Earth without People: the Next Beginning?

It was called the Triassic Period, and it ended 136 million years ago. “[U]nderground channels of molten rock … fed widespread volcanic eruptions 200 million years ago as the supercontinent Pangaea pulled apart at the seams. The eruptions covered more than four million square miles with basalt lava and belched vast amounts of carbon dioxide and sulfur into the atmosphere. Brief volcanic winters followed, but the eruptions also set off an ocean-acidifying, global-warming catastrophe that wiped out three-quarters of life on earth. This was the end-Triassic extinction, which cleared the way for the dinosaurs and their domination of the planet for the next 136 million years, before a giant asteroid struck Mexico and ended their reign.” Peter Brannen for the New York Times, August 16^th.

Science fiction stories of humans in giant fleets of space vehicles searching for a new planetary home are still popular. But what if it were true? What if we had to leave? Could it be that we are precipitating another de facto Triassic Period… acidity so strong that most of life on earth just dies? “This spring, a team of researchers from Columbia University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a paper in the journal Science connecting these eruptions — which took place in four pulses over 600,000 years — with this global near-death experience, one of five major extinctions over the last 540 million years.

“Some scientists believe we are now in the midst of another great extinction, driven not by natural events but by the activities of man: hunting, habitat destruction, the introduction of invasive species and pollution, which has drastically altered the thin glaze of life-supporting chemistry that coats the earth. By some estimates, perhaps close to 30,000 species of plants and animals go extinct every year. Whole ecosystems, like coral reefs, which went virtually extinct in the end-Triassic extinction, are now facing worldwide collapse again.

“A World Bank report last fall warned that ‘present emission trends put the world plausibly on a path toward 4 degrees Celsius warming within the century.’ The surface waters of the carbon-dioxide absorbing oceans have already become 30 percent more acidic since the start of the Industrial Revolution…  ‘In terms of global warming and ocean acidification,’ [Professor Paul E. Olsen, a paleontologist at Columbia and one of the study’s co-authors] said, the rate of change during the end-Triassic extinction ‘was comparable to what we’re doing today.’…

“Professor Olsen discovered that the first wave of the extinction happened within just a single sedimentary layer, in less than 20,000 years, as atmospheric carbon dioxide likely doubled from the eruptions, sending global temperatures soaring by 3 degrees Celsius or more.” NY Times. Global warming, increasing acidity, slow eradication of an increasing number of species… could it be that mankind is replicating the same kind of environmental damage to the planet that thousands of erupting volcanos and massive lava flows impose on the planet 200 million years ago. This is a slow build, well within the above-noted 20,000 years that laid the planet bare so many millions of years before. Nature just picked up where she left off and began rebuilding for a few more million years.

But the “gradual without the dramatic impact of oh-so-many erupting volcanos” has not remotely become a desperate call to action for all mankind. The problem still seems to be too much in the future, and there is this subtext that our ingenious technology will find a simple and affordable solution along the way. But the numbers just keep getting worse, and nature really doesn’t care if she has to start over… again. When is it time to make a difference? When is it too late?

I’m Peter Dekom, and while the nastiest moments might not happen in my lifetime, they well might during the lives of my son and his children.