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Even the worst mass extinction had its oases
- ZunarJ5 2y agoThe technical term, as mentioned in the article, is refugium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refugium_(population_biology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refugium_(population_biology). Using the term oases is mildly irking, haha. Though I have extreme reservations about the current state of conservation science (on questions of nature and it's own agency), this is precisely why conservation is extremely important. We must protect what we have left to let nature adjust to what we become and want to be: https://eos.org/features/critical-zone-science-comes-of-age https://eos.org/features/critical-zone-science-comes-of-age Source: I work in palaeoecology.
- jordanb 2y agoA while back I read a book called Extinction by Douglas H. Erwin. It was a history of the end-Permian event. There were a few interesting takeaways: 1) When people started realizing that these dieoffs happened there was a belief that there was probably a common cause like impactors, but end-Permian almost certainly wasn't an impactor like K-T was. There are several things that can kick-off an extinction 2) One thing that is true is that the extinctions seem to follow the same script. Lots of things can kick them off, but once they start going it's a rock rolling down a hill very quicky. End-Permian seems tied to the Siberian Traps basaltic eruption, but that eruption had been going for thousands of years before the dieoff started. K-T definitely happened within years following the impact, but end-Permian seemed to be a "first gradually, then suddenly" as pollution from the traps put more and more stress on the biosphere until suddenly... 3) He posed the question: are we currently in an great extinction. He wrote that we are not because they look at the fossil record of really fundamental creatures (stuff like krill in the ocean) upon which the whole biosphere relies, and we're not yet seeing them collapse. But once such a collapse begins, it will be something that is unstoppable. 4) He thought that there is a big gap in our knowledge of survival and recovery. Why have none of these massive events just turned the planet into a dead world? How does life come back? Historically the early-Triassic was seen as a really boring thing to study because there's not much evidence of life in it, but understanding how life soldiers on through these "wasteland Earth" episodes is potentially a fertile ground for research.
- ashoeafoot 2y agoSome total niche bacteria doing millenias of groundwork.
- mapt 2y ago* End-Permian is associated with the Siberian Traps, but those in turn are associated with the Wilkes Land Crater impactor, which is antipodal to that event and may have seen antipodal seismic focusing. * "Going on for thousands of years" - Dating the End-Permian has confidence intervals on the order of 30,000 years. * Small size and diverse ecology almost guarantees survival of life. There is life basically everywhere we look, down to extremophiles living very slow lives in a random cubic meter of "solid rock" two kilometers deep. We have even evolved several chemical alternatives to photosynthesis as a primary energy source. Mammals and small birds deep in a cave somewhere appear to have been some of the only land vertebrates to survive K-T, and radiated out from there. Evolution does the rest.
- jordanb 2y ago> associated with the Wilkes Land Crater impactor Erwin discusses that theory but doesn't agree with it. In any case, 1) there are other mass dyings that are definately not impactors like the oxygen crisis. 2) there are other basaltic eruptions on the scale of the siberian traps (like CAMP) where the cause is known and not an impactor.
- blueflow 2y agoP-T is likely not due to the Wilkes Land crater, which would be 2.5x the size of the K-Pg impact and would have left an comparable amount (or more) of iridium in the boundary sediments. There are elevated iridium levels in the P-T boundaries, but only sporadically.
- mapt 2y agoThe theory being something along the lines of "Large mantle plume under Siberia suddenly freed when surface crust is fractured in numerous places by extensive antopodal convergence of shockwaves from the Wilkes Land impactor".
- morkalork 2y agoI love the retro cgi article image, it gives me fuzzy nostalgic feelings for the 90s era of Myst, Reboot and The Mind's Eye.
- mfro 2y agoThe artist appears to be committed to the bit: https://fineartamerica.com/profiles/corey-ford?tab=artwork https://fineartamerica.com/profiles/corey-ford?tab=artwork
- yobert 2y agoYeah it reminds me of POV-Ray, in a fun way!
- david422 2y agoOk I went looking through those paintings. That is an ... odd account. AI? Not AI? Looks like mostly just screenshots from some 90's computer games.
- mfro 2y agoI think it's safe to say she learned 3D art in the early 2000s and has not updated her PC since.
- PaulKeeble 2y agoLife will survive what humans have done. When our numbers are dropped substantially by many C's of climate change a lot of wildlife will be able to repopulate and survive although much wont because it will be too hot for correls and many other species. We are taking many species with us every year at the moment, its a mass extinction event, but even if we fire all our nuclear weapons we wont wipe out all the land animals and fauna. Its not just humans being put in jeopardy by what we are doing but it ought to be enough to get off this maybe extinction path. 1.5C done, Onwards to 2C, should hit it before 2030.
- yieldcrv 2y ago> Scientists have debated whether this event caused nearly as much terrestrial destruction. Is this the right phrasing? I thought the whole planet was terrestrial Not a distinction between sea and land life
- WaltPurvis 2y agoUsing "terrestrial" to refer only to land-based life is proper, i.e., it's a common and accepted definition of the word.
- adrian_b 2y agoLatin "Terra" actually meant "dry", so it was the proper term for dry lands, as opposed to seas and oceans. For instance, "continent" is an abbreviation for "terra continens", i.e. dry land that is contiguous. Spanish "tierra" and the cognate words in the other Romance languages, which usually correspond to English "land", have remained closer to the original meaning of the word. The entire planet was very seldom, if ever, referred as "Terra". The correct Latin word for the entire planet was "Tellus" (whence the adjective "telluric"), whose likely meaning was "support" in the sense "the earth that supports us on it".
- didgetmaster 2y agoI have heard that scientists estimate at something like 99.9% of all species that ever lived have ZERO evidence left in the fossil record. While I think that a great many things can be learned by studying the relative few fossils discovered; making broad assumptions about ecosystems based on limited evidence seems like a bit of a stretch.
- _1tem 2y ago[flagged]
- goatlover 2y agoWhat is this anti-scientific comment doing on hacker news? Evolution is a fact. It happened and it's still happening. The exact way species evolved is theoretical based on existing facts.
- _1tem 2y ago[flagged]
- tomrod 2y agoMake reddit style claims, get reddit style responses [0] [1] [0] https://imgflip.com/i/voggo https://imgflip.com/i/voggo [1] https://tenor.com/view/watch-it-gif-3524753964604521397 https://tenor.com/view/watch-it-gif-3524753964604521397
- Loughla 2y agoI feel like the basis of your argument requires you to very heavily misinterpret the word theory as being equal to the word belief. There's a reason those two things have different words for them. You know that, right?
- andrewflnr 2y agoDon't feed the troll. Especially don't feed them with tricky semantic distinctions.
- 1970-01-01 2y agoThis is also why some hypothesize that Mars may not be a dead rock.
- Loughla 2y agoIt does stand to reason that if there was life on Mars there might still be life on Mars. Everywhere we look on Earth, life exists, even in extreme environments and independent of the sun's energy. I think the first alien we'll find will be an extremophile bacteria or other microorganism.
- andrewflnr 2y agoAlmost certainly microorganism, but not necessarily extremophile. It depends what you mean by "find". We might "find" oxygen in an exoplanet atmosphere and go, "yay, they have... algae?" :D
- tomrod 2y agoThat would be hugely important, actually. With N=1, we know that life exists but not how common different development might be. Algae on another planet would suggest panspermia of common development pathways.
- andrewflnr 2y agoWell, you don't actually get an id as specific as earthlike algae from an atmospheric spectrum (I guess I didn't actually say that's what I was thinking. Oops :D). If you actually went there and found earthlike DNA, then yes.
- w0de0 2y agoIt seems to me that “refugia” would be more apposite word for this phenomenon than “oases.”
- dredmorbius 2y ago<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43436432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43436432>
- pmdulaney 2y agoYes, and the oasis was Noah's ark.