Decline of carbon dioxide-gobbling plankton coincided with ancient global cooling

The evolutionary history of diatoms -- abundant oceanic plankton that remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the air each year -- needs to be rewritten, according to a new Cornell study. The findings suggest that after a sudden rise in species numbers, diatoms abruptly declined about 33 million years ago -- trends that coincided with severe global cooling.

The study is published in the Jan. 8 issue of the journal Nature.

The research casts doubt on the long-held theory that diatoms' success was tied to an influx of nutrients into the oceans from the rise of grasslands about 18 million years ago. New evidence from a study led by graduate student Dan Rabosky of Cornell's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology takes into account a widespread problem in paleontology: that younger fossils are easier to find than older ones.

"We just tried to address the simple fact that the number of available fossils is colossally greater from recent time periods than from earlier time periods," Rabosky said. "It's a pretty standard correction in some fields, but it hasn't been applied to planktonic paleontology up till now."

More than 90 percent of known diatom fossils are younger than 18 million years. So an unadjusted survey of diatom fossils suggests that more diatom species were alive in the recent past than 18 million years ago.

The dearth of early fossils is understandable. Sampling for diatom fossils requires immense drill ships to bore into seafloor sediment. To find an ancient fossil, scientists first have to find ancient sediment -- and that's no easy task because plate tectonics constantly shift the ocean floor, fossils and all. Much of the seafloor is simply too young to sample.

So Rabosky and co-author Ulf Sorhannus of Edinboro University of Pennsylvania controlled for how many samples had been taken from each million-year period of the Earth's history, going back 40 million years. After reanalysis, the long-accepted boom in diatoms over the last 18 million years disappeared. In its place was a slow recent rise, with a much more dramatic increase and decline at the end of the Eocene epoch, about 33 million years ago.

With the new timeline, diatoms achieved their peak diversity at least 10 million years before grasslands became commonplace.

"If there was a truly significant change in diatom diversity at all, it happened 30 million years ago," Rabosky said. "The shallow, gradual increase we see is totally different from the kind of exponential increase you would expect if grasslands were the cause."

As an example of that kind of increase, Rabosky turned to another fossil record: horse teeth. Before grasslands, horses had small teeth suited for chewing soft leaves. But as grasslands appeared, much hardier teeth appeared adapted to a lifetime of chewing tough, silica-studded grass leaves. Diatoms ought to show a similar evolutionary response to the sudden availability of silica, Rabosky said, but they don't.

Although the new results don't explain the current prevalence of diatoms in the ocean, Rabosky said that whatever led to diatoms' rise at the end of the Eocene, the tiny organisms may have contributed to the global cooling that followed.

"Why diatom diversity peaked for 4 to 5 million years and then dropped is a big mystery," Rabosky said. "But it corresponds with a period when the global climate swung from hothouse to icehouse. It's tempting to speculate that these tiny plankton, by taking carbon dioxide out of the air, might have helped trigger the most severe global cooling event in the past 100 million years."

The research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation.

Hugh Powell is a science writer at Cornell's Lab of Ornithology.

Energy and Environment

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January 8, 2009

Comments

i found a way to save millions of lives what do you think

January 9, 2009 by Anonymous, 26 weeks 2 days ago
Comment id: 33691

Friday, January 09, 2009

earthquakes

Total Lunar Eclipse: February 20, 2008 6-7 days later

Magnitude ..4.8 - ENGLAND, UNITED KINGDOM

2008 February 27 00:56:45 UTC

Path of the Annular Solar Eclipse of 1992 Jan 04 five days later

09 Jan 1992
UN DHA

Vanuatu Cyclone Betsy Jan 1992 UNDRO Situation Reports 1-5
..
Total Solar Eclipse of 2008 Aug 01 one day later
A magnitude of 5.5 earthquake hit Bacolod early this morning at around 2:15am ... Bacolod Earthquake August 2, 2008 2:15am. Aug.02, 2008 in Bacolod, News, Philippines ...
now look

5.0-magnitude quake hits China's Sichuan province: seismologistsBeijing (AFP) Aug 7, 2008 - A 5.0-magnitude earthquake hit Thursday in southwest ... Beijing (AFP) Aug 6, 2008. A 6.0-magnitude earthquake killed three people ...

now look at this nasa map of the end of the shadow of this eclipse and tell me where it lands
http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEgoogle/SEgoogle2001/SE2008Aug01Tgoogle2.html

2006 Sep 22
11:41:16
Annular
central
144
-0.4062
0.9352
261.0

07m09s
..
http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEgoogle/SEgoogle2001/SE2006Sep22Agoogle.html
7 days later

The largest event to occur this week in this region was a minor earthquake of magnitude 3.8, 12 miles SW of Toms Place, CA at 09:54 PM UTC Friday, 09 29, 2006 (02:54 PM PDT Friday, Sep 29, 2006).

7 M >1.2 earthquakes in the San Francisco Bay area (map).
now these are the after effects
6 days later from eclipse
The largest event to occur this week in this region was a microearthquake of magnitude 2.0, 1 miles ENE of Union City, CA at 03:23 PM UTC Thursday, 09 28, 2006 (08:23 AM PDT Thursday, Sep 28, 2006).
now one of the similarities i notice most happen early in the morning as sun as the sunrises
2006 Borujerd earthquake. Date. Mar 31, 2006. Magnitude. 6.1 Mw. Depth: 7 kilometres (4 mi) ... earthquake occurred in the early morning of March 31, 2006 in ...

Latitude:
18.6890

Longitude:
-107.0570

Depth:
34 km
..
now 6 days later
On Monday April 3 2006 at 7:30 PM (PDT) the USArray seismic network recorded an earthquake (preliminary Mw 5.9) located off the coast of Jalisco, Mexico.
earthquake injures 12: Xinhua, China. Monday, April 3, 2006
look at this nasa map and look where the shadow ends
http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEgoogle/SEgoogle2001/SE2006Mar29Tgoogle.html

2005 Oct 03
10:32:47
Annular
central
134
0.3306
0.9576
162.2
04m32s
..

6 days later look at this map and look where the shadow ends

http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEgoogle/SEgoogle2001/SE2005Oct03Agoogle.html
now as you look where the shadows and you notice a similar distance between the end of the shadow and where the earthquake took place

CNN.com - South Asian quake toll nears 20,000 - Oct 9, 2005

Rescue workers pulled survivors from rubble and uncovered bodies from debris as darkness fell in Islamabad and elsewhere, a day after a 7.6-magnitude earthquake ...

www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/asiapcf/10/..09/..quake.pakistan/index.html
now also notice just about that same distance from pakistan
again notice what time this occured

Earthquake Pakistan 8 Oct 2005

... by the United States Geological Survey, National Earthquake Information Center ... Pakistan at 9:50 PM MDT, Oct 7, 2005 (Oct 08 at 8:50 AM local time ...

2005 Apr 08
20:36:51
Hybrid
central
129
-0.3473
1.0074
27.0
00m42s
..

4 days later

USGS Earthquake Hazards Program " Magnitude 6.7 - SOUTHEAST OF THE ...

Earthquake Details. Magnitude. 6.7. Date-Time. Monday, April 11, 2005 at 17:08:53 (UTC) ... and the Loyalty Islands. Earthquake Information for New Zealand ...

now look at this map notice the similar distance between the end of the shadow to this location

http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEgoogle/SEgoogle2001/SE2005Apr08Hgoogle.html

April 10, 2005

South Asia: Countries affected by the earlier earthquake on December 26

People living on the Indonesian island of Sumatra have fled their homes after an earthquake of magnitude of 6.7 hit the area earlier today. Although the quake was not powerful enough to cause a tsunami, the event sparked fears of a repeat of the December 26 magnitude 9.3 earthquake in which around 300,000 people died. Today's tremor struck 70 miles southwest of Padang, a city in western Sumatra, yet no damage has been reported so far
now what cause the earthquake dec 26 2004
look at this map and if it shows todays date click on date and put in dec 26 2004 notice were the asteriod is
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=2004%20VW14;orb=1
now this is my theory that what cause these earthquakes is a process like quantum entanglement you see it takes the photons from the sun to reach earth in 8 mins 29 secs and based off my calculation accord to the speed of light and distance fromt he earth about 4 milliseconds
now the sunlight contains waves waves are particles planets give off waves magnetic ones
look at this you see the moon aslo has waves weaks ones but based off the distance between the moon and earth its magnetic waves which causetidal waves during full moons reach here in about a sec so in quantum entangle electrons can be in a multitude of location at once with in wavelengths that they are connect to even if its light years away so during an eclipse when the sun hits the moon it doesnt take photons 8 minutes to reach eart they reach earth in the sametime the the ones from the moon does almost instantly now before these particles reach earth they have to go through differrent conversion and changes

Artistic rendition of Magnetosphere.

now during a solar flare solar wind carrys the magnet field from the sun to the earth of course this would cause some king of magnet instability in earths own magentic field it would effect earths normal and reverse polarity now in this case it does take 1 to 6 days to trigger an earthquake it happens that same hour here do you want to know what cause the big tsunami in dec 2004

The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake was an undersea earthquake that occurred at 00:58:53 UTC on December 26, 2004, with an epicentre off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. It is known by the scientific community as the Great Sumatra-Andaman earthquake

beside the asteriods that day click on here and first ill tell you what to find there was a coronal hole

Earth is glidng through a solar wind stream flowing from the indicated coronal hole. Image credit: NOAA's Solar X-ray Imager i cant copy the picture but here now

http://spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&month=12&day=26&year=2004

now these solar winds ejection cause some of the massive earthquakes here

What's Up in Space -- 26 Jan 2001
Subscribe to Space Weather News!

THREE CMEs: Three bright coronal mass ejections billowed away from the Sun in rapid succession yesterday and today, forming a beautiful cloverleaf pattern around our star. None of the CMEs were Earth-directed. [350 kb movie] INVISIBLE TAIL: NASA's IMAGE spacecraft, the first to enjoy a global view of the magnetosphere, has spotted a curious plasma tail pointing from Earth toward the Sun. [FULL STORY] EARTH SONGS: If humans had radio antennas instead of ears, we would hear a remarkable symphony of strange noises coming from the space around our own planet. An online receiver at the Marshall Space Flight Center is playing these elusive songs of Earth so anyone can listen. [FULL ..

Massive earthquake in Gujarat, India on Friday Jan.26,2001

http://gujaratearthquake.homestead.com/
A solar wind stream flowing from the indicated coronal hole could reach Earth on Jan. 8th or 9th. Credit: SOHO Extreme UV
now look this same hole was found jan 7 2009 they believe it each earth on the 8 and 9th according to my theory the effect would have been dealt that same hour
well theres to many but as long as we are in this stream it will trigger earthquakes all around the subduction zones
now how do i plan on being able to predict these events weeks and months in advance is by studying them you notice the distance between the shadows and eclispe and dont get it confused earthquakes happen almost everyday small ones though big ones to but they can be triggered if we can study exactly what triggers them we can know how to predict them
i have drawn maps which mrjohn over the faith mission shelter stole my whole bookbag being nosiy took so i would have to do it over again i need a laptop i only have so much time at the library i could study the weather study the distances location and look for patterns,, ill put those patterns together like a puzzle to make the pieces come together the thing is earths magnetic field moves westward .2 degrees every year the moon seperate from earth a couple i belive if im not correct 18 centimeters ever year so result will vary this is why i have to look for similarities and compare them to eclipse and asteriods which cast a shadow you see around the shadow potent x rays are emitted in the corona the crown,,, now another thing is gravitational lense

SPACE.com -- Universe Loaded With Natural Magnifying Glasses

A survey of a section of the universe reveals 67 new gravitational lenses. ... Cosmic magnifying glasses called gravitational lenses help scientists zoom in on ...

now every celestial body in space creates a gravitation lense i had this in my early blogs before i even leaned what it was but the moon becomes a lense a magnifying one around the edges near the corona where the potent x ray emission are these rays are magnified do to earth around the shadow of the eclipse or what i liek to call the shadow of death think about a magnifying glass you can point it on something and pretty soon it will catch fire right

now

heres a fact

Earthquakes are caused mostly by rupture of geological faults, but also by volcanic activity, landslides, mine blasts, and nuclear experiments. An earthquake's point of initial rupture is called its focus or hypocenter. The term epicenter refers to the point at ground level directly above this

everything in yellow is just like a solar flare and also when an asteriod passes close by the planent they come in groups and they in some case come from outside of out solar system bringing in unknown elements they also create there on magnetic field and waves and are mostle made of iron the same as earth solid cores these waves travel to earthcores converting back and forth from shear waves to pressure waves and reach the surface this effect may take 1-6 days during an eclipse this process is also i see as quantum tunneling

Reflection and tunneling of an electron wavepacket directed at a potential barrier. The bright spot moving to the left is the reflected part of the wavepacket. A very dim spot can be seen moving to the right of the barrier. This is the small fraction of the wavepacket that tunnels through the classically forbidden barrier. Also notice the interference fringes between the incoming and reflected waves.

imagine the bright light like the sunlight and the barried can be the moon and the atmosphere around earth and on earth you notice hwo it gets dim,,, there are alot of things people dont know which exist in the universe

in my thoughts you see i wanted to go to school to be a physist afer i started my self learning steps but as i would read differrent journals and reviews i would learned that their are new discoveries which break the classic laws of physic so i thought why waste countless years studying something thats refutable when i can find out about these new discovers break down what i dont know in them and apply them to other things,,in a sense making me more advance them those who are learning about classic laws for instance like protien in green sulfur bacteria they found electrons break the laws of physic by danicing and leap and instead of being tightly bound it can be in all places at once also when i first learned about quantum entanglement before i learned this it was always my theory light traveled faster then the constant c especially when i leared distant quasars have been know to travel 3 times faster this is why they are held back classic laws of physic where thought o when experimenting was limited so when they try to make new discoveies based off limited information the expectation are limited and they often fail i take another approach i dont believe in everything i read i have to find it out for myself it we all did this imagine the possibilites stop being followers and be more of leaders find out things for your self

i need a job if you can help call 940-723-5663 cory shelby i live in a shelter in wichita falls texas called faith mission