Imagine That!

Evidence in Canadian Arctic points to volcanoes as cause of massive extinction

Emphasis mine.

"A mass extinction 250 million years ago was caused by massive volcanic causing run away global warming to impact the temperature and acidity of the world’s oceans, Canadian researchers found in new research announced Sunday."

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"The Permian extinction happened about 250 million years (ago) when 95 per cent of life was wiped out in the sea and 70 per cent on land.

Unlike the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, where there is widespread belief that a meteorite was at least the partial cause, it is unclear what caused the Permian mass extinction.

Research had suggested volcanic eruptions through coal beds in Siberia may have generated significant greenhouse gases causing run away global warming, but little proof had existed.

Grasby and his colleagues discovered layers of coal ash in rocks from the extinction boundary in Canada’s High Arctic that gives the first direct proof to support the belief that eruptions in what is known as the Siberian Traps, now found in Northern Russia, produced ash clouds that had a broad impact on global oceans."

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"At the time of the extinction, the Earth contained one big land mass, a supercontinent known as Pangaea. The environment ranged from desert to lush forest, and the planet was already populated with four-limbed vertebrates. Among them were primitive amphibians, early reptiles and synapsids: the group that would, one day, include mammals."

Gee. No humans yet?

"The volcanoes, centred around the current-day Siberian city of Tura, covered an area just under two million square kilometres, a size larger than Europe. The ash plumes from the volcanoes travelled to regions now in Canada’s Arctic where the coal-ash layers where found."

Hmmmm. Were these researchers looking for a way to tie in coal, or some other form of fossil fuel? Who paid them? (Hey, deniers can play that game, too.)

"The Earth was already heating up at the time, suffocating its oceans because of decreasing oxygen levels, the researchers suggest. And the ash may have contributed to that effect, they found.

"It was a really bad time on Earth. In addition to these volcanoes causing fires through coal, the ash it spewed was highly toxic and was released in the land and water, potentially contributing to the worst extinction event in earth history," said Grasby.""

If you want to learn more about the impact of volcanoes on global temperatures and ocean acidification read pages 206 to 229 of Ian Plimer's Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science, from which the following passages are taken:

"There are two main types of volcanoes. Those in mid-ocean rifts are unseen and by far the most abundant volcanoes. Some 85% of the world's volcanoes are unseen, unmeasured, quietly erupting deep in the ocean floor along the global 64,000 km of oceanic ridge systems and pose little in the way of volcanic hazards. These mid-oceanic ridge systems quietly play their own game while the rest of the world goes by without noticing. They are characterized by basalt lava flows and emission of very large volumes of the main volcanic gases (H2O vapour, CO2, methane, hydrogen sulphide, sulphur dioxide, hydrogen and nitrogen.)" P. 207

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"Submarine volcanoes are poorly understood because of the lack of continuous observation and measurement. They emit huge amounts of very hot gases. Exchange of heat and mass between ocean waters and submarine volcanic rocks is concentrated at mid-ocean ridges and ridge flanks where seawater circulation releases heat and fluids into the ocean. This affects global heat and geochemical budgets of the oceans. Seamounts away from mid ocean ridges also act as pathways for the exchange of heat. The CO2 from tens of thousands of submarine hot springs associated with these submarine basalt volcanoes quietly dissolves in the cold high-pressure deep ocean water and does not bubble to the surface. Water at the bottom of the oceans is undersaturated in dissolved CO2, hence very large volumes of CO2 can dissolve. One hot spring can release far more CO2 than a 1000 mW coal-fired power station, yet they are neither seen nor measured. Submarine volcanic gas does not even figure in calculations of the sources and sinks of atmospheric CO2 in the IPCC climate models." P. 208

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"As oceans contain 22 times more heat than the atmosphere, ocean heat contributes greatly to driving climate and the unseen submarine volcanism can have a profound effect on the surface heat of the Earth." P. 209

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"We need to get basalt volcanicity into perspective. Some basalt eruptions have an enormous rate of discharge, up to 10,000 cubic metres per seconds. Fragmentation of the molten rock occurs by volatile degassing. As the molten rock rises to the surface, gas comes out of solution and coexists with melt, the proportion of gas increases as bubbles grow larger. The expanding gas squirts lava out at the surface as fountains. The quicker the gas is released and the faster the molten rock rises, the higher the lava foundation. Lava fountains are in the order of 1 km high. As the main gas is H2O, a degassing of only 1-5% of H2O is sufficient to produce lava exit velocities of 100 to 500 metres per second." P. 210

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"Over 1500 subaerial volcanoes have been active over the last 10,000 years and more than one third of these have erupted or one or more times in recorded history. These constitute 1% of the world's surface area but only 15% of the world's volcanism and 80% of the documented historic eruptions. Some 57% of the world's visible 600 active volcanoes are islands or are in coastal settings and 38% are within 250 km of continental landmasses. Some 500 million people live within proximity of active or potentially active volcanoes. This was the entire global population of the 17th Century. Most of these people live in the Pacific region. If explosive volcanism occurs, it can produce tsunamis and choking ash clouds which have a profound effect on islands and adjacent continental landmasses. We currently live in a time of volcanic quiescence.

If you really want a bad hair day, then a supervolcano can do it for you." P. 211

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"Widespread volcanic events or a single supervolcano can change climate. Large volcanic eruptions emit the same amount of energy as an asteroidal impact and are more frequent. Deep sea sediments from the North Pacific Ocean show that sediment changed from non-glacial to glacial at about 2.67 Ma over a period of 2000 years."  P. 211

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"The number and thickness of volcanic ash layers in this deep sea sediment ten-fold at this same time, suggesting a widespread volcanic, possibly from many volcanoes. The rapid intensification of glaciation was likely to be associated wit this widespread volcanic episode which began 2.67 Ma. At this time, volcanoes closed the Central American seaway between the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean, there was an exchange of vertebrates between the Americas and the changed circulation of ocean water accelerated Northern Hemisphere cooling. At 2.67 Ma, there was also a starburst that flooded Earth with cosmic rays, hence a combination of events probably drove climate change." P. 211-212"

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"Supervolcanoes are a threat to civilization on Earth as they occur at twice the frequency of impacting asteroids and comets larger than 1 km diameter. Asteroid and comet impacts can have similar effects on climate as a supervolcano. Current climate models do not even consider the possibility of another supervolcano eruption. They sleep restlessly in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and the Pacific region. And these are the small supervolcanoes that we can see. The ones we don't see are a greater threat." P. 213-214

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"The greatest mass extinction of all time occurred when basalt supervolcanoes were at their peak." P. 214

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"A supervolcano beneath the sea heats the ocean, adds CO2 to ocean water (which is later released to the atmosphere), temporarily turns ocean water from alkaline to acid, deoxygenates ocean water and creates a local, minor or mass extinction.  Most supervolcanoes are submarine, we do not see them, they are not factored into climate models, and they emit monstrous volumes of CO2."  P. 216

So, the impact of sub-marine volcanoes, especially super-volcanoes, is completely ignored in the computer models used by AGW pseudo-science. This new discovery by Canadian researchers is sure to heat up the debate in the so-called "settled" science of global warming.