Sputnik
Research into ancient geological events suggests that our planet has a slow, steady “heartbeat” of geological activity approximately every 27 million years.
The pulse of clustered geological events, including volcanic activity, mass extinctions, plate reorganization, and sea level rise, moves slowly, on a 27.5-million-year cycle of cataclysmic tides, but fortunately for us, researchers believe we have 20 million years. Another one before the next “pulse.”
“Many geologists believe that geological events are random over time,” Michael Rampino, a geoscientist at New York University and lead author of the study, said in a 2021 statement, “but we provide statistical evidence for a common cycle, suggesting that these geological events are interconnected rather than random.”
The team analyzed the histories of 89 well-understood geological events from the past 260 million years, and some of those times were difficult – more than eight of these world-changing events came together over small geological timescales, forming the catastrophic ‘pulse’.
The study team emphasized: “These events include times of marine and non-marine extinctions, major ocean anoxic events, continental flood basalt eruptions, sea level fluctuations, global pulsations of magma within plates, and times of changes in rates of seafloor spreading and plate reorganization.”
The team continued: “Our results indicate that global geological events are generally interconnected, and appear to come in the form of pulses with a basic cycle of about 27.5 million years,” according to the team. A study published in a journal
That 2018 paper, conducted by two researchers at the University of Sydney, looked at Earth’s carbon cycle and plate tectonics, and also came to the conclusion that the cycle is about 26 million years long.
Collins explained that in this latest study, many of the events the team looked at are causal events, meaning one directly causes the other, and so some of the 89 events are linked to each other: for example, hypoxic events that cause marine extinctions.
“These periodic pulses of tectonics and climate change may be the result of geophysical processes linked to the dynamics of plate tectonics and mantle plumes, or they may instead be rhythmic by astronomical cycles linked to Earth’s motions in the solar system and the galaxy,” the team concluded.
