The era before the Dinosaurs was fascinating, with all sorts of prototypes of what would become major animal phyla (well, plant phyla too, but I sadly lack the imagination required to be a paleobotanist). The Mammals descended from a strange group that was dominant at the time, the mammal-like reptiles. They dominated the end of the Paleozoic Era, the "Old Life" before the Dinosaurs of the Mesozoic.
One of the great mysteries of the history of life on Earth is the repeated Mass Extinction events. The disappearance of the Dinosaurs is pinned on an asteroid event, but that extinction is only one of very, very many. In fact, the definition of the end of one era (say, the Permian) and the beginning of another (the Triassic) is defined as a mass extinction event.
Literally, we cannot describe the history of life on this planet without using these mass die-offs as a yardstick. So what caused them all?
A new scientific paper looks to possibly revolutionize the study of Paleontology, and coincidentally sweep "consensus" Climate Science with it. Henrick Svensmark's Cosmic Ray hypothesis is no stranger to long time readers. What's new is a correlation of the fossil record with the well-known astronomical calculations of nearby Supernovae. The correlation is eerie.
Keep your eye on this one. Rather than the rococo climate models, brimming with epicyclic escape clauses, "gridding", "adjusting", and "smoothing", you have a simple hypothesis that maps very, very closely to a data set that stretches back a half billion years.
Read it all, and short the solar and wind power generation companies.
4 comments:
There was always no uncertain awe whenever "they" saw a, "Star of wonder, star of night, star with royal beauty bright, westward leading, still proceeding..." Stars have always foretold the ominous.
Now that's some cool stuff, right there.
They say Betelgeuse is "overdue" to go supernova. I don't want to be around for the experiment.
I haven't read the paper itself, but based on the write-up I saw over at Watts Up With That ...
... I don't buy it.
Point 1) how are they defining 'nearby' supernovae?
Point 2) how do they know how many 'nearby' supernovae there have been in the last ten thousand years, let alone five hundred million. Supernovae do leave traces behind: neutron stars and certain kinds of nebulae. Where are the remnants of these ancient supernovae?
Point 3) of the five largest mass extinctions in the geologic record, three (terminal Permian, terminal Triassic, terminal Cretaceous) are perfectly correlated with very large basalt-trap events (Siberian, Central Atlantic, and Deccan Traps respectively). That's well beyond any acceptable coincidence. I suspect a connection - and not a cosmic one.
"Epicyclic" is such a good word. It references Ptolemy and Kepler beautifully as we look for a new Kepler to knock the complex gridding, adjusting, and smoothing of the "researcher's" thumb on the mechanism out of the climate models.
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