Peter🌲Brannen
@PeterBrannen1
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Mammal. Next📘on CO2 over all Earth history Last 📘THE ENDS OF THE WORLD on geology of worst mass extinctions ever …
Laurentia
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If Twitter crashes and you need to find me, the hell you will. I've got a two day head start on you, which is more than I need. I speak a dozen languages, know every local custom, I'll blend in, disappear, you'll never see me again.
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The only way to stop a bad guy with asbestos is a good guy with asbestos
If you ban asbestos, building contractors would just find another way to kill occupants with carcinogenic insulation
The problem isn't asbestos, it's mental health
We need to put asbestos in every school
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You: This one untested supplement will restore balance to my body
Your body:
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Imagine being a photon forged in the center of a star, crossing 93 million miles of space, hitting a cycad leaf in a Carboniferous jungle, being stored as chemical enrgy, being buried for 315 million yrs, being dug up burned & released again as waste heat in a bitcoin transaction
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I'm a broken record but it really is eerie seeing global geochemical cycles go haywire in exact same way they do during worst mass extinctions in earth history: big negative carbon isotope excursions, falling ocean pH, rapid warming & spreading ocean anoxia. We should prob stop
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Humans are injecting CO2 into the air 10 times faster than in the most devastating catastrophe in earth history (the End-Permian mass extinction) which was a CO2-driven global warming apocalypse that wiped out 90% of life on Earth
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Refuse to learn what the feral hog thing is, but will use this as an opportunity to remind people of the existence of something called the “Hell Pig” that lived 20 million years ago
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I am growing weary of climate change takes like: "Everyone was afraid of X in the 70s & it didn't turn out that bad" "People always think they live in unique times" etc. There hasn't been a shock to the Earth system like this in 66 million years. We're heading into the unknown.
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I wrote a brief against the idea of the Anthropocene for
@TheAtlantic
. Humanity's claims on deep time are unearned, unless we radically get our act together as a species
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My favorite (only) cicada fact. They use prime numbers to survive by emerging from the ground after 13 or 17 years
"By having a life cycle that is a prime number, they can prevent predators from developing a life cycle that is a factor of that number."
After 17 years underground, as many as 1.5 million cicadas could emerge per acre in parts of Virginia, North Carolina and West Virginia. Did we mention the bugs are known for their distinct — and overwhelming — chirping?
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An incredible new animation of the movement of the continents, the great ice ages & ever-changing sea levels over the history of animal life, by Christopher Scotese.
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The oceans have absorbed 350,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules of energy since 1960.
For my money, this is currently the most terrifying chart in all climate science.
Since 1990, the oceans have been heating relentlessly - and last year just smashed the previous record set a year earlier.
More info from
@hausfath
in his latest dispatch
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A cool thing about Moby-Dick is that, sandwiched between extended explorations of the sublime terrors of the deep and human cruelty, there will be a several-hundred-word digression about how it's fun to be cozy under the covers
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We usually think of single-celled life killing animals by making them sick. This single-celled foram actually catches and digests a whole animal alive (a brine shrimp)
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I like when science papers say something incredibly obvious then back it up with lots of citations, like "Earth is a planet¹ ² ³ ⁴ ⁵ ⁶ ⁷ ⁸."
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This is staggering. The number of birds in the United States and Canada has dropped almost 30% since 1970
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Fun facts about 56 million years ago:
1) No ice on Antarctica.
2) Sand tiger sharks, palm trees and crocodiles in the arctic.
3) 104°F seawater in tropics.
4) Lethally hot on many places on land.
4) Global reef collapse.
5) Geological evidence for megastorms and floods.
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Norway's new offshore oil "mega-project", the massive Johan Sverdrup field, started production yesterday. It's expected to produce crude for 50 years, and produce 20 times as much CO2 as Norway's annual emissions.
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Sometimes I remember that there's a gigantic, almost perfectly circular 280-mile diameter arc in Canada, and that no one really knows why and I can't think about anything else for awhile
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This, to me, is the single scariest graphic about our future world. It's a map of the expected pH change of the ocean by the end of the century, as the seas react with excess CO2 and get more acidic. This global chemistry experiment will be lethal for huge swaths of ocean life.
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Something I think a lot of Silicon Valley-type space enthusiasts really don’t appreciate is that there is nothing we could do, nuclear war-wise or climate change-wise that would make the Earth more uninhabitable than Mars.
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@ferrisjabr
Similarly cool is diatomaceous earth, made of diatom skeletons. Spread it on your garden to kill pests or mix it with nitroglycerin to make dynamite.
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@Lee__Drake
There's video
We usually think of single-celled life killing animals by making them sick. This single-celled foram actually catches and digests a whole animal alive (a brine shrimp)
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The last time CO2 was this high:
-Beech trees at the south pole
-Sea level 50-65 feet higher
-No Greenland ice sheet
-No West Antarctic ice sheet
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Ppl who think dinosaurs were obsolete or represent failed way of life don't understand how bad that extinction was or how thoroughly they dominated planet for a functional eternity. Was also worst extinction in mammal history & still more dinosaur species alive today than mammals
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@Lee__Drake
There's also a single-celled foram that lives at the bottom of the ocean that gets up to almost a foot in diameter, forams are weird
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Made a graph of how the atmosphere has responded to different presidents
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This is great news. Along with dolphins, until the late 19th century Chesapeake Bay was also home to manatees, otters, sea turtles, alligators, giant sturgeon, sharks, rays and giant oyster reefs that filtered the entire Bay in a couple days. Hope it all comes back.
THIS IS SO NICE EVERYBODY. Dolphins have returned to the Potomac River & there are at least 1,000 of them & one just gave birth & this is what happens when you clean up rivers. By
@KarinBrulliard
on
@PostHealthSci
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1.1 billion years ago the Mid-Continent Rift tried tearing America apart and failed. Today we honor this triumph over the forces of extensional tectonics
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Almost 50 years ago the Russian scientist Mikhail Budyko predicted 1°C of warming by 2019 and the disappearance of about 50% of Arctic multiyear ice. There has been 0.98°C of warming and multiyear Arctic sea ice has declined 46%.
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Nobody will remember:
- Your salary
- Your fancy title
- How busy you were
- How many hours you worked
People will remember:
-Your general body plan if you're buried in an anoxic environment in a subsiding sedimentary basin & get exposed by erosion again in the geologic future
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Paleoclimatology, is the study of Earth's ancient climates. Taking the extreme long view it becomes unsettlingly apparent that Earth's climate is "an angry beast," as Columbia climate scientist Wally Broecker used to say, "And we are poking it with sticks"
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The official
@NWS
forecast for Death Valley on Sunday, 131°F, would be the hottest temperature ever reliably recorded on Earth
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Truly heartbreaking story about an inspiring woman. There are 120,000 stories.
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Here's a pic I took of the monument to the death of the dinosaurs in the town center of Chicxulub, Mexico--the epicenter of the 110-mile Chicxulub impact crater that ended the Mesozoic world. As far as I know it's the only memorial for most important event of the past 200 mil yrs
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Climate Change is such an inadequate term. It changes where rain falls, where things grow, where life lives, where human habitation viable. It changes color of planet, chemistry of oceans, redraws coastlines, reroutes ocean currents, alters plant physiology. Everything's changing
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┏━━┓┏━━┓┏━━┓┏━━┓
┗━┓┃┃┏┓┃┗━┓┃┃┏┓┃
┏━┛┃┃┃┃┃┏━┛┃┃┃┃┃
same CO2 as 3 million yrs ago when sea level was 70 ft higher
┃┏━┛┃┃┃┃┃┏━┛┃┃┃┃
┃┗━┓┃┗┛┃┃┗━┓┃┗┛┃
┗━━┛┗━━┛┗━━┛┗━━-
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What's crazy is something pretty similar to this actually happened. When the dinosaur's doomsday asteroid hit, it instantaneously put a 20-mile hole in the ground followed--3 minutes later--by a (very) temporary 10-mile high mountain
Brilliant demonstration of Newton’s principle of inertia.
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I know nobody cares but seriously, we really should have stopped burning fossil fuels 30 years ago. 50% of the Great Barrier Reef died since 2016 and the last time CO2 was this high sea level was 70 feet higher.
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Thinking about the relationships between ultra-long-lived Bowhead whales & Greenland sharks. I imagine some must know each other individually. Theres no way you can swim in the Arctic for 200 years & not know that one creepy Greenland shark who's been hanging around for 400 years
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The idea of terraforming a hellhole like Mars is funny to me. On Earth, basically a perfect planet already, 4-6°C warming = civilization-threatening catastrophe, & one we might go thru w anyway. What are chances we’re competent enough to warm up Martian atmo by 75C & hit bullseye
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"If the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to well below 2 °C is not met, one or more critical thresholds might be crossed in Antarctica, committing us to long-term, possibly irreversible, sea-level rise of up to dozens of metres."
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I can't imagine anything more horrible than being slowly digested by a giant merciless floating orb, life is rough in the planktonic world.
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A prediction: It's going to be somewhat difficult adjusting to a climate that predates the evolutionary history of humans by millions of years
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Like any big, strong, long-lived hurricane,
#Larry
will be releasing a whole lot of energy into the Atlantic in the form of big waves.
Swell is already impacting the Caribbean and will arrive on the East Coast next week.
Paradise for experienced surfers, dangerous for others.
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Hope this works
World leaders toss a coin at Trevi for good luck fighting the climate emergency
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I will never not be astonished by the fact that raindrops can be fossilised, while a billion years of history can go missing elsewhere. Geology is often like getting to read a single page at random from the Library of Congress
I will never not be astonished by the fact that *raindrops* can be fossilised.
These are raindrops in sedimentary rock deposited around 240 million years ago in what's now Shropshire in the UK. Just incredible.
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It's also a public service that's required to keep its prices artificially low because we think (or used to think) it's a good thing that all Americans have the same access to the mail. Who cares if it's profitable?
For the fiscal year ending in Sept 2006, the USPS ran a profit of $900 million.
Then, in Dec 2006, Republicans mandated that the USPS pre-fund all of its retirements for the next 75 years, at a cost of $5 billion a year.
When was it you said the USPS started losing money?
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Happy Earth Day to the planet that wasn't really habitable for the first 90% of its history. An inspiration to late bloomers everywhere.
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I wish it was more widely appreciated how absolutely critical funding basic research is.
The test being used to diagnose the novel
#Coronavirus
other pandemics like AIDS and SARS—was developed with the help of an enzyme isolated from a microbe found in marine
#hydrothermalvents
as well as freshwater hot springs.
#scienceresponds
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Two other big national stories: Today the US officially became the only country on Earth to leave the Paris Climate Agreement. It also saw 1,116 deaths from COVID and a record 103,000 new cases.
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With Kerry being named climate czar, I wonder who will be appointed ocean vizier, forest mandarin, or soil lord?
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The only experimental record we have of how the climate actually changes on this planet is Earth history. As such, the geologic record counsels extreme caution. My essay on the last 60 million years for
@TheAtlantic
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I know this isn't some new insight, but I still hear people talking about Mars as an "insurance policy" and it's idiotic
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"Still more incredible is the fact that one person almost single-handedly created the first maps of two-thirds of the planet, yet is unknown to the average citizen of Earth...The unsung mapmaker is Marie Tharp" -Marcia Bjornerud
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This is so cool. If the earth spun the other way the Southeastern US would be a vast desert, the Sahara would disappear, the Middle East would be a humid swamp and Europe would freeze
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Pictured: An ~800,000 year-long climate convulsion that robbed the ocean of much of its oxygen, 94 million years ago (the black line in the rocks)
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In case anyone was wondering what the absolute worst-case scenario for climate change is
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It will likely get much cooler in 130,000 or 400,000 years from a combination of the silicate weathering feedback and Milankovitch forcing. Before that, it will likely get very warm because of the radiative properties of CO2, which were worked out by scientists in the 1800s
Trump on climate change: "It'll start getting cooler. You just watch ... I don't think science knows, actually."
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That's 91°F in the Arctic circle, nothing to see here
An even hotter day far inside the Arctic circle! Scorching heat in far northern Europe!
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Massive volcanic pulses of CO2 that helped drive one of the biggest mass extinctions in Earth history, at the end of the Triassic period, put out about 4.1 × 10¹⁴ mol/year of CO2. We're currently putting out about 8.2 × 10¹⁴ mol/year CO2.
New paper Capriolo et al. feat.
@PalaeoLeeds
scientists
@bjwmills
@bobbarium
@AlexDunhill
& Paul Wignall suggests that ancient volcanic eruptions that triggered mass extinctions emitted CO2 at a similar rate and magnitude to modern anthropogenic emissions😬
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As an impact modeler once told me, these artist's reconstructions are basically impossible. You couldn't have really "seen" the asteroid impact. So much energy was released that the first thing you'd "see" is that you were blind, and you and everything around you was on fire
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CO2 emissions will drop 6% this year. To reach the Paris climate goals they have to drop 7.6% every single year, starting now, until they hit zero. If we delay until 2025 they'll have to drop by 15.5% every year
The coronavirus pandemic is expected to drive down carbon dioxide emissions by 6% this year, the World Meteorological Organization says. It would be the biggest annual drop since World War II.
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I wrote about where we get our strange abundance of oxygen in the atmosphere, and how, in burning fossil fuels we're burning down millions of years of forests from throughout Earth history. For
@TheAtlantic
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"Our findings predict that a temperature increase of 5.2°C above the pre-industrial level at present rates of increase would likely result in mass extinction...even without other, non-climatic anthropogenic impacts."
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Priest who joined Columbus wrote of sea turtles in the Carribbean: “The sea was all thick with them. So numerous that it seemed the ships would run aground on them.” Scenes like this strike us as unusual because of "shifting baselines"--our inurement to a diminished natural world
This drone footage captured the largest green turtle gathering ever seen in the Great Barrier Reef.
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If you need an escape from the horrors of the news, my book on the worst mass extinctions in the history of the life is out in paperback TODAY
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800 years ago the West was stricken with a mega-drought, like it is today. As a result, huge swathes of the Sand Hills of Nebraska weren't grass-covered hills and wetlands, like today, but were instead mobile, Sahara-style sand dunes--the largest in the Western Hemisphere
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Brooklyn brownstones are pretty and all, but I like them because they’re made of dirt carried by streams down from the mountains of the early Jurassic, into a dinosaur-haunted tropical New England rift valley 200 million years ago
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Cleansing your timeline with this unfathomably well-preserved gecko from 54 million years ago
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The truly wild thing about the chemistry experiment we’re running on the climate & oceans right now is—unlike pandemics, solar storms, volcanic eruptions, etc.—it’s not a once-a-century, once-a millennium disruption . . . it’s completely unprecedented in the past 66 million years
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TFW your carbon offset forest burns to the ground
It looks like two CA IFM offsets are within the North Complex fire in CA and Lionshead fire in Oregon.
CA’s carbon offset protocols account for wildfire risk, but this fire season demonstrates that their 100-year time horizons are woefully under-calibrated for changing climate.
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The Little Ice Age, the Medieval Climate Anomaly & all the microscopic climate squiggles of the past few thousand years--which nevertheless had giant impacts on civilization & are commonly invoked for insight into modern climate change--are child's play compared to what's coming
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Boy, it's sure starting to feel like the once-in-an-epoch experiment on the planet's carbon cycle that it is
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Fun fact: Pandemics aren't the only thing that can threaten to overwhelm the healthcare system. From a 2012 World Bank report on what 4 degrees of warming would look like:
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I think the first person to step foot on Mars is going to have a massive panic attack, and possibly lose their minds, when they suddenly realize what a truly awful place it is, and how far home is
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Like, even after an End-Permian-style climate catastrophe, or all-out nuclear war, there would still be oxygen and a magnetic field
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Boy, we really should have gotten started on this earlier
Here is a longer look at what meeting various climate targets (without negative emissions) would entail compared to our historical emissions:
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Some thoughts about the Earth on
#EarthDay
:
-It doesn’t care if we’re here or not
-It’s seen worse than us
-If we want to stick around on it it’s up to us
-When carbon cycle goes haywire everything dies
-If we do ourselves in, in a million years it’ll be like we were never here
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Ruin a geological period by injecting thousands of gigatons of carbon dioxide into the air.
I'll go first: the Triassic.
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A cool thing about Google now is if you search something like "how to bake a potato" you get 5 pages of results from sites called like "potatobaking.oven" that say "Baking is a great way to heat up a potato. On the one hand it heats them up, on the other it can make a warm treat"
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"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." -Dwight Eisenhower, lefty extremist
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I don't know what I expected for 2020 but I really didn't think I would be looking forward getting past something called "peak death day"
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My nightly Wikipedia wormhole has brought me to the abandoned Namibian mining town of Kolmanskop, which is slowly being swallowed by the sands of the Namib
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Here’s what a 5°C global warming, ocean acidification event that lasted for 200,000 years looks like in a sediment core pulled up from the bottom of the ocean. We’ll probably leave something similar behind in the rocks. [📸 J. Zachos]
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Warning: Consult a geologist before drilling tunnels into a bedrock of porous limestone, dead corals and sand right next to the ocean
@FrancisSuarez
@CityofMiami
Cars & trucks stuck in traffic generate megatons of toxic gases & particulate, but
@boringcompany
road tunnels under Miami would solve traffic & be an example to the world.
Spoke with
@RonDeSantisFL
about tunnels last week. If Governor & Mayor want this done, we will do it.
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Similarly strange: there's two impact craters next to it. One is 470 million years old and the other is 280 million years old and have nothing to do with each other?
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our current approach to climate change is like if you had to make chocolate cake for guests but kept adding cupfuls of mustard to recipe, while telling your guests don't worry, you'll figure out how de-mustard it at the end. Only, cake=Earth, guests=all life, and it's impossible
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How extreme can the climate get? The geologic record tells us: extremely extreme
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Someone broke into my car and stole my sleeping bag and sleeping bag pad, but they didn’t touch the Cretaceous shrimp burrows, inoceramid clams, Neoprotrozerozoic ooids, diamictite, Eocene plant matter, Cambrian trilobites or agnostids—and for that I’m grateful.
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My least favorite trope: hearing that someone has "moved left" on the climate
Becoming increasingly worried about climate change ≠ movement along a political axis
Becoming increasingly worried about climate change = aligning one's beliefs with physical law
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For reference
Below is a list of +3,000 scientists who signed a letter about the youth climate protests, published in the journal Science. The letter states:
"We declare: Their concerns are justified and supported by the best available science."
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