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BEC CREW 22 DEC 2016 It's dangerously close to hitting a critical pressure point. A 12-km wide cauldron that forms a vast supervolcano on the coast of Italy is showing signs of reawakening after almost 500 years of inactivity. Not only is this site rumoured to be responsible for the extinction of the Neanderthals, it’s got 500,000 people living around it right now, and researchers say it appears to be approaching a critical pressure point that could lead to an eruption. You might imagine a supervolcano as like a regular volcano, only supersized, rising up out of the ground and...

A breed of sea snake thought to be extinct for years was recently discovered off the west coast of Australia, another in a string of similar findings among species scientists believed were lost forever. It was the first time the species of snakes was seen in more than 15 years since disappearing from the Timor Sea, according to researchers at Australia's James Cook University who identified the snakes. The discovery of the Short Nose sea snake was confirmed after an Australia Parks and Wildlife officer sent a photo to researchers for identification, the university said. The study's lead author, Blanche...

One thing we know for sure is that conditions on Earth were, shall we say, unpleasant for the dinosaurs at the moment of their demise. Alternate and overlapping theories suggest the great beasts were pelted with monster comets, drowned by mega-tsunamis, scorched with lava, starved by a landscape stripped of vegetation, blasted with the radiation of a dying supernova, cloaked in decades of darkness, and frozen in an ice age. Now, a pair of researchers have new evidence to support a link between cyclical comet showers and mass extinctions, including the one that they believe wiped out the dinosaurs 66...

Geoscientists now overwhelmingly agree that a single large asteroid or comet impact, such as Chicxulub in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico, could not have been the sole cause of the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. Instead, new research in both planetary/space science and multiple earth-science specialties reveals that concomitant volcanic activity and the associated climate and environmental changes were significant contributing factors in four of the five major mass extinctions in Earth history.

A Curtin University researcher has shown that ancient volcanic eruptions in Australia 510 million years ago significantly affected the climate, causing the first known mass extinction in the history of complex life. Published in prestigious journal Geology, Associate Professor Fred Jourdan from Curtin’s Department of Applied Geology, along with colleagues from several Australian and international institutions, used radioactive dating techniques to precisely measure the age of the eruptions of the Kalkarindji volcanic province – where lavas covered an area of more than 2 million square kilometres in the Northern Territory and Western Australia.Dr Jourdan and his team were able...

AROUND 251 million years ago, over 90 per cent of the species on Earth suddenly went extinct. Their killer may not have been a devastating meteorite or a catastrophic volcanic eruption, but a humble microbe. The prevailing theory is that the mass extinction at the end of the Permian period was triggered by volcanic eruptions over a vast area of what is now Siberia. This led, among other things, to a dramatic rise in greenhouse gas emissions. But the scenario just doesn't fit the facts, says Daniel Rothman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From his analysis of an end-Permian...

As climate change progresses, the planet may lose more plant and animal species than predicted, a new modeling study suggests. This is because current predictions overlook two important factors: the differences in how quickly species relocate and competition among species, according to the researchers, led by Mark Urban, an ecologist at the University of Connecticut. Already evidence suggests that species have begun to migrate out of ranges made inhospitable by climate change and into newly hospitable territory. "We have really sophisticated meteorological models for predicting climate change," Urban said in a statement. "But in real life, animals move around, they...

Bob Schieffer on Sunday blamed the internet for the growing number of Americans that think Barack Obama is a Muslim. Namelessly referring to last week's Pew Research Center poll finding that eighteen percent now believe this, the "Face the Nation" host concluded Sunday's program saying that "in the internet age, ignorance travels as rapidly as great ideas."

University of Oregon Scientists found microscopic diamonds in the black layer of rock at Murray Springs in Arizona. At least once in Earth’s history, global warming ended quickly, and scientists have long wondered why. Now researchers are reporting that the abrupt cooling — which took place about 12,900 years ago, just as the planet was emerging from an ice age — may have been caused by one or more meteors that slammed into North America. That could explain the extinction of mammoths, saber-tooth tigers and maybe even the first human inhabitants of the Americas, the scientists report in Friday’s...

PARIS (AFP) - Global warming could cut a swathe through the planet's species over the coming centuries, warns a study released Wednesday that shows a link between rising temperatures and mass extinctions reaching back half a billion years. Each of five major eras of declining biodiversity -- including one in which 95 percent of the Earth's species disappeared -- correspond to cycles of severe warming over the 520-million-year period for which there are fossil records. If emissions of greenhouse gas rise unchecked, the predicted increase in global temperature over the next several hundred years could fall within a similar range...

Source: American Institute of Biological Sciences Date: March 2, 2007 Improved Predictions Of Warming-induced Extinctions Sought; Species Persist More Than Models Assume, Researchers Say Science Daily — In the March 2007 issue of BioScience, an international team of 19 researchers calls for better forecasting of the effects of global warming on extinction rates. The researchers, led by Daniel B. Botkin, note that although current mathematical models indicate that many species could be at risk from global warming, surprisingly few species became extinct during the past 2.5 million years, a period encompassing several ice ages. They suggest that this "Quaternary conundrum"...

Going Under Down Under: Early people at fault in Australian extinctions Sid Perkins A lengthy, newly compiled fossil record of Australian mammals bolsters the notion that humanity's arrival on the island continent led to the extinction of many large creatures there. Archaeological evidence suggests that people arrived in northern and western Australia about 50,000 years ago (SN: 3/15/03, p. 173: Available to subscribers at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20030315/note10.asp). By 5,000 years later, about 90 percent of the continent's mammals larger than a house cat had gone extinct, says Gavin J. Prideaux, a paleontologist at the Western Australian Museum in Perth. Casualties of that...

Mass Extinctions - A Threat from Outer Space or Our Own Planet's Detox? University scientists suggest extraterrestrial theories are flawed and that more down to earth factors could have accounted for past mass extinctions Earth history has been punctuated by several mass extinctions rapidly wiping out nearly all life forms on our planet. What causes these catastrophic events? Are they really due to meteorite impacts? Current research suggests that the cause may come from within our own planet – the eruption of vast amounts of lava that brings a cocktail of gases from deep inside the Earth and vents them...

'Extinct' Birds in Comeback But No Hope for Dodo Click to enlarge JOHANNESBURG -- Scientists beware: don't count your extinct bird species because one of them may hatch.Several supposedly extinct birds have recently been "rediscovered," raising hopes that others not seen for ages may still be taking to the skies."The real message of rediscoveries is that we didn't look hard enough in the first place," said Nigel Collar of UK-based conservation group BirdLife International."We think we've explored the planet when we haven't. We have this assumption that we know it all but we don't," he said.The most recent reported rediscovery...

A huge blast of radiation from an exploding star might have been behind one of the Earth's worst mass extinctions, some 450m years ago. In the latest issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters, scientists argue that a gamma ray burst, the most powerful explosion that occurs in the universe, was responsible for the Ordovican mass extinction in which 60% of all marine invertebrates died. Gamma ray bursts are thought to be caused either when two neutron stars collide or when giant stars collapse into black holes at the end of their lives. For around 10 seconds, intense pulses of energy...

Papers have been flapping with new headlines about the latest in a long line of alleged dinosaur ancestors of birds. This one is claimed to be a sensational dinosaur with feathers on its hind legs, thus four ‘wings’.1 This was named Microraptor gui—the name is derived from words meaning ‘little plunderer of Gu’ after the paleontologist Gu Zhiwei. Like so many of the alleged feathered dinosaurs, it comes from Liaoning province of northeastern China. It was about 3 feet (1 meter) long from its head to the tip of its long tail, but its body was only about the size...

“In 1990 they found that the Earth goes through abrupt temperature changes from deep ice samples in Greenland of about 10,000 years ago the Earth’s temperature dropped 19 degrees” (research found by weather channel) taking 5-10 years (weather channel) but from analytical data, I intend to show this could take for the most part one year (Robert T Bailey) and more shocking a large part of the temperature change will happen this year! The End of the World as we known it is coming; an ice Age will change the face of the Earth. We have a crisis here. In...

OSLO (Reuters) - Global warming could wipe out a quarter of all species of plants and animals on earth by 2050 in one of the biggest mass extinctions since the dinosaurs, according to an international study. The United Nations said the report, highlighting threats to creatures ranging from Australian butterflies to Spanish eagles, showed a need for the world to back the Kyoto protocol, meant to brake rising temperatures linked to human pollution. "A quarter of all species of plants and land animals, or more than a million in all, could be driven to extinction," said Chris Thomas, professor of...

Jim Estes clearly remembers the day when he peered down from a skiff in Alaska's Aleutian Islands and saw what looked like "The Invasion of the Sea Urchins." The spiny round blobs had eaten right through the underwater kelp forest that shelters many marine creatures. Normally rare except in deeper waters, the urchins were jostling for space almost up to the beach. "There were just urchins everywhere," said Estes, a researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey in Santa Cruz, Calif. "I was astonished. I just saw lots of urchins where I had not seen them in the past." For years,...

Contrasting views on the health of the earth are being debated on the 32nd annual Earth Day, with a defector from the environmental movement saying the earth is healthier than ever and an environmentalist saying the earth is headed for a "pretty bleak future," if we don't change our habits. Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish professor and author of the book Skeptical Environmentalist, takes a critical look at the many claims made over the years by environmentalists. Lomborg used to be in his own words "a Greenpeace kinda leftie" who believed the earth was heading for an environmental catastrophe. His book...