Volcanoes Played Pivotal Role in Ancient Ice Age, Mass Extinction

Researchers here have discovered the pivotal role that volcanoes played in a deadly ice age 450 million years ago.

[Northie]

Interesting study, with respected names involved.

This is the clincher in the climate debate: we are beginning to truly understand the climate drivers of the ancient past, most of which had to do with changes in the atmosphere caused by volcanism, impacts, or, in this case, erosion. Paleontology is where it's at!

[frank miller]

What a bunch of nonsense! The most likely cause
of any Ice Age, is the just the interim stage,
whence decaying huge forests, began to be ploughed under by sediments, creating the first 'coal fields
precursors' with combustible methane {CH4}, and numerous other combustible gases; perhaps even with some mutually decaying dinosaurs, which eventually formed our oil fields, ignited by lightning,forest fires causing huge smoke clouds which prevented the Sun's rays from reaching already border-line Summer/Winter melting/freezing Polar ices, waterways, seas!
There are surface tar deposits, such as the La Brea Tar pits in Los Angeles which have entrapped
prehistoric animal remains, with occasional bubbling up of combustible gases!
For a volcano to generate such huge smoke/dust
clouds to obliterate the Sun, it would have had to continue spewing Earth's inner core iron, which on the way up about 2500 miles, melted the mantle's
rock, and then penetrating the Earth's 10 miles crust errupted, for a long period ot time without the lava finally cooling, and sealing the crater!
No recorded land, nor Oceanic volcanos lasted
that long, otherwise we would have continuous ice
ages!!
Get back to the drawing board Paleontologists!
F.M.

[frank miller]

Clarification of my #1 post: I don't know if any of you remember the Mt.St.Helen's volcanic eruption
around the early 1980's I think, but the spewed
greyish mantle/crust dust particles were of much bigger particle size, than smoke particles from
prehistoric forest fires, and because the air gravitational sedimentation rate of particles is I think proportional to the square, or cubed of the particle diameter, and a specific gravity term in the numerator, would make it unlikely to reside
in the atmophere long enough! Dust particles are outside the colloidial size limits, which are exclusively within the perview of smokes!
Sure there were a lot of sulfur, and other gases
such as HS, CO2,, and water vapor which would form
sulfurous acid acid rains, and harmless carbonic
acid respectively, but those would have been repre-
cipitated back to Earth, lands, and oceans, as the former was done before sulfur dioxide coal stack
neutralizers were installed, some period after
Cottrell electrostatic particulate precipitators
in the late 30's, and early 40's were intalled on all Western World very ubiquitous mid-century
coal fired power plants, and iron smelters!
F.M.

[Brian_G]

The Earth is distilling lighter elements out of the core, into the air, since the Earth began. We don't need to reduce CO2 emissions to mitigate climate, we need to put a lid on volcanoes. We could create giant Venus simulators, and learn to colonize hot, dense planets.

But this won't fit the luddite, "Stop, go back!" call of climate change mitigation technology. It's not CO2 they hate, so much as fossil fuel, the backbone of our economies.

[Northie]

frank miller wrote:

For a volcano to generate such huge smoke/dust
clouds to obliterate the Sun, it would have had to continue spewing Earth's inner core iron, which on the way up about 2500 miles, melted the mantle's
rock, and then penetrating the Earth's 10 miles crust errupted, for a long period ot time without the lava finally cooling, and sealing the crater!
No recorded land, nor Oceanic volcanos lasted
that long, otherwise we would have continuous ice
ages!!
Get back to the drawing board Paleontologists!
F.M.

Read more volcanology, Frank. You've just described mantle plumes and basalt superfloods, which are precisely the kind of eruptions at issue here.

[frank miller]

I perhaps believe your 'mantle plumes..." concept
in terms of volcanoes, but I think you have to combine Colloid Chemistry, the background of which you don't formally have 'Northie #5' unless you had a degree in Chemistry, and colloid chemistry,
sedimentation rates in any media, consciously
in your mind as an Industrial R&D Chemist, as per my #3 post!
The North American Continent was once covered with ice sheets! That is over 4 million square
miles for the U.S. and another 3 million square
miles when you include Canada! That is year round,
Summer, and Winter! So what blocked the Sun for so long? The solution may not be exactly as I have described, as I admit of knowing nothing about
the glacial periods, not the last small one 11,000
years ago, whence huge timber trunks were lined up
parallel to each other in the direction of ice flow!
But the first stage of coal formation is vegetation based peat, with huge trillions of tons around the Great Lakes of Michigan; and covering
much of Russia! That generates methane, combustible
hydrocarbons, before being even more compacted
by high pressure, heat, and anaerobic bacteria!
So there may have been an interim stage with massive hydrocarbon releases, for as you know, the Nitrogen Cycle responsible for soil bacteria, fixing atmospheric nitrogen, formed by LIGHTNING
splitting part of the 20 per.cent atmospheric nitrogen {N2} into water soluble nitrogen oxides,
precipitated by rains, snows for aerobic bacteria to convert into amino acid nitrate root precursors
must have been very active in that constantly once
uniformely warm, and humid climate 250 to 500
millions of years ago, for much of the Earth being covered with vegetation, and constant Lightning
storms! Some volcanoes may have ignited part of the decaying flora, but that would have been localized!
Just think about other mechanisms, B4 drawing
conclusions 'Northie'!!
F.M.

[frank miller]

Clarification of my #6 post "Northie": A conscious knowledge/practice of Colloid chemistry, as a discipline in itself, demonstrates that an almost infinite variety of shapes and structures can be formed by aggregation of simple volcanic dust particles, adhering together with the 0.10% to 2.8% atmospheric absolute water vapor, forming even larger/heavier, hence faster falling particles with very much decreased atmospheric residence times, insufficient to block the Sun, in any large geographic sense.

What is interesting about dwelving deeper into a subject, as in my #6 post, is that nitrogen fixing
soil bacteria may have been the first living form of life? For higher animals needed vegetation, to
eat! Now fish used these eventual amino-acid Lightning formed water soluble NO's for proteins, and the dissolved calcium, magnesium {central
coordinating atom in the complex nitro green chlorophyll phtosynthesis catalyst,} along with
phosphorous for bone/scales apatite; and for kelps/algae!
The sulfur in all DNA/RNA protein molecules, along with phosphorous in the neuro/muscle ATP transmitter, must also have come from somewhere?
The point whence life began, becomes more narrowed
but that's another discipline! But lightning may have provided the initial spark?
F.M.
F.M.

[Northie]

Frank, ash isn't the concern here. Basalt floods don't typically involve as much ash in relation to their CO2 as ordinary subduction volcanoes do. They are more like Hawaiian volcanoes, gently oozing all over the place rather than exploding. The hypothesis is that CO2 outgassing during basalt floods balanced the heavy absorption of CO2 by erosion at the time, and that when the eruptions stopped, CO2 levels declined enough to cool the climate into an ice age.

Evidence from 450 million years back is sketchy, to say the least, but that kind of volcanism is clearly linked with several other warmings so perhaps it was at work here as well.

[frank miller]

You are so full of it "Northie #8"!!! Always equivocating IDIOT: It was warm and very humid
you illiterate clown. My God there are oceans , and oceans of oil {and methane CH4} PLUS idiot
vitually small 'continents' of coal and peat!
Of course there was CO2, clown, but not from
volcanic ash as much as burning decaying forest
residues but also from the aromatic tree terpenes!
All that was apparently reprecipitated {my God you have absolutely no knowledge of Physical
Chemistry, and learned NOTHING from all my detai-
led, since February 2009, on about 6 to 9 "CO2AGW"
mechanisms pertaining to conservation of mass, and energy, from all the atoms released after the Big Bang, and the reprecipitation of CO2 as carbonic acid, and photosynthesis absorption! Smoke particles, idiot are opaque compared to transparent CO2 [g], and carbonic acid so no Sun
block there!
You know ignorant uneducated people are the worst
simply because they have neither imagination,
nor the self-respect of questioning what may appear
to be dubious! Now if you had a chain of volcanoes, stretching the 2500 odd miles across Canada, and the U.S.A. at let's say 100 miles interval, and they all erupted at the same time, for about a month B4 all the heavy dust settled,
then that may be enough to block the Sun light/heat
portion, turning the high humidity {read slowly..
'warm and humid'..} into ice sheets!!
But that is not even contemplative!!
So go back and think some more, but remember there is very little carbon dioxide from volcanic eruptions, unless the lava travelled through
beds of decaying flora, and fauna!!
F.M.

[frank miller]

Correction to my #6 post:"...splitting part of the ~78 per.cent atmospheric nitrogen [N2] into water soluble nitrogen oxides.."
F.M.