Mass Extinction Every 62 Million Years

[grewwalk]

Something interesting I came across and wanted to share:

With surprising and mysterious regularity, life on Earth has flourished and vanished in cycles of mass extinction every 62 million years, say two UC Berkeley scientists who discovered the pattern after a painstaking computer study of fossil records going back for more than 500 million years.

[Fram]

This has been posted twice on the Planet X forum yet, so perhaps we better discuss it there?

[cyswxman]

And, I suppose, we're overdue for the next one. [-(

[Fram]

Damn, we missed the mass extinction of 3 million BC. I told you we should have hurried a bit more. Now we have to wait another 59 million years...

[Rich]

It's Jack McDevitt's Omega Clouds!!! And they swing by a little more often than 62 million years... we're doomed.

[tlbs101]

Doesn't that next 62 million year period start tomorrow?

Whatever happened to Raup's twenty-six million year extinction cylce? #-o

[Nicolas]

Whatever happened to Raup's twenty-six million year extinction cylce? #-o

26, 62, obviously a pole shift

[archman]

There was a mass extinction in the Eocene.

[Inferno]

There do seem to be periodic mass extinctions, but the time frames vary widely. Some scientists will claim it's every 30 million, others 60 million, still others 100 million.

To me it just seems that when you have life on a planet for a few billion years, that's more than enough time for a few mass extinctions to happen now and then.

Whatever happened to Raup's twenty-six million year extinction cylce? #-o

26, 62, obviously a pole shift

Yes, of course...

[grewwalk]

I did notice were overdue and such, but I thought it was interesting anyways.

Thanks for your input

-grewwalk

[Enzp]

Today is the first day of the last 62 million years of your life.

[beskeptical]

Whatever happened to Raup's twenty-six million year extinction cylce? #-o

From the article:

Sepkoski himself had suggested that marine life appeared to have its ups and downs in cycles every 26 million years, but to Rohde and Muller, the longer cycle is strikingly more evident, although they have also seen the suggestion of even longer cycles that seem to recur every 140 million years.

Sepkoski's fossil record of marine life extends back for 540 million years to the time of the great "Cambrian Explosion," when almost all the ancestral forms of multicellular life emerged, and Muller and Rohde built on it for their computer version.

They essentially said more careful evaluation of the data showed the 62 million year cycle to be the most significant one.

[beskeptical]

This has been posted twice on the Planet X forum yet, so perhaps we better discuss it there?

Well it's no wonder considering this in the article:

Muller has long been known as an unconventional and imaginative physicist on the Berkeley campus and at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. It was he, for example, who suggested more than 20 years ago that an undiscovered faraway dwarf star -- which he named "Nemesis" -- was orbiting the sun and might have steered a huge asteroid into the collision with Earth that drove the dinosaurs to extinction.

"I've given up on Nemesis," Muller said this week, "but then I thought there might be two stars somewhere out there, but I've given them both up now."

He and Rohde have considered many other possible causes for the 62- million-year cycles, they said.

Perhaps, they suggested, there's an unknown "Planet X" somewhere far out beyond the solar system that's disturbing the comets in the distant region called the Oort Cloud -- where they exist by the millions -- to the point that they shower the Earth and cause extinctions in regular cycles. Daniel Whitmire and John Matese of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette proposed that idea as a cause of major comet showers in 1985, but no one except UFO believers has ever discovered a sign of it.

I couldn't believe how many of these themes are on our planet X forum. :roll:

At least these researchers have dismissed these possibilities.

[beskeptical]

Damn, we missed the mass extinction of 3 million BC. I told you we should have hurried a bit more. Now we have to wait another 59 million years...

The article says the actual extinctions take place over several million years. Whose to say we are self fulfilling the prophesy. :P