Atmospheric changes related to volcanic eruptions, and not a giant asteroid, were probably the main factors behind Earth's biggest die-off about 250 million years ago, according to two separate teams of scientists working at sites around the globe.
The mass extinction, known as the “Great Dying,” extinguished 90 percent of sea life and nearly three-quarters of land-based plants and animals.There has been recent evidence that a big asteroid or meteor hit the Earth and triggered the catastrophe, but researchers say they now have evidence that something much more long-term was the culprit.

Kliti Grice of Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Australia, and colleagues studied sediment cores drilled off the coasts of Australia and China and found evidence that the ocean was lacking oxygen and full of sulfur-loving bacteria at that time.

This finding would be consistent with an atmosphere low in oxygen and poisoned by hot, sulfurous, volcanic emissions, they wrote in a report published in the journal Science.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6848487/

Hmm, another theory to the extinction of the big lizards. How classic.

we saw something about this on tlc/discovery too. core samples taken all over the world show the same sediment and period of low oxygen/death. it could make sense that the environmental changes could have taken place gradually as multitudes of volcanos erupted over time. interesting concepts.

That's a stage which's common with that moon a spacecraft just landed on, Titan I think. Plus they even found rivers and other frozen stuff on there.
Pretty interesting article ^_^

Hmm, another theory to the extinction of the big lizards. How classic.

:sohwell: welp, they are the educated ones. if we dont believe their words as fact, we be deemed as religious.

If we didn't have education, we would be in complete danger of taking educated people seriously.

I think its more, if we dont educate ourselves we run the risk of taking crackpots seriously :p

If we dont do something to protect ourselves from global climate change and natural disaster, we'll be doing the dying

We could move into another planet ^_^

Not yet we cant.

There are no other inhabitable planets withen our solar system and we lack the ability to teraform another world into something like Earth. Our bio domes are inadaquite to shelter life on a hostile world.
We are just now finding planets outside of our solar system, most of them gas giants pulling on a star, nothing we could go rent an apartment on. Even if we did find a planet that could support life, we dont have a way to get there.
We've left ourselves with little other choice but to start building in near space. The advances science will make just building and living in the international space station will become the basis for building space craft and space colony.

At the pace we're at with Space Exploration and Technology, I figure when the time comes for operational Space Stations, it'd be too late for mankind. But you're right Lady, everything we've explored and landed on, is either what Earth is, only billions of years before civilization or just barren toxic planets.
Heck, there is another way .... *looks at the end of his room and finds Mr.Video. Goes through titles like "World Wars", "SpaceBalls the movie", "Land Before Time", "History of Football - 200 years", "Race to another planet to inhibit" ... oh found it ! Takes it off the shelf and looks for his Vhs player* :drool:

*watches cavemen* No wait, fast foward through this.
*watches queen elizabeth inauguration* Fast foward.
*watches embarassing 1st grade projecy* Fast foward. And never show this scene again.

Hahaha GFX.... just like Lord Dark Helmet would say "Don't every play this again !" ^_^;

I wish we could just rewind the climate :(

On a related note to the main topic, this is depressing news

Click the link to read more .... poor polar bears they're so cute :(
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/oxfordshire/4218441.stm

At current rates, the earth will be 2C above pre-industrial levels some time between 2026 and 2060, says the report by Dr Mark New of Oxford University.

Temperatures in the Arctic could rise by three times this amount, it says.

It would lead to a loss of summer sea ice and tundra vegetation, with polar bears and other animals dying out.


Polar bears will be consigned to history, something that our grandchildren can only read about in books - Dr Catarina Cardoso

when we screw the Arctic, we are screwing the rest of the world too.



Dr New said: "A very robust result from global climate models is that warming due to greenhouse gases will reduce the amount of snow and ice cover in the Arctic, which will in turn produce an additional warming as more solar radiation is absorbed by the ground and the ocean." -_-;

NO! I love the polar bears! :cry: