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  • What is interesting is that plant communities diverge and converge over 100k+ year timeframes. The boreal or what have you might have looked a bit different in terms of composition a few 100k years ago. Most env. Scientists (myself included until I learned this) tend to think of ecosystems as relatively static, but that's not the case. They, like the organisms they contain, adapt to external pressure, or die.

  • The Siberian Traps event released some 40,000 gigatons (Gt) of carbon over 200,000 years. The resulting increase in global average temperatures between 5 - 10°C caused Earth’s most severe extinction event in the geologic record”.

    We are emitting more carbon than any volcanic event

    Nonchalant whistling of oil executives can be heard in the background

  • The biggest difference we see between today's world and that world is the almost instantaneous movement (in evolutionary time) of plant and animal species with very high degrees of invasiveness, almost globally. It's not clear how this would impact the adaptation phase of these events, but I have a hard time imagining it following the same tract as how global warming would impact integrated, in tact ecosystems.

    • They say right in the article that decline in veg resulted in worse and longer climate change.

      Degradation of ecosystems with invasive spp. Likely just increases the rate of veg removal

      • For one, an invasive species could force a lot of other competitors into extinction, dropping the diversity. Then the now dominant invasive species suffers its own decline, leaving much less left.

7 comments