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The Best Science Writing Online 2012
Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way...
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Burning coal is nasty business, concentrating all kinds of toxic metals and resulting in potentially deadly fly ash. That's why stretches of the Emory and Clinch rivers in Tennessee essentially died when flooded with coal ash slurry two years ago.
Now imagine that happening on an apocalyptic scale: millennia-long volcanic eruptions setting on fire--even exploding--massive coal deposits in present day Siberia. That's what some scientists think may have set off the Permian mass extinction some 250 million years ago.
Roughly 90 percent of all ocean life died as a result. It was the end for ammonites and trilobites. Life itself may have barely survived the most devastating mass extinction event known to science, hence its name: the "Great Dying." And the reason could be coal ash, according to new research published in Nature Geoscience. (Scientific American is part of the Nature Publishing Group.)
Canadian geologists have found evidence of coal char--"remarkably similar to modern coal fly ash" in their own words--in ancient Arctic rocks. Given the toxic impact of modern coal fly ash on aquatic ecosystems, the scientists suggest that the massive coal conflagration may have created toxic marine conditions the world over.
Of course, humanity is currently setting off the sixth mass extinction event in Earth's history. And a big part of that is from burning coal, both the CO2 it releases that then causes climate change as well as all that fly ash. We may just be following Mother Nature's ancient recipe.
—David Biello
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23 Comments
Add CommentFirst by flood...then by fire. Makes perfect sense. Yea...right!!! The ash scenario, while plausable, is not happening today via man made conditions. Your tieing them together is laughable. A meteorite crashing into the earth in the worst possible place is more likely...like a high density coal deposit...may be an explanation but to link this type of event to man is not.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@Eleaders,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"...may be an explanation but to link this type of event to man is not."
You do realize that humanity is extinguishing whole species at a rate not seen in millions of years?
@David Bello, "It was the end for ammonites and trilobites." trilobites yes but ammonites disappeared during the KT mass extinction.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIs it being aware of our own mortality that turns us into 'brain-dead doubting tomases'. We no longer care what kind of a world we leave our heirs. Coal smoke, oil smoke and natural gas vapors are the most deadly thing we put into our environment and it does kill and create mayhem on every living thing around it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI don't think we can put enough coal ash into the air to cause a mass extinction; I hope we are smart enough to stop it before it gets that far. We can put enough coal ash into the air though to cause massive brain damage and massive chronic diseases.
Either way, we need to stop burning fossils to create energy before we end up with a nation of blooming idiots...we don't have enough government jobs for them all.
@eleaders, "The ash scenario, while plausable, is not happening today via man made conditions." it amazes me the absolute level of certainty you have about your "belief" when we know for certain that we are generating huge amounts of coal ash annually, 125 million tons in the US alone, and we know of the harm it does to the environment. We even have a case in which coal ash has killed part of a river, yet you are absolutely certain that this is not causing an environmental problem. What field work did you do to come to that conclusion? Can you site some peer reviewed papers to support your claim? Do you have anything that would give us a sense that you know what you are talking about? For some reason with these trolls their level of confidence seems to increase along with their level of ignorance.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJames: We all try to convince the idiots who surround us that we got to stop polluting our planet, we need to limit our population, we must sustain bio-diversity, that there are no garbage dumps on our planet, using an old car for as long as possible, though its expensive to maintain, is environmentally better than buying the latest hybrid, no one one listens and you got to give up. No mankind is selfish, unthinking and stupid. Only a few have made everything we have possible.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAdopt the attitude of the scientists of the 30s and 40s, do nothing to increase life spans, do nothing to increase food production, do nothing to improve health. Encourage smoking, say climate change is a fiction, do all you can to encourage the idiots to drive the species to extinction. It is the best outcome for this little planet and life universe-wide. Remember our little planet seeds the universe. We don't need man for that process to continue, but we do need him to go extinct for this planet to sustain life.
If you have a scientific bent get pleasure from thinking about the problems that remain unsolved. Learn about science, but don't do anything to make life easier for the Homo sapien.
Bob,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPut on your science hat and do a little research.
With modern day scrubbers we are putting very little fly ash into the sky. The article implies we are putting so much fly ash into the air that we should be concerned about fly ash being the cause of our extinction. We are dumping ash generated via coal fired plants into controlled landfills with little, if any, chance of it making it's way into waterways.
Not related to fly ash. Lets stay on the subject here.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@Robert,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPlease compare the numbers you provided with the numbers that supposedly caused the mas extinction and get back to us. I'd be very interested in knowing the ratio.
Also,
Maybe we should look at the ability of our current environment to absorb or put that ash back to work for the good of the planet when it is released slowly. Obviously a rapid release of ash in a very short time period would be VERY bad.
Over population is the entire reason for the world's ecological problems. Power is necessary to live in this modern world. All power production produces waste. Too many people...too much power...too much waste.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow long do these extinction events take? Do we have any reliable data? If, say 65 million years ago, an asteroid impact wiped out dinosaurs, I can imagine it not taking all that many years to do the damage, although I can not imagine how long the "recovery" process might have been. The Permian extinction, 250 million years ago? 90% of the planet's life forms? How long did it take? The debate is still wide open as to the cause or causes, let alone how long it took to totally kill off that many life forms. We have begun the sixth die off. We debate the cause(s), and just how extensive the die off will end up being. We know next to nothing about the processes and timelines of the past, be they "fast" or "slow". The magnitude of the changes we are currently responsible for, measured in mere hundreds of years? Were the extinctions of the past any "slower" or "faster"... and to be played out over how many years to come? Hundreds? Thousands? Millions of years? Maybe we are slower than an asteroid, but having already passed "peak oil", i.e., we have already burned half the oil of the entire planet, and are burning the coal. DARE WE scoff at scientists trying to grasp the scale of the changes being made, or the timelines involved? Whatever survives will go on to evolve. If the recovery timelines are measured by mere tens or hundreds of thousands of years, our species may survive but will have evolved. Three to five generations of us in the next 100 years... I bear witness to the beginning; and my children, grandchildren, great grandchildren? And yours? This is the way the world ends? Not with a bang, but a whimper?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@Eleaders,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Not related to fly ash. Lets stay on the subject here."
This is an article about the possible relationship between the Permian Extinction Event of 250 million years ago and the extinction events that are happening now. Please read the article before commenting.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't our contribution to global polution 0.5%? If so, what should be done about the other 99.5% cauased by nature?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@Zarniw,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't our contribution to global polution 0.5%?"
You are wrong. Humanity has increased the CO2 content of the atmosphere by 40% and that share continues to rise. Take a look at what is the most famous graph in all of science:
The Keeling Curve:
http://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu/program_history/keeling_curve_lessons.html
Now the Keeling Curve covers only from 1958 to present, but we know what the content of atmospheric CO2 was by looking at ice cores, corals, etc.
I don't understand someones hostility to his own species. People scrape and use the resources around them because that is their NATURAL INCLINATION.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"eleaders", I live in West Virginia where coal burning, oil burning, and natural gas burning plants are as common as the churches on our street corners. 98% of West Virginia's energy is produced by these fossil fuel plants and our state is surrounded by coal ash sludge ponds that when they burst, kills everything in their path. West Virginia is 48th in the nation in childhood IQ, #1 in the nation in chronic childhood disease, #1 in the nation in child abuse deaths; every living thing in two of our major rivers, about a year ago, was killed by toxic chemicals used by natural gas fracking. Our kitchen water spickets catch fire from the methane that coal and natural gas extraction puts into our water tables; our water wells explode from gas build up caused by MTR and natural gas fracking. Some of our creeks and streams run green from mountain top removal and radioactive waste from natural gas waste water seeping for miles in our water tables.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think you are an idiot when you say that humans are not the cause of rabid climate change.
Good thing we are burning the coal off in a controlled manner instead of letting it pile up for some volcano to have it all burn off at once.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYet another biased story stick to the historical context not try to equate something that happened millions of years ago to what is going one today.
I recall reading some years ago that there was some debate as to the cause of the P/T extinction and that the idea that it was caused by the Siberian Trap eruption encountering coal deposits was a bit controversial. Now if there is widespread coal ash found from about the same time period, that would lend support to the idea.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt remains unclear to me how much to attribute the extinction event to a changing climate resulting from the increasing CO2 relative to direct toxic effects of the ash. In the author's words:
"The flood basalt volcanism released CO2. In addition, related thermal metamorphism of Siberian coal measures and organic-rich shales led to the emission of methane..."
relating to the ash:
"We therefore speculate that the global distribution of ash could have created toxic marine conditions."
So, it's not an either-or.
A bit more details here:
http://news.discovery.com/earth/coal-fires-mass-extinction-110124.html
Article itself (paywall)
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/ngeo1069.html
Supplemental:
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/extref/ngeo1069-s1.pdf
fnsgreen: Have you heard of justice or as we in Auz refer to it "A fair go"? Its not something restricted to a race, religious group or species.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou got to be as honest as possible when you analyse the world around you, and call a spade a spade. Your wonder at my despise of my own species is exactly what members of the KKK felt about people who believed members of the African race had rights similar to the rest of the population.
How is this relevant to today, you ask? While obviously not by itself a candidate for wiping out the human race, coal ash remains pretty nasty stuff, and can kill and sicken as well as or better than any of our other toxic detritus. In fact, as bad as coal-based atmospheric emissions can be, they pale in comparison to the effects of coal ash, as it is allowed to be disposed of currently, on the health of people living in the vicinity of these vast impoundments. In the U.S., new EPA “regulations" concerning coal ash are being bought with coal dollars, and abetted by pro-industry puppeteers with their hands on Obama’s strings. The coal industry’s growing list of paid apologists now includes CNN, which, according to the following After the Press video report, aired a story recently about a giant coal ash dump on the W. Va./Penn border – with the “report" in fact sponsored by an airbrushed spot for The Coalition for Clean Coal:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Lwr2SA5Pec
It is amazing the number of people who say carbon capture and storage is an efficient way to deal with coal burning. By that, of course, they mean capturing CO2 and storing it underground. The simple reply though, is that coal is already captured and securely stored underground, so why bother with all the expense of CCS?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe can capture solid carbon from hydrocarbons by pyrolysing them, and putting the coke in land fill. Then the only problem remains of how to avoid fires from lightning strikes?
There are two types of flyash one can be used as a replacement for portland cement in concrete and the other form can be used as the 'sand' componant of concrete.Fly ash produces a concrete that is quite equivalent to pozaline concrete the Romans used.Over 40% of all coal fly ash goes to making concrete and concrete products.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes it is a terrible thing when fly ash ponds collapse as they did in those TVA sites.Fly ash can also be added to asphalt concrete for road construction and re-sufacing.
Fly ash has been precipitated out of the exhast plumes of coal fired powerplants for years.
It was amazing to me to stumble into this article as I was actually looking up fly ash on my browser as I was thinking about doing some concrete casting and I had been reading on some Roman History about the Roman's discovery of using volcanic ash in their concrete.The nice thing about the type of concrete is that it can be tamped and produce walls without having to use rebar.It saves energy not having to use portland cement,You can make brick without a kiln.It takes less water to make concrete with it.
It is frightening to me to see such neo-luddite articles trying to draw analogy to ancient extinctions with a poorly researched piece.Keep that up and it will be like the little boy that cried wolf so much that when the wolf arrived no one believed it.
This contry has done a lot to have a safer environment .Do you ever think about what goes into that thing you buy made in China where they don't have scrubbers on their coal plants? Before you dis coalfly ash ponds keep this in mind that those two major pond collapses were on TVA projects and TVA are Federal Government projects.
Earth itself has gone through many climate changes regardless of human interaction.There is warming occurring throughout the solar system not just here on Earth.Mass extinctions have occured with no around.Siberia and Alaska Mammoths are found frozen in the ground.Used to be balmy there.Ice ages have ended and the oceans have risen.Ancient cities have been found in the sea around Japan, India ,and other locations.Completely different flora make up what became coal.Nature abhors a vacuum,there will be new critters to replace those departed.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is sad to see people that wish mankind to die off rather than be part of a solution.Places like West Virginia are not that way BECAUSE of coal but because of those few that have exploited the coal,the people.West Virginia is the Belgian Congo of the Rockefeller Family and the minions of their Energy Cartels.Probably would not be that way if W.Va had not been 'pried'off Virginia.Sorry ,just a thought.I had a friend several years ago buy some nice land in W.Va. and had a little farm and nice forest.He went up to work on his place one summer and all the trees were gone.He found he owned the land surface but not the trees.
There are very few people on this Earth that control the resources and they have a vested interest in controlling Energy,Banking etc.The solutions lay in people making conscious discovery of service to others rather than the Elites Service to Self mentality.If you think mankind ids the problem you are a useful idiot of the service of self crowd and they will manipulate you into a tool,a useful idiot.
Reading some entries here make me think of the premise in the movie "Idiocracy" whre the intellegent failed to reproduce and the idiots reproduced expotentially.Population is not the problem distribution is the problem.That is food distrobution.Crazy programs like making fuel alcohol from corn rather than from the cellulosic waste.Banning Hemp (male) because of marijuana(female).
Politics has no answer.Politics is about power and control.