NASA Falling Short of Asteroid Detection Goals

The team says it is almost certain that a large Baptistina fragment created the 180km Chicxulub crater off the coast of the Yucatan 65 million years ago. The impact that produced this crater has been strongly linked to the mass extinction event that eliminated the dinosaurs. Image from The BBC.

From Wired Science:

Without more funding, NASA will not meet its goal of tracking 90 percent of all deadly asteroids by 2020, according to a report released today by the National Academy of Sciences.

The agency is on track to soon be able to spot 90 percent of the potentially dangerous objects that are at least a kilometer (.6 miles) wide, a goal previously mandated by Congress.

Asteroids of this size are estimated to strike Earth once every 500,000 years on average and could be capable of causing a global catastrophe if they hit Earth. In 2008, NASA’s Near Earth Object Program spotted a total of 11,323 objects of all sizes.

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Extinction Hits 'Whole Families'

From The BBC:

Whole "chunks of life" are lost in extinction events, as related species vanish together, say scientists.

A study in the journal Science shows that extinctions tend to "cluster" on evolutionary lineages - wiping out species with a common ancestor.

The finding is based on an examination of past extinctions, but could help current conservation efforts.

Researchers say that this phenomenon can result in the loss of an entire branch of the "tree of life".

The message for modern conservation, say the authors, is that some groups are more vulnerable to extinction than others, and the focus should be on the lineages most at risk.

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Human Activity Is Driving Earth's 'Sixth Great Extinction Event'

The leatherback turtle is endangered - but scientific reports expose worrying signs of mass extinctions among other wildlife species. Photograph: Frans Lemmens/Getty Images

From The Guardian:

Population growth, pollution and invasive species are having a disastrous effect on species in the southern hemisphere, a major review by conservationists warns.

Earth is experiencing its "sixth great extinction event" with disease and human activity taking a devastating toll on vulnerable species, according to a major review by conservationists.

Much of the southern hemisphere is suffering particularly badly, and Australia, New Zealand and neighbouring Pacific islands may become the extinction hot spots of the world, the report warns.

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Will Comets Wipe Out Life On Planet Earth? -- News Roundup

According to scientists Jupiter and Saturn have protected life on Earth for hundreds of millions of years by catching and batting away dangerous comets Photo: PA

Comet 'Unlikely To Wipe Out Earth' -- The Telegraph

The Earth is being protected from comets, thanks to the gravitational pulls of Saturn and Jupiter, according to new research

It is the plot of many a Hollywood science fiction thriller - a comet on a direct collision course with Earth destined to wipe out all known life.

But the producers of Deep Impact and other blockbusters might be wide of the mark, scientists have found, as new evidence suggests comets pose less of a threat to life on earth than previously imagined.

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More News On Comets And Striking The Earth

Comets probably won't destroy life on Earth, researchers say -- National Post
Comets probably won't cause the end of life as we know it: study -- AFP
Comets Not So Likely to Smash Into Earth and Kill Us All -- Discover Magazine
Comets From Edge of Solar System Unlikely to Hit Earth -- Space.com
Comet Collisions Won’t Spark The End Of The World -- Red Orbit
Doomsday Comet Less Likely, Calculations Show -- Discovery
Crashing Comets Not Likely The Cause Of Earth's Mass Extinctions -- Science Daily

Comet Killed Ice Age Beasts

The nanodiamonds were found on the island of Santa Rosa, which was linked to three of the Northern Channel Islands off the southern California coast in a landmass known as Santarosae (encircled at top). Credit: Courtesy NOAA and UC Santa Barbara.

From Live Science:

Space rocks that slammed into the glaciers of eastern Canada some 12,900 years ago likely helped wiped out mega-animals like woolly mammoths and possibly the continent's first human inhabitants called the Clovis people, according to a new study that adds to evidence that a trio of factors were involved.

The new evidence comes from recently discovered nano-sized diamonds, which researchers say are the strongest clues to date for an argument that could explain the region's die-off during the late Pleistocene epoch.

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How Global Catastrophe Could Make Us Smarter

From Live Science:

When supervolcanoes blow their tops, the world's climate is altered and life is snuffed out regionally and challenged globally. Such an event is thought to have occurred 74,000 years ago when the Toba supervolcano erupted in what is now Sumatra with a force estimated to be 1,000 to 10,000 times that of Mount St. Helens.

The timing of Toba's tempest fits with an interesting bottleneck known to exist in human evolution, as seen in DNA evidence. The population became very small sometime between 90,000 and 60,000 years ago. And a new idea floating around suggests that the eruption may have contributed — by necessity — to our supreme intelligence today. Further, it has been suggested, we may be undergoing the next great leap in smarts right now.

More on all that lower down. First, some fresh research on the eruption:

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Ancient Volcanic Eruptions Caused Global Mass Extinction

Researchers believe they have uncovered evidence of a giant volcanic eruption that led to global mass extinction 260 million years ago. (Credit: iStockphoto/James Steidl)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (May 30, 2009) — A previously unknown giant volcanic eruption that led to global mass extinction 260 million years ago has been uncovered by scientists at the University of Leeds.

The eruption in the Emeishan province of south-west China unleashed around half a million cubic kilometres of lava, covering an area 5 times the size of Wales, and wiping out marine life around the world.

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Who Is Responsible For Averting An Asteroid Strike?

This NASA slide depicts the catastrophic collision of a massive comet or asteroid with earth 250 million years ago, which appears to be the reason 90 percent of all marine species and 70 percent of all land vertebrates abruptly died out. (NASA/Newscom/File)

From Christian Science Monitor:

Column: It's time to set aside political quibbles and form an international plan.

Asteroid hunters have good news – and a challenge – for the rest of us.After an extensive search for asteroids a kilometer or more across, engineer Steve Chesley says that “we can now say with confidence that no asteroids large enough to cause such a global calamity [as killing off the dinosaurs] are headed our way.”

But if one of them – or even a smaller, city-destroying rock – were detected on a collision course, would the world community be prepared to handle it? A conference of legal experts that discussed this question at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln last month answered it with a resounding “No.”

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When Comets Attack: Solving the Mystery of the Biggest Natural Explosion in Modern History

(Photograph by Pete Turner/Getty Images)

From Popular Mechanics:

On the morning of June 30, 1908, the sky exploded over a remote region of central Siberia. A fireball as powerful as hundreds of Hiroshima atomic blasts scorched through the upper atmosphere, burning nearly 800 square miles of land. Scientists today think a small fragment of a comet or asteroid caused the "Tunguska event," so named for the Tunguska river nearby. Now, a controversial new scientific study suggests that a chunk of a comet caused the 5-10 megaton fireball, bouncing off the atmosphere and back into orbit around the sun. The scientists have even identified a candidate Tunguska object—now more than 100 million miles away—that will pass close to Earth again in 2045. Is there a hidden, but powerful, danger inside the seemingly harmless comet?

On the morning of June 30, 1908, the sky exploded over a remote region of central Siberia. A fireball as powerful as hundreds of Hiroshima atomic blasts scorched through the upper atmosphere "as if there was a second sun," according to one eyewitness. Scientists today think a small fragment of a comet or asteroid caused the "Tunguska event," so named for the Tunguska river nearby. No one knows for certain, however, because no fragment of the meteoroid has ever been found. The explosion was so vast—flattening and incinerating over an 800 square-mile swath of trees—that generations of amateur sleuths have put forward scenarios as strange as stray black holes or UFO attacks to explain the tremendous explosion.

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Poison Bacteria Set Up Worst Extinction

In the three to four million years before the Permian-Triassic extinction, illustrated here, the seas were already oxygen-starved, according to a new study. The stagnant depths were a haven for bacteria that belched poison that crippled life on Earth, leaving it vulnerable to the volcanic knockout punch that would soon come. Lunar and Planetary Institute

From MSNBC:

New finding gets to heart of a long debate among extinction researchers.

In the ancient oceans, stagnant depths harbored poison-belching bacteria that crippled life on Earth, leaving it vulnerable to a knockout punch from volcanic eruptions, according to a new study.

Three to four million years before the Permian-Triassic extinction, also known as the Great Dying, the seas were already becoming oxygen-starved and sour, said the study in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

Changqun Cao of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Nanjing and a team of researchers studied rock samples drilled in central China from the late Permian and early Triassic periods. Rocks from the extinction itself date to 252.2 million years ago, and show several chemical signs of catastrophe.

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Gamma-Ray Burst Caused Mass Extinction?

Gamma-ray bursts are thought to be streams of high-energy radiation produced when the core of a very massive star collapses, as seen in the above artist's rendering. An April 2009 paper suggests that a gamma-ray burst aimed at Earth may have caused a mass extinction event 440 million years ago, and that a similar celestial catastrophe could happen again. Illustration courtesy NASA/CXC/M.Weiss

From National Geographic:

A brilliant burst of gamma rays may have caused a mass extinction event on Earth 440 million years ago—and a similar celestial catastrophe could happen again, according to a new study.

Most gamma-ray bursts are thought to be streams of high-energy radiation produced when the core of a very massive star collapses.

The new computer model shows that a gamma-ray burst aimed at Earth could deplete the ozone layer, cause acid rain, and initiate a round of global cooling from as far as 6,500 light-years away.

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New Theory On Largest Known Mass Extinction In Earth's History

Hypothetically speaking, large areas of the hyper saline Zechstein Sea and its direct environment could have looked like this, which in the Permian Age was situated about where present day Central Europe is. At the end of the Permian Age the Zechstein Sea was irrevocably disconnected from the open sea and the remaining sections of sea soon dried out after that. As a result the microbial-limited halogenated gases from the Zechstein Sea stopped and vegetation was able to regenerate again. The pink colour of the Zechstein Sea was probably brought about by microbes with an extreme preference for salt, as is the case with salt lakes today. In the background sand dunes can be recognised from a landscape with hardly any water. (Credit: Dr. Karsten Kotte/Universität Heidelberg)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 31, 2009) — The largest mass extinction in the history of the earth could have been triggered off by giant salt lakes, whose emissions of halogenated gases changed the atmospheric composition so dramatically that vegetation was irretrievably damaged.

At least that is what an international team of scientists has reported in the most recent edition of the Proceedings of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Dokladi Earth Sciences). At the Permian/Triassic boundary, 250 million years ago, about 90 percent of the animal and plant species ashore became extinct. Previously it was thought that volcanic eruptions, the impacts of asteroids, or methane hydrate were instigating causes.

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Today's Unsettling Comparison To 'The Great Dying'

From ABC News:

250 Million Years Ago, Rising Greenhouse Gas Levels Set Off Catastrophic Changes

In 1980, scientists Luis Alvarez and his son, Walter, proposed a new explanation for the dinosaurs' disappearance 65 million years ago: a meteor strike. Initially, the idea was met with resistance. But the evidence was convincing: a sediment layer high in iridium, an element common in asteroids, was found the world over, along with a 110-mile-wide impact crater in the Yucatán of the same age. What started as a fringe idea has gone mainstream.

Now scientists are rethinking another of earth's great die-offs. The end-Permian extinction 251 million years ago was the worst of earth's five mass extinctions. Ninety percent of all marine life and 70 percent of terrestrial life disappeared. It took five million years, perhaps more, for the biosphere to recover.

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Asking ‘Why Do Species Go Extinct?’

‘I realized that extinction was something that as a scientist, I could study. I could ask, Why do species go extinct?’ - Stuart L. Pimm Alex di Suvero for The New York Times

From New York Times:

For a man whose scholarly specialty is one of the grimmest topics on earth — extinction — Stuart L. Pimm is remarkably chipper. On a recent morning, while visiting New York City, Dr. Pimm, a 59-year-old zoologist, was full of warm stories about the many places he travels: South Africa, Madagascar and even South Florida, which he visits as part of an effort to save the endangered Florida panther. Fewer than 100 survive in the wild. In 2006, Dr. Pimm, who holds the Doris Duke professorship of Conservation Ecology at Duke University, won the Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences, the Nobel of the ecology world.

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Mexico City's 'Water Monster' Nears Extinction

Sep. 27: An Axolotl salamander, or Ambystoma mexicanum, swims in a tank
at the Chapultepec Zoo in Mexico City.

From FOX News:

MEXICO CITY — Beneath the tourist gondolas in the remains of a great Aztec lake lives a creature that resembles a monster — and a Muppet — with its slimy tail, plumage-like gills and mouth that curls into an odd smile.

The axolotl, also known as the "water monster" and the "Mexican walking fish," was a key part of Aztec legend and diet. Against all odds, it survived until now amid Mexico City's urban sprawl in the polluted canals of Lake Xochimilco, now a Venice-style destination for revelers poled along by Mexican gondoliers, or trajineros, in brightly painted party boats.

But scientists are racing to save the foot-long salamander from extinction, a victim of the draining of its lake habitat and deteriorating water quality. In what may be the final blow, nonnative fish introduced into the canals are eating its lunch — and its babies.

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Current Mass Extinction Spurs Major Study Of Which Plants To Save

From E! Science News:

The Earth is in the midst of the sixth mass extinction of both plants and animals, with nearly 50 percent of all species disappearing, scientists say. Because of the current crisis, biologists at UC Santa Barbara are working day and night to determine which species must be saved. Their international study of grassland ecosystems, with flowering plants, is published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"The current extinction event is due to human activity, paving the planet, creating pollution, many of the things that we are doing today," said co-author Bradley J. Cardinale, assistant professor of ecology, evolution and marine biology (EEMB) at UC Santa Barbara. "The Earth might well lose half of its species in our lifetime. We want to know which ones deserve the highest priority for conservation."

He explained that the last mass extinction near the current level was 65 million years ago, called the Cretaceous Tertiary extinction event, and was probably the result of a meteor hitting the Earth. It is best known for the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs, but massive amounts of plant species became extinct at that time as well.

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Are Mammals Heading For Extinction

Two Tasmanian Devil females are seen in captivity at the Tasmanian Devil Conservation Park in Taranna. Half the world's mammals are declining in population and more than a third probably face extinction, according to an update of the "Red List," the most respected inventory of biodiversity. (Photo: Breitbart)

Half Of Mammals 'In Decline', Says Extinction 'Red List'
-- Breitbart/AFP

Half the world's mammals are declining in population and more than a third probably face extinction, said an update Monday of the "Red List," the most respected inventory of biodiversity.

A comprehensive survey of mammals included in the annual report by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which covers more than 44,000 animal and plant species, shows that a quarter of the planet's 5,487 known mammals are clearly at risk of disappearing forever.

But the actual situation may be even grimmer because researchers have been unable to classify the threat level for another 836 mammals due to lack of data.

"In reality, the number of threatened mammals could be as high as 36 percent," said IUCN scientist Jan Schipper, lead author of the mammal survey, in remarks published separately in the US-based journal Science.

The most vulnerable groups are primates, our nearest relatives on the evolutionary ladder, and marine mammals, including several species of whales, dolphins and porpoises.

"Our results paint a bleak picture of the global status of mammals worldwide," said Schipper.

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10 Species You Can Kiss Goodbye

Sumatran Rhinoceros

From Live Science:

Think the polar bear has it bad? Here are 10 critters who are even worse off than our favorite threatened Arctic resident. Listed on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) Red List as critically endangered, meaning they face an extremely high risk of extinction in the immediate future, these animals may not live to see the end of the next decade without the a similar effort of human intervention that brought them to the brink in the first place.

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Scientists Close In On Mass Killer Of Life On Earth

From McClatchy:

WASHINGTON — It was the greatest mass murder of all time — poison everywhere! billions slain! — but the killer or killers have never been positively identified.

An estimated 95 percent of all marine species and up to 85 percent of land creatures perished, according to Peter Ward, a paleobiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Scientists call it "The Great Dying." Life took millions of years to recover.

Scientific sleuths, however, now think they're making progress toward pinning down what caused the extinction of most plants and animals on Earth some 251 million years ago.

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