Evolution of tree roots may have driven mass extinctions (2022)
news.iu.edu
news.iu.edu
Meanwhile, the next COP28 (United Nations Climate Change conference) will be held by United Arab Emirates's minister for industry and CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. As much as this seems like a joke, or a "Don't look up" moment, it is not one ...
“As much as this seems like a joke … it is not one”
https://unwatch.org/u-n-elects-saudi-arabia-to-womens-rights...
A lot of regulatory bodies, commissions, councils, are for optics and captured by the governments or corporations they should be regulating in some way. Put another way we have the fox watching the hen house. Put another way it's all bullshit. It's just as true with our domestic regulation.
What news are you reading? Last year the world invested $500bn in wind and solar, and another $500bn in energy efficiency. The IRA has $369bn for green tech, and Europe is going to spend $270bn. The invasion of Ukraine has left large amounts of Russian oil and gas effectively stranded. We're going to reach peak carbon in 5 years, and 2°C is looking increasingly feasible.
I mean, if the sidewalks outside your house were government controlled, the most likely people to try to take control of them would be people with an interest in making money from them (somehow). Most people don't enter government to be the "Minister of Forestry" without some previous industry experience, and a plan of what to do with the forests. The people with industry experience and a plan are usually ones frustrated by the limits of the regulations and therefore they have the desire to take over and change the rules to suit them.
This is at the heart of the problem. You get these revolving doors between eg big positions at the FDA and big pharma staffed by the same individuals at different times in their careers, same with eg Wall St vs SEC. This extends to lobby group positions. One day Fred is the head of the FDA the next day he’s lobbying the FDA for Pfizer. This should be illegal.
They mask the corruption this causes by saying “Hey we need someone with industry/regulatory experience” with no acknowledgement of the massive ($$) conflicts of interest inherent in that strategy.
> the evolution of tree roots likely flooded past oceans with excess nutrients, causing massive algae growth
> these rapid and destructive algae blooms would have depleted most of the oceans’ oxygen, triggering catastrophic mass extinction events
> these past events were likely fueled by tree roots, which pulled nutrients from the land during times of growth, then abruptly dumped them into the Earth’s water during times of decay
Just a tldr since it took me a minute to find. Super interesting, always fun / horrifying to think about the earth before terrestrial animal life.
Is this another potential "great filter"? Evolving lifeforms can randomly find ways to kill an ecosystem.
But in this case it would be rather wasteful to also nourish the rest of the body. As a bonus, if all the remaining people are just brains floating in a tank, they can't really escape.
It won't get great results from test audiences.
What do you mean by that? (Not a native speaker and out of ideas on how to search for it)
The film's nearly 40, and I still don't want to spolier it. Suffice to say, it made me feel physically sick.
Source please!
On the other hand, https://www.reddit.com/r/matrix/comments/q2xefs/batteries_no... says that this was never true
Doesn't make immediate sense to me, if using brains as computers you wouldn't want to occupy them with the Matrix simulation and the whole story falls apart, so how was the complicated plot ought to be? Use the brains with the Matrix how we are used already for solving captchas?
also in multi-generational wealth: poor and hard working become successful (when society allows it) then the descendants are lazy and loose the wealth, and finally further descendants are poor and may learn to work hard.
that is, until societies re-organize and stop rewarding hard-work with success; what happens next is still happening, it's what we see in our actual political leadership, it's not very effective and is dragging the world into a seemingly unavoidable war. (both china and USA blaming each other for the escalating: "they (the other) should change course cuz we won't"
That part is relatively well established. This paper looks at the transport of phosphorus in particular, from terrestrial rock into marine ecosystems.
Plants can't take up phosphorus in its mineral bound form. Modern trees have micro-organisms living on their roots that release P (and N etc) from the soil. In certain periods of the Devonian era, P would have been primarily liberated from the rock by acids let off by the plant roots as they decayed.
This is nonsense, obviously. Would apply only for shallow bottom or fresh waters
The abstract of the paper linked in the article seems to support your statement, though.
"For the past several hundred million years, oxygen concentrations in Earth's atmosphere have been comparatively high[..]. Yet, the oceans seem never to have been far from anoxia (oxygen depletion)[..] OAEs seem to be promoted by warm climates[...] ocean oxygen concentrations are declining in the modern ocean [...] A full-scale OAE would take thousands of years to develop[...]" (OAE = oceanic anoxic event) https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaj2321
So my layman summary of that particular study, would be, that the oceans have always been one the “edge of anoxia”, and although human activity could push it closer to that, there is no reason to believe that it could happen in our lifetime or that of our grand-grand children.
To start anoxia is a relative term. It depends on how much oxygen do you spent respect to how fast you replace it. Is also a buffered event, and the problem corrects itself automatically [1]. Therefore, things like "the edge of anoxia" have moving boundaries and are difficult to define
[1] When some area is lacking oxygen, marine life response migrating or is simply killed. The result is that more oxygen is available for the rest until reaching a new equilibrium.
The article provided is paywalled, so I can't really evaluate it here
Water will be filled with high concentrations of things that love to release oxygen. Bazillions of oxygen. Thus throwing fertilizer in the ocean equals to oxygen increase, not decrease... in principle.
Of course, biology is never so simple. You can have most life killed by lack of oxygen even while being submerged in a soup of oxygen producers because anoxia is a relative term. Life also breathes. And, unlike photosynthesis, breathing is done also at night. At the end of the night life can experience troubles to survive.
And there is the chemistry also. Stuff reacts chemically with the salts or organic matter suspended in the sea. This can release oxygen as by-product, remove oxygen and store it in some molecule, or remain neutral about it.
Chemistry can also affect oxygen producers. Too much fertilizer and your plant will die by thirst. In the sea the problem is reduced because your flower pot can decide to swim away or sink away.
They don't have any fossil record of tree roots they're looking at in this paper, they're looking at sedimentary rock from lakebeds, right? So they see smoke and think 'gun'.