Researchers Discover That Global Mass Extinctions of Land-Dwelling Animals Follow a 27-Million-Year Cycle

Sixty-six million years ago, 70 percent of all species on land and in the seas, including the dinosaurs, suddenly went extinct, in the disastrous aftermath of the collision of a large asteroid or comet with the Earth. Subsequently, paleontologists discovered that such mass extinctions of marine life, in which up to 90 percent of species disappeared, were not random events, but seemed to come in a 26-million-year cycle.

In their Historical Biology study, Rampino and co-authors Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science and Yuhong Zhu of NYU’s Center for Data Science, examined the record of mass extinctions of land-dwelling animals and concluded that they coincided with the extinctions of ocean life. They also performed new statistical analyses of the extinctions of land species and demonstrated that those events followed a similar cycle of about 27.5 million years.

What could be causing the periodic mass extinctions on land and in the seas? Mass extinctions are not the only events occurring in cycles: the ages of impact craters — created by asteroids and comets crashing to the Earth’s surface — also follow a cycle aligning with the extinction cycle.

Astrophysicists hypothesize that periodic comet showers occur in the Solar System every 26 to 30 million years, producing cyclical impacts and resulting in periodic mass extinctions. The Sun and planets cycle through the crowded mid-plane of the Milky Way Galaxy about every 30 million years. During those times, comet showers are possible, leading to large impacts on the Earth.

To add to ‘the solar system is not standing still’..

it's 225 million mile ride at 250km/s that gives us roughly 8 points of extinction if the cycle is every 27million years.

Our galaxy has 4 major spiral arms and several minor arms with 'space' in between the arms. During our 225 million mile ride, we transverse these arms. Our Sun is currently transiting the minor Orion spiral arm. It takes about 10 million years to transit the arm. (That's also the lifetime of a ‘massive star’ formed and remaining within the arms, which eventually becomes a black hole or a supernova). The next two arms are Sagitarius, our next stop, and Perseus, about 100 million miles apart. If an extinction event is going to happen, it will likely happen in the Sagitarius arm or in 'open space' between the Orion and Sagitarius arms. While the sun is orbiting it's also 'bobbing' around the galaxy's mid-plane which takes about 70,000 years, or about 35,000 years above the plane and the same below.

A mathematician astrologer might be able to predict exactly where our solar system was on any given 10 million year increment, in which arm if any, whether the sun was below, above or on the midplane at the time of (a past or future predicted) extinction events. Just as astrologers predict where the stars were on a famous figure's birthday. Where was the earth 439, 364, 251, 214, and 65 million years ago in relation to where the earth is now? What external stresses of the space environment were the sun and earth subject to in each arm/interval between arms?

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