Study: A death star named Nemesis isn’t to blame for mass extinctions
In the 1980s, fossil record research showed a curious cycle: Every 27 million years, Earth hosted a mass extinction. Some scientists blamed a dim star dubbed Nemesis. They suggested it was in a deadly dance with our sun, periodically kicking comets out of the distant Oort Cloud to shower our planet with destruction. Morbidly fascinating…
The worst extinction in our planet’s history, and what it means for humans
The mass extinctions that wiped out the dinosaurs aren’t the worst in our planet’s history, Paul Gilster explains. The absolute worst extinction event occurred around 2.4 billion years ago. We often speak about extinction events, and cite such examples as the Cretaceous-Tertiary event some 65.5 million years ago, when the mass extinction of dinosaurs and…
How did the victims of the Plinean Eruption of Vesuvius die?
Even at the the far edge of the mud and ash that came from the Pompeii volcano’s explosion, the heat was sufficient to instantly kill everyone, even those inside their homes. And that is how the people at Pompeii, whose remains were found trapped and partly preserved within ghostly body-shaped tombs within that pyroclastic flow,…
The Grand Canyon of Colorado
The Grand Canyon itself is, of course, utterly stupefying. Vintage footage of the Grand Canyon from the 1920’s, that most romantic era of National Parks travel, completely knocks my socks off. And here it is in all its monochrome glory… This post originally appeared on Voyages Extraordinaires.
Extinction of the Old, Evolution of the New: What really happened to the dinosaurs?
In the following essay, Greg Laden muses on the glacial pace it takes for geological theories to be widely accepted and the difficulty of pinpointing exactly when the dinosaurs went extinct. I refer, of course to the realization that a giant object from outer space can land on the earth with catastrophic consequences, perhaps causing…