Our planet Earth has extinguished large portions of its inhabitants
several times since the dawn of animals. And if science tells us anything, it will surely try to kill us all again. Working in the 19th century, paleontology pioneer Georges Cuvier saw dramatic turnovers of life in the fossil record and likened them to the French Revolution, then still fresh in his memory.
Today, we refer to such events as “mass extinctions,” incidents in which many species of animals and plants died out in a geological instant. They are so profound and have such global reach that geological time itself is sliced up into periods—Permian, Triassic, Cretaceous—that are often
defined by these mass extinctions.
Debate over what caused these factory resets of life has raged ever since Cuvier’s time. He considered them to be caused by
environmental catastrophes that rearranged the oceans and continents. Since then, a host of explanations have been proposed, including
diseases,
galactic gamma rays,
dark matter, and even
methane from microbes. But since the 1970s, most scientists have considered the likely root cause to be either
asteroid impacts, massive
volcanic eruptions, or a
combination of both.
Read more at
Arstechnica
