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Tren Hirschi

Laurie Oberg

11th grade English

1/26/2018

Climate Changes and Climate Killings

I have long had an interest in geology and have often heard that we can learn from the

past. Two years ago, while researching the Permo-Triassic Extinction, I was astounded at how

similar it was to how the Earth is changing today (or how I had heard it was changing). I didn’t

know a lot about climate change, so I decided to look into what we can learn about climate

change from mass extinctions from the past. This was a good way to both expand my

knowledge on geology and learn more about how the planet works.

From taking the geology class from Mr. Ramsey, I learned that there was a connection

between climate change and mass extinction, but I wasn’t really sure what that connection was.

When I started this project, I thought that was all I didn’t know, but I came to learn how vast the

history of Earth really is, and that there really isn’t one “connection” between these two topics

because every time a mass extinction occurred (there were 5), the Earth was completely

different and in some cases completely alien to the one we know today.

I have a background in geology to the meager extent of a rockhounder (someone who

collects rocks) and have long wanted to explore more of the scientific side of rocks, instead of

focusing on the pretty crystals.

Climate change has been a topic of some debate in the world of politics, though I have

long been of the opinion that it exists, even though if asked, I could do little to prove why. While

researching this topic, I was surprised that climate change has been an undisputed fact in the
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Earth Sciences community since around the American Civil War. The Greenhouse Effect was

first described by French Scientist Joseph Fourier in a paper published in 1822. The fact that

we’ve known for so long and yet ignore those facts appals me. If you are of the opinion that

climate change does not exist, or that we can’t make a lasting change to our climate, I implore

you to read on and scrutinize anything.

To start researching this topic, I got a book titled ​The Ends of the World: Volcanic

Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions ​by

Peter Brannon. The book goes in depth into the facts of what happened during each of the

Earth’s 5 mass extinctions, then shows what we know about why those changes occured. I have

yet to finish the book, but even just the first two extinctions have some eerie similarities to today,

even though Earth may not have seemed very similar.

To explain what I learned, it is best to start at the beginning (or as close as we care to

look): The Ordovician period. Starting 485.4 MA (Million years Ago) and ending 443.8 MA, the

Ordovician period is the first time that life begins to take hold of and take over the planet.

Diversity explodes as life tries new crazy experiments. What would become North America is

covered in a shallow sea. Brannon, in his book ​The Ends of the World​, says that “At the bottom

of [the Ordovician] open seas, oxygen was in short supply. Much of the living world was instead

jammed onto the shallow seas of the continents and dominated by submarine creepy-crawlies,”

(Brannon 33). The shallow sea (possibly as shallow as knee-deep across the continent) is the

perfect place for life to thrive because the water protects it from the sun in a way that the

atmosphere has yet to evolve to do and deeper waters lack necessary oxygen.
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The End-Ordovician Extinction occurred when a major and lasting drop in temperature

creates an ice age that lowers sea levels dramatically. For the shallow sea world of the

Ordovician, this dried up the habitat which was such a traumatic change that it ran roughly 85%

of all life on Earth to extinction.

Prior to the extinction, the atmosphere was mostly Carbon Dioxide originating from

volcanism, with little to no oxygen. This made for a balmy climate with few, if any glaciers. When

there is too much CO2 in the atmosphere, Earth has a natural rebound method in the form of

acid rain. CO2 mixed with rain is slightly acidic, which erodes calcium rich limestone. This

mixture of carbon from the air and calcium from the ground, called Calcium Carbonate is then

ingested by plankton and other sea creatures for the use of shell/skeleton building, and is then

buried back in the ground when they die, which has the effect of burying Carbon Dioxide.

Around 443 MA, the CO2 spitting volcanoes calmed down, and CO2 levels plummeted. This

lowered the global temperature and created the extinction-creating effects previously described.

The major thing we can learn from this extinction is the effect to which CO2 affects the

climate. In almost every extinction in Earth’s history, CO2 plays a part either because there is a

sudden increase or decrease. These extinctions happened over thousands to millions of years,

but today CO2 levels are increasing at 100 times the pace, and at our current rate we will soon

reach levels not seen since before the ice age.

The next major chapter in life’s journey on Earth is the Devonian Period. Often called

“The Age of Fishes”, the majority of life is still in the oceans with some of the largest reefs in the

history of the world. Plants also begin to creep inland as they evolve to cope with the

inhospitable conditions, and the first trees evolve.

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It is generally believed that the very trees struggling to survive are part of

what brought about Devonian life’s downfall. Again, in part by creating a

decrease in CO2. Trees are very good at sucking up CO2 and putting it back into

the ground by using it to build their massive structure and then dying and being

buried, which had the effect of bringing down CO2 levels.

When trees were introduced, their roots also broke apart the ground and sped up how

quickly it weathered. This sent unprecedented levels of nutrients such as phosphorus and

nitrogen into the ocean, where plankton and algae eagerly sucked it up, creating an algal bloom,

but on a possibly global scale. As algae in the oceans decomposed, it used up oxygen in the

water, and when there is a massive amount of algae, oxygen disappears fast, which had a

catastrophic effect on sea life.

This extinction is a good show of how incredibly effective Life is at changing its

environment, and not necessarily for the better. Life is one of the largest forces of change in

geology. Throughout its history, Life has endeavoured to make Earth a more hospitable place

by evolving traits to help an individual, but when an entire species adopts those changes, it

almost invariably results in changes in the environment and changes for other species. No

species is better at evolving and changing the environment than our own, and throughout our

history we have tried to make our lives easier, and in doing so have reworked our environment

in ways that are not necessarily friendly for Life in general. Today we are seeing very similar

effects to the ancient algal blooms of the Devonian in places such as the Gulf of Mexico and

Chesapeake Bay, where algal blooms are normal. “Eutrophication” (the phenomenon of algae

taking the majority of the oxygen out of the oceans), Brannon writes in his book, “is caused by

too much of a good thing… Today the Gulf of Mexico’s problem starts in the heartland. When

farmers in the… Midwest and the Great Plains spread fertilizer rich in nitrogen and phosphorus
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on their crops, what isn’t taken up by the plants is eventually washed into the Mississippi River,”

(Brannon 77). This will and ​is ​leading to massive ocean die-offs.

Thus far we have been able to work around the changes we have created, but when we

create changes that compare to mass extinctions, will we be able to recover from such a

traumatic awakening to the workings of our planet, and what will we have to sacrifice to survive?

There isn’t a way to summarize all I have learned into a statement, but perhaps the most

powerful thing I learned is that Life will not die. There is nothing we can do to the Earth to make

it permanently inhospitable forever, but there are countless instances of species going extinct

because they unwittingly changed their environment in a way that resulted in their extinction. If

we are to survive, our view towards nature must change from one of a mysterious manifestation

of malice and motherhood to one of a tragic and beautiful story with a blatant moral.

I enjoyed doing this project, though I still feel like there is plenty more to learn. I am

planning to continue research into this topic and I hope to learn more about what happened in

the past and how to affect the future. I really like the idea of learning anything for the sake of

learning, as opposed to learning a specific curriculum because someone decided “it will help”.
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Works Cited

Peter Brannen. ​The Ends of the World

Joseph Fourier. Théorie analytique de la chaleur​ (​The Analytical Theory of Heat​)