem. Carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on Earth's systems. We have the potential to release two or three thousand gigatons of carbon dioxide. to the atmosphere in the In the next two centuries, when we look at Siberian Trap volcanism, we will talk about similar amounts of carbon dioxide release, but over millennia or perhaps a million years, so we will take everything the Siberian Trap event and we will compress it on a time scale. of human activity one or two centuries and that is scary, it is already causing the planet to warm and scientists fear that the uncontrolled global warming of the past could occur again in the future with more than 30 trillion tons of methane locked up as hydrates at sea. floor, the potential for another hydrate meltdown is as real today as it was 250 million years ago, but this time we would have started it.

I am sure that if we continue with what we are doing today in terms of pollution, we will cause a catastrophe, but how quickly is the big question? The end of the Permian extinction was one of the most important chapters in the history of the evolution of life. It's an incredible thought, but it nearly wiped out life itself from the face of the planet. It ended the reign of the Earth Masters, but provided opportunities for other survivors who would have become our direct ancestors without the mass extinction event or this would probably not be here at all in the next