Mmass of earth5/18/2023 I had written to Erwin to get his take on the contemporary idea that there is currently a sixth mass extinction under way on our planet on par with the so-called Big Five mass extinctions in the history of animal life. “Wildlife accounts for only 3 percent of earth’s land animals-human beings, our livestock, and our pets take up the remaining 97 percent” There’s a very rapid collapse of the ecosystem during these mass extinctions,” he said. I mention this because it turns out that, from a mathematical point of view, the problem of understanding these food webs is exactly the problem as understanding the nature of the power grid. “Because it was not clear how to manage that collapse-although after the fact it was clear that it should have been easily contained-it cascaded into failure of grids across the northeastern United States. Erwin thinks that most mass extinctions in earth’s history-global die-offs that killed the majority of animal life on earth-ultimately resulted, not from external shocks, but from the internal dynamics of food webs that faltered and failed catastrophically in unexpected ways, just as the darkening eastern seaboard did in 2003. These are devastating chain reactions that no one understands. He proposed that earth’s great mass extinctions might unfold like these power grid failures: most of the losses may come, not from the initial shock-software glitches in the case of power grid failures, and asteroids and volcanoes in the case of ancient mass extinctions-but from the secondary cascade of failures that follow. And it was largely due to a software bug in a control room in Ohio.”Įrwin is one of the world’s experts on the End-Permian mass extinction, an unthinkable volcanic nightmare that nearly ended life on earth 252 million years ago. It covered a huge section of both Canada and the United States. The blackout extended all the way up into Toronto, all the way out to Michigan and Ohio. “And this is seven hours into the blackout,” he said, pulling up a new map, cloaked in darkness. You can see Long Island and New York City.” “These are images from the NOAA website of the US blackout in 2003,” he said, pulling up a nighttime satellite picture of the glowing northeastern megalopolis, megawatts afire under the cold dark of space. At the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America, Smithsonian paleontologist Doug Erwin took the podium to address a ballroom full of geologists on the dynamics of mass extinctions and power grid failures-which, he claimed, unfold in the same way.
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