David Grinspoon Quote
The idea arose when Dan Rothman, a geochemist at MIT, was studying the graphs showing changes in the carbon cycle at the time of the Great Dying. He noticed something about the shape of the curves. He saw a pattern of extremely rapid and accelerating atmospheric and oceanic change that did not look like the simple signature of a volcanic injection of gas into the environment. Rather, it looked to him like a superexponential pattern, the kind of increase you see in a gas being exhaled from a rapidly multiplying biological population. He and his colleagues did some detailed mathematical analysis of the geological record, and their results confirmed that the pattern of change was more consistent with biological growth.2 They connected the Great Dying with the evolution and rapid growth of a new type of bacteria that produces methane and multiplies rapidly when it is supplied with the metal nickel, a trace element that was delivered in abundance
The idea arose when Dan Rothman, a geochemist at MIT, was studying the graphs showing changes in the carbon cycle at the time of the Great Dying. He noticed something about the shape of the curves. He saw a pattern of extremely rapid and accelerating atmospheric and oceanic change that did not look like the simple signature of a volcanic injection of gas into the environment. Rather, it looked to him like a superexponential pattern, the kind of increase you see in a gas being exhaled from a rapidly multiplying biological population. He and his colleagues did some detailed mathematical analysis of the geological record, and their results confirmed that the pattern of change was more consistent with biological growth.2 They connected the Great Dying with the evolution and rapid growth of a new type of bacteria that produces methane and multiplies rapidly when it is supplied with the metal nickel, a trace element that was delivered in abundance
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