Sign Up Now
Login/New User




Eco

The Snowball Effect

Erin Shaw

A research team based in Riverside, California suggests that global warming could release “long-dormant stores of methane gas . . . causing an abrupt and catastrophic climate change like one that occurred 635 million years ago.” The research findings, published in Nature, are based on past geologic records, the most reliable way to understand climate change. Led by Martin Kennedy, the research team looked for stable isotopes in marine sediment samples from South Australia. According to truthout.org, “they found the greatest variation of the oxygen isotope ever reported from marine sediments, which they attributed to the melting ice sheets and methane gas release.”

Kennedy also found that “the abrupt climate change 635 million years ago directly preceded the appearance of multi-celled animals in fossil records.” Kennedy told Truth Out that “animals evolved after the whole system stabilized, and we’re suggesting there’s a linkage there.” If the geologic record is an accurate predictor of future events, could the oncoming climate change signal the next phase in evolution? Although it is still uncertain, this suggested link could point to an evolutionary shift 635 million years in the making.

Creative Commons Image: "2007_07_21_1hr-lax_133.JPG" by dsearls on Flickr.

6-11-08

email

Thank you for your interest in spreading the word on Reality Sandwich.

NOTE: We only request your email address so that the person you are recommending the page to knows that you wanted them to see it, and that it is not junk mail. We do not capture any email address.

Enter multiple addresses on separate lines or separate them with commas. You can only email up to 10 recipients
The Snowball Effect
(Your Name) has forwarded a page to you from Reality Sandwich
(Your Name) thought you would like to see this page from the Reality Sandwich web site.

methane gas causes even more of a green house effect than CO2

Submitted by Entropic Blur on Thu, 06/12/2008 - 15:10.

I think you bring up an interesting point about evolutionary shift, but I also want to comment on the importance of methane as a green house gas. It's a lot better at insulating than C02, and one of the huge concerns associated with global warming is that a slight increase in temperature may trigger the release of methane pockets. This would heat up the earth even more efficiently than CO2 and to a greater temperature than what is already projected.

The Nature article points out that the methane release would have ended a snowball phase that the earth went through, where almost all the water on earth is frozen. So it makes sense to me that warming up to a more ideal environment (i.e. having more liquid water) would have helped trigger some (physical) evolutionary shifts -- as opposed to a less ideal climate, which is what could happen now.

Nonetheless, rapid change does force rapid evolution. At least climate change now is helping people we might least expect to shift to more sustainable living habits, which could be part of the psychic evolution we talk about on this site. So ... if climate changed a lot faster than expected ... we'd have a lot of rapid changing to do! Rapid evolution!

I also think that what Adrian Melott is doing at Kansas U is interesting. He's found that the sun's wobble in and out of the plane of the Milky Way can expose it to cosmic rays, affecting biodiversity and evolution: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070423_cosmic_evo.html

Namaste. --EB--

Picture of <em>vivifidal</em>

the IT factor

Submitted by vivifidal on Sun, 06/15/2008 - 11:00.
if one views cosmic radiation as data, then the presently occuring galactic core transit could be seen as infusing the sytem with both an increased amount of data and an increased novelty or diversity of data. In a biosystem increased novelty leads to biodiversity and an overall increased system stability due to the dysentropic manner in which biomechanisms convert noise to signal. There's a clever little formula for this with deltas and lambdas and little arrows above sigmas which I would love to jot down once I figure it out, but the gist of it is that since dna mutates via single digit changes of a 64bit matrix graycode (individual genes can be viewed as groupings of faces of abstract octahedral crystals where a single mutaion is represented by movement from one triangular face to the adjacent one so that for any possible mutation there are three possible variations two of which are novel and one of which is a reversion to a prior state) from the sample of the pre-existing stable sources, ie current species genome and specific individual genome, the elimination from the gene pool of specific variants changes the relative mix of permutaiton from the initial pool at an increased rate until equilibrium is reached and that new equilibrium is highly divergent from the initrial state.