Extinction Event

Richard Cronin

The linked paper provides more support for the papers of Dr. Gerta Keller — that episodes of extensive volcanism darkened the skies and was the cause of the Great Extinctions on land.

Even more important are volcanic acid gas emissions. In the oceans, the great injection of acidic gases from submarine volcanoes and hydrothermal vents turned the oceans anoxic. Even on land, extensive volcanism would have produced intense acid rain and defoliation.

Several reptiles of those eras had breathing systems vastly inferior to today’s mammals, so choking SO2 fumes would certainly have been deadly. Acid gases would affect both land and sea animals.

The only thread that supports the Alvarez hypothesis of a single major meteor strike causing the Great Extinctions ( i.e. the Cretaceous/ Tertiary extinction caused by the Chixulub meteor) has been a fine layer of Iridium spread around the globe.

Just a single meteor strike, even a very large one, is highly unlikely to have darkened the skies for more than 2 or 3 years. Moreover, a single meteor in no way could have acidified the globe’s oceans and lands.

Iridium is very dense and very little is to be found in the Lithosphere and Upper Mantle. It is thought that most Iridium sank into the Lower Mantle upon planetary formation. Ergo, the flawed premise that the layer(s) of Iridium could only have been delivered to the Earth by extraterrestria l source(s).

In his concepts of the Plate Climatology, James Edward Kamis points out that the most vigorous and continuously active volcanoes like Mauna Loa and the volcanoes of Iceland extend deep into the Lower Mantle. They are easily the source of Iridium. Ergo, the concepts put forward by Gerta Keller explain all of these observations.

Volcanic and seismic activity in planetary processes, especially in the oceans, is just now coming to light. Neither Svente Arrhenius (1896) nor Gilbert Plass (1956) had any awareness of these processes.

The entire discussion of climate change has been dominated by people looking up and only taking dry bulb temperature measurements on the surface. The effects of humidity are managed by ever more complex algorithms in the "models”, then deriving some incredible rolling average of the entire globe’s changing by tenths and hundredths of a degree. Is it even possible to derive an average level of thermal energy at the Earth’s surface ?

Get your head out of the clouds and look beneath your feet.

Tim asks:

Richard, do you think a major asteroid strike could trigger a supervolcanic event? I wouldn't think so but I am far from an expert on such things. Maybe we did in fact have the asteroid triggering the rest of it?

Richard Cronin replies:

Scientists have speculated that a major asteroid strike could have caused pole reversals by sending shock waves to disrupt the Earth’s dynamo. Even if such an asteroid made a square hit on some seismically active continental region like Yellowstone, it might pop off a single super-volcano, but I can’t see it doing anything more broadly

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 12:58 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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