Saturday, 11 November 2023 – 13:44 WIB
LIVE Techno – Our Earth never stops providing amazing new news.
Most recently, research into ancient geological events shows that our planet has a slow, steady ‘heartbeat’ of geological activity every 27 million years or so.
This series of geological events, including volcanic activity, mass extinctions, plate reorganization, and sea level rise, occurred very slowly, representing a powerful 27.5 million year tidal cycle.
But fortunately for us humans, researchers think we have another 20 million years before the next ‘pulse’.
Illustration of Earth and Moon.
“Many geologists believe that geological events occur randomly over time,” explained Michael Rampino, a geologist from New York University and lead author of the study, in a statement released. Science AlertSaturday, November 11 2023.
“But our study provides statistical evidence for a common cycle, showing that these geological events are correlated rather than randomly moving,” he continued.
The team conducted an analysis of the ages of 89 well-understood geological events over the past 260 million years.
As the graph below shows, some of these were difficult times, with more than eight world-changing events occurring in a geologically small time period, forming a ‘pulse’ of disaster.
Major geological events on earth over 260 million years
“These events include periods of marine and non-marine extinctions, large oceanic anoxic events, flood-basalt eruptions on continents, sea level fluctuations, global intraplate magmatism waves, and periods of changes in basal spreading rates ocean and plate reorganization,” the team wrote in their paper.
“Our results show that global geological events are generally correlated, and appear to occur simultaneously with an underlying ~27.5 million year cycle.”
Geologists have been investigating potential cycles of geological events for a long time.
In the 1920s and 30s, scientists of the time argued that the geological record had a 30 million year cycle, while in the 1980s and 90s researchers used the best dated geological events at that time to provide they span between ‘pulses’ of 26.2 to 30.6 million years.
And now, everything seems to be fine, 27.5 million years is the exact time that scientists estimate
A study published in late 2020 by the same authors showed that this 27.5 million year period was also the time of mass extinction.
Other research from Rampino and his team suggests that a comet strike may be the cause, with one space researcher even suggesting that Planet Nine is the cause.
But if the Earth really does have a geological ‘heartbeat’, it may be caused by something closer to Earth.
“These waves of tectonic cycles and climate change may be the result of geophysical processes related to the dynamics of tectonic plates and mantle plumes, or they may also be caused by astronomical cycles related to the movement of the Earth in the Solar System and Galaxy,” the team wrote in their research.
2023-11-11 06:44:14
#Earth #Turns #Heartbeat
