Permian-Triassic mystery solved; cute baby spotted; 2023 nine-day seismic event

This week, a billionaire took a spacewalk, archaeologists discovered a new isolated lineage of Neanderthals, and the James Webb Space Telescope revealed the outer reaches of the Milky Way. And a few other things happened:

Rumble solved

If you’re extremely sensitive to longitudinal P-wave seismic frequencies, you may have noticed a rumbling beneath your feet in 2023 that resonated across the Earth for nine straight days. “What’s that?” you may have wondered as scientists attached electrodes to your body to study your seismically strange, earthquake-detecting physiology.

An international team studied this mystery and came up with a likely solution: A mountaintop in a fjord in eastern Greenland collapsed into the sea, triggering a mega-tsunami with 200-meter-high waves that rippled through the fjord for nine days and generated seismic waves that reverberated throughout the Earth. Seismologists at the time found it quite strange. And like most catastrophic events these days, it was caused by climate change, according to the new study.

Global warming has melted the glacier at the base of Dickson Fiord, destabilizing 33 million cubic meters of rock and ice, which have plunged into the sea. “Climate change is changing what is typical on Earth and can trigger unusual events,” said seismologist Alice Gabriel of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, in what can only be described as a seismic understatement.

Cute baby, endangered

Officials at an Indonesian national park say they have spotted a young Javan rhino in the wild, proof that the endangered species is still reproducing viably. The female, named Iris, appears to be between three and five months old. A camera trap captured the baby Rhinoceros sondaicus walking with its mother, who was totally relaxed, no problem, just an adorable and highly endangered animal passing by.

Ujung Kulon National Park, the only existing sanctuary for the species, announced the sighting of two more rhinos in the park earlier this year. Despite this good news, the species is still threatened by poaching and natural disasters. According to the International Rhino Foundation, there are only 80 Javan rhinos left alive in the world.

Studying objectively terrifying

There are few things as troubling, or likely to send me into a dissociative spiral, as the widespread scientific consensus that the Permian-Triassic mass extinction event 252 million years ago was caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide emissions from volcanoes that saturated the atmosphere, leading to climate change and the collapse of terrestrial and marine ecosystems. However, the associated decline in normally resilient insect and plant life remains a mystery—typically, when temperatures rise in the tropics, plants and insects move to cooler climates.

Researchers from the University of Bristol and the China University of Geosciences have published a paper arguing that the effects of rapid climate change have been so devastating because of the length of El Niño events compared to today. During these multi-decade events, weather and climate variability were extreme and temperature gradients collapsed. In fact, it was too hot everywhere. The long El Niño that caused the June 2024 heatwave caused global temperatures to rise by about 1.24 degrees Celsius above normal.

Paul Wignall, professor of palaeoenvironments at the University of Leeds, said: “Fortunately, such events have only lasted for a year or two so far. During the Permian-Triassic crisis, El Niño persisted for much longer, leading to a decade of widespread drought, followed by years of flooding. In fact, the climate was completely chaotic, making it very difficult for any species to adapt.”

© 2024 Science X Network