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April 15 - April 26, 2019
Temperatures soared—the seas warmed by as much as ten degrees—and the chemistry of the oceans went haywire,
The water became acidified, and the amount of dissolved oxygen dropped so low that many organisms probably, in effect, suffocated.
the whole episode lasted no more than two hundred thousand years, and perhaps less than a hundred thousand. By the time it was over, something like ninety percent of all species on earth had been eliminated.
One hypothesis has it that the heating of the oceans favored bacteria that produce hydrogen sulfide, which is poisonous to most other forms of life.
“truly grotesque place” where glassy, purple seas released poisonous bubbles that rose “to a pale green sky.”
every extinction event appears to be unhappy—and fatally so—in its own way.
It may, in fact, be the very freakishness of the events that renders them so deadly; all of a sudden, organisms find themselves facing conditions for which they are, evolutionarily, completely unprepared.
Zalasiewicz is convinced that even a moderately competent stratigrapher will, at the distance of a hundred million years or so, be able to tell that something extraordinary happened at the moment in time that counts for us as today.
humans have rearranged the earth’s biota,
Rattus exulans,
“a grey tide” that turned “everything edible into rat protein.”
(A recent study of pollen and animal remains on Easter Island concluded that it wasn’t humans who deforested the landscape; rather, it was the rats that came along for the ride and then bred unchecked.
Rattus norvegicus.
The descendants of today’s rats, according to Zalasiewicz, will radiate out to fill the niches that Rattus exulans and Rattus norvegicus helped empty.
Most significantly, Crutzen said, people have altered the composition of the atmosphere. Owing to a combination of fossil fuel combustion and deforestation, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air has risen by forty percent over the last two centuries, while the concentration of methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas, has more than doubled.
the Anthropocene will be marked by a unique “biostratigraphical signal,” a product of the current extinction event on the one hand and of the human propensity for redistributing life on the other.
International Commission on Stratigraphy,
Carbon dioxide has many interesting properties, one of which is that it dissolves in water to form an acid.
Gases from the atmosphere get absorbed by the ocean and gases dissolved in the ocean are released into the atmosphere.
A decline of .1 means that the oceans are now thirty percent more acidic than they were in 1800.
At that point, the oceans will be 150 percent more acidic than they were at the start of the industrial revolution.
