"Burning Fossil Fuels Helped Drive Earth’s Most Massive Extinction"
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Massive volcanic eruptions ignited oil and coal deposits in Siberia in the events that led to the Permian-Triassic “Great Dying” event.
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In rocks that formed in Northern Italy’s Dolomites and elsewhere around the time of the Permian-Triassic extinction, researchers detected spikes of a molecule formed from fossil fuel combustion.
What self-respecting mass extinction event would overlook the (proverbial) "smoking gun"..?
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The smoking gun was ancient volcanism in what is today Siberia, where volcanoes disgorged enough magma and lava over about a million years to cover an amount of land equivalent to a third or even half of the surface area of the United States.
But, there's always a "but" ...
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But volcanism on its own didn’t cause the extinction. The Great Dying was fueled, two separate teams of scientists report in two recent papers, by extensive oil and coal deposits that the Siberian magma blazed through, leading to combustion that released greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane.
Back here, just to top it off with some additional duplicated text to get all the way to the Full line.
[This message has been edited by rinselberg (edited 11-19-2020).]
What about the thousands of coal fires burning under ground now. Surprised the tar pits have not gone up in flames yet.
Humans think they are so smart, but if Covid has shown us anything its that at any moment something could wipe us puny humans out. As much as we know there is so much we will never have the capacity to understand. I'm ok with that.
Originally posted by Jake_Dragon: What about the thousands of coal fires burning under ground now. (?)
That's a question I wanted to consider. Before I used Google, my thought was "A completely insignificant amount, compared to the total amount of CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions from the purposeful burning of fossil fuels and other industrial and agricultural processes.
Now I think different. From wikipedia:
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Across the world, thousands of underground coal fires are burning at any given moment. ... to cause 40 tons of mercury to enter the atmosphere annually, and to represent three percent of the world's annual CO2 emissions.
That's based partly on some older citations that I retrieved, from 2003. But I think even today, underground coal fires are a "thing" in terms of global warming, and not something that should be completely overlooked. This was revisited in an undergraduate honors thesis from 2014.
I also stumbled upon this, which I can't remember ever being aware of before:
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Underground coal gasification (UCG) is a promising option for the future use of un-worked coal. UCG permits coal to be gasified in situ within the coal seam, via a matrix of wells. The coal is ignited and air is injected underground to sustain a fire, which is essentially used to “mine” the coal and produce a combustible synthetic gas which can be used for industrial heating, power generation or the manufacture of hydrogen, synthetic natural gas or diesel fuel. As compared with conventional mining and surface gasification, UCG promises lower capital/operating costs and also has other advantages, such as no human labor underground. In addition, UCG has the potential to be linked with carbon capture and sequestration. . . .
What about the thousands of coal fires burning under ground now. Surprised the tar pits have not gone up in flames yet.
Humans think they are so smart, but if Covid has shown us anything its that at any moment something could wipe us puny humans out. As much as we know there is so much we will never have the capacity to understand. I'm ok with that.
Damn its getting hot in here Click to show
Yeah whats that town, i can't even remember the state, where the mines under the town caught fire, and started spewing toxic gas out all over the town, and the town was abandoned, and they expect the first to burn for i think it was 100's of years..
Yeah whats that town, i can't even remember the state, where the mines under the town caught fire, and started spewing toxic gas out all over the town, and the town was abandoned, and they expect the first to burn for i think it was 100's of years..
But, while it’s been disruptive, this fire has only been burning for the past 53 years - a relative blink of an eye when you consider that in Australia a similar blaze has been smouldering for an estimated 6,000 years, long before the country was settled by Europeans.
Visible only as some foul-smelling steam, the coal seam blaze is contained 30 metres below the surface of Mount Wingen (which means “fire” in the local Aboriginal language) or Burning Mountain, located in the state of New South Wales. And it’s officially the oldest fire on the planet, that we know of at least.
This girl is more than a little (overly?) dramatic and plays fast and loose regarding radiation but is relatively accurate otherwise.
2 billion years ago, the Earth itself had naturally occurring nuclear reactors. Since this is the 'nature thread'... Two billion years ago— eons before humans developed the first commercial nuclear power plants in the 1950s— seventeen natural nuclear fission reactors operated in what is today known as Gabon in Western Africa [Figures 1 and 2]. The energy produced by these natural nuclear reactors was modest. The average power output of the Gabon reactors was about 100 kilowatts, which would power about 1,000 lightbulbs. As a comparison, commercial pressurized boiling water reactor nuclear power plants produce about 1,000 megawatts, which would power about ten million lightbulbs. Despite their modest power output, the Gabon nuclear reactors are remarkable because they spontaneously began operating around two billion years ago, and they continued to operate in a stable manner for up to one million years. Further, at the Gabon reactors many of the radioactive products of the nuclear fission have been safely contained for two billion years, providing evidence that long-term geologic storage of nuclear waste is feasible.. The article is a good bit longer than the text above, goes into great but easily understood explanation of how the natural reactors came to be, and why they will probably never happen again, here on Earth anyway.
