Permian-Triassic mystery solved; cute baby spotted; the nine-day seismic event of 2023

This week, a billionaire went on a spacewalk, archaeologists discovered a new, isolated Neanderthal lineage, and the James Webb Space Telescope revealed the outer edges of the Milky Way. And a few other things happened:

Rumble clarified

If you’re hypersensitive to longitudinal P-wave seismic frequencies, you may have noticed a rumbling beneath your feet that echoed throughout the Earth for nine days in 2023. “What is that?” you may have wondered as scientists hooked electrodes to your body to study your seismologically strange, earthquake-detecting physiology.

An international team has investigated this mystery and found a likely solution: A mountain peak in a fjord in East Greenland collapsed into the sea, triggering a mega-tsunami with 200-meter-high waves that echoed back and forth in the fjord for nine days, creating seismic waves that reverberated around the Earth. Seismologists thought this was pretty strange at the time. And like most catastrophic phenomena today, it was caused by climate change, according to the new study.

The warming climate caused the glacier at the base of Dickson Fjord to melt, destabilizing 33 million cubic meters of rock and ice that fell into the sea. “Climate change is changing what is normal on Earth, and it can set unusual events in motion,” said seismologist Alice Gabriel of UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography in what can only be described as a seismic understatement.

Baby cute, endangered

Officials at an Indonesian national park announced the sighting of a young Javan rhino calf in the wild, proof that the endangered species is still reproducing. The female calf, named Iris, appears to be between three and five months old. A camera trap caught the baby Rhinoceros sondaicus walking with its mother, completely relaxed, no big deal, just an adorable and critically endangered animal hanging around.

Ujung Kulon National Park, the only existing protected area for the species, announced the sighting of two more calves in the park earlier this year. Despite the good news, the species is still threatened by rampant poaching and natural disasters. According to the International Rhino Foundation, there are only 80 living Javan rhinos left in the world.

Study objectively frightening

There are few things that unsettle me as much, or send me into a dissociative future tense as much as the widespread scientific consensus that the Permian-Triassic mass extinction 252 million years ago was caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide emissions from volcanoes that saturated the atmosphere, leading to climate change and the collapse of terrestrial and marine ecosystems. But the associated decline in normally resilient insect and plant life remains a mystery—generally, plants and insects spread to cooler climates as temperatures rise in the tropics.

Now, researchers from the University of Bristol and China University of Geosciences have published a study arguing that the impacts of rapid climate change were so devastating compared to today because of the long-lasting El Niño events. During these decades-long events, weather and climate fluctuations were extreme and temperature gradients collapsed – essentially, it was too hot everywhere. The long-lasting El Niño that caused the June 2024 heatwave raised temperatures around 15 degrees Celsius above normal worldwide.

Paul Wignall, professor of palaeoenvironment at the University of Leeds, says: “Fortunately, such events have so far only lasted one or two years. During the Permian-Triassic crisis, El Niño lasted much longer, leading to a decade of extended drought followed by years of flooding. Essentially, the climate was very messed up, and that makes it very difficult for any species to adapt.”

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