(Illustration by Anthony Hutchings/Friends of the NC Museum of Natural Sciences via Courthouse News)
(CN) Scientists from New York University have found that mass extinctions of land-based animals are more predictable than previously thought, and occur roughly every 27 million years in a cycle likely due to our planetary orbit, according to a new study released Thursday.
The study, published in the journal Historical Biology, explains how our place in the galaxy has placed us into a cycle of mass extinctions caused by asteroid or comet impacts and subsequent volcanic eruptions.
The Earth has seen a handful of mass extinction events throughout its history from natural disasters, and experts say that without drastic change we are on track to experience another one.
Sixty Six million years ago it would have been a pleasant day one second and the world was already over by the next, wrote Peter Brannen about the Mount Everest sized asteroid that blasted a hole in the ground, the Chicxulub Impact, releasing the equivalent of 100 million megatons of TNT creating a 20-mile deep, 110-mile hole and sterilizing the remaining 170 million square miles of the ancient continent of Pangaea, killing virtually every species on Earth.
“As the asteroid collided with the earth in the sky above it where there should have been air,” adds Brannen, “the rock had punched a hole of outer space vacuum in the atmosphere. As the heavens rushed in to close this hole, enormous volumes of earth were expelled into orbit and beyond all within a second or two of impact.”