A story making the rounds is creating headlines such as the one in the ever credulous Arizona Daily Star: “Flatulent dinosaurs helped warm Earth, study says.” British researchers posit that the flatulence of herbivorous dinosaurs produced so much methane that it warmed the climate. The paper, published in Current Biology is summarized by the authors as follows:

Mesozoic sauropods, like many modern herbivores, are likely to have hosted microbial methanogenic symbionts for the fermentative digestion of their plant food. Today methane from livestock is a significant component of the global methane budget. Sauropod methane emission would probably also have been considerable. Here, we use a simple quantitative approach to estimate the magnitude of such methane production and show that the production of the greenhouse gas methane by sauropods could have been an important factor in warm Mesozoic climates.

If you read the story (full text here) you will find that the contention depends on many assumptions and rather extravagant extrapolation. The gassiest dinosaurs were the Sauropods which became abundant during the Jurassic Period about 150 million years ago. Global temperatures are estimated to have been 18 F warmer than today, but that warmth began in the preceding Triassic Period about 250 million years ago. There seems to be a timing problem. Also, the researchers estimate that the amount of methane produced by dinosaurs was similar to the amount produced today by livestock farming and industry, so why aren’t we warmer?

At the end of the paper, the researchers note as an attempted justification for their speculation:

 ”Although dinosaurs are unique in the large body sizes they achieved, there may have been other occasions in the past where animal-produced methane contributed substantially to global environmental gas composition: for example, it has been speculated that the extinction of megafauna coincident with human colonization of the Americas may be related to a reduction of atmospheric methane levels.”

That references a 2010 paper in which the researchers estimated the amount of methane produced by mammoths and other large herbivores. They speculate that the arrival of humans in North America and the subsequent disappearance of these animals reduced methane emissions and led to an abrupt cooling period, the Younger Dryas, about 12,800 years ago.

At the end of the Younger Dryas, the global temperatures and atmospheric methane both rose rapidly. So where did the methane come from since those flatulent mammoths were no more? The mammoth fart theory fails to explain previous similar abrupt cooling and warming in the Older Dryas period and the Oldest Dryas period, nor a subsequent similar event about 8,200 years ago.

Both of these papers present interesting stories, but they both fail upon close inspection. Still, science is speculative and the stories make headlines and get the authors published.

See also:

Arizona Geological History Chapter 5: Jurassic Time

Ice Ages and Glacial Epochs

Research Review 3 Climate cycles and a Mammoth Mystery

A new analysis of supernovae and geology by Dr. Henrik Svensmark of the Technical University of Denmark, posits that astronomical phenomena had a great influence upon life on Earth. Dr. Svensmark looked back through 500 million years of geological and astronomical data and considered the proximity of the Sun to supernovae as it moves around our Galaxy, the Milky Way. The announcement of the study from the Royal Astronomical Society reads:

Research by a Danish physicist suggests that the explosion of massive stars – supernovae – near the Solar System has strongly influenced the development of life. Prof. Henrik Svensmark of the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) sets out his novel work in a paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

When the most massive stars exhaust their available fuel and reach the end of their lives, they explode as supernovae, tremendously powerful explosions that are briefly brighter than an entire galaxy of normal stars. The remnants of these dramatic events also release vast numbers of high-energy charged particles known as galactic cosmic rays (GCR). If a supernova is close enough to the Solar System, the enhanced GCR levels can have a direct impact on the atmosphere of the Earth.

Prof. Svensmark looked back through 500 million years of geological and astronomical data and considered the proximity of the Sun to supernovae as it moves around our Galaxy, the Milky Way. In particular, when the Sun is passing through the spiral arms of the Milky Way, it encounters newly forming clusters of stars. These so-called open clusters, which disperse over time, have a range of ages and sizes and will have started with a small proportion of stars massive enough to explode as supernovae. From the data on open clusters, Prof. Svensmark was able to deduce how the rate at which supernovae exploded near the Solar System varied over time.

Comparing this with the geological record, he found that the changing frequency of nearby supernovae seems to have strongly shaped the conditions for life on Earth. Whenever the Sun and its planets have visited regions of enhanced star formation in the Milky Way Galaxy, where exploding stars are most common, life has prospered. Prof. Svensmark remarks in the paper, “The biosphere seems to contain a reflection of the sky, in that the evolution of life mirrors the evolution of the Galaxy.”

In the new work, the diversity of life over the last 500 million years seems remarkably well explained by tectonics affecting the sea-level together with variations in the supernova rate, and virtually nothing else. To obtain this result on the variety of life, or biodiversity, he followed the changing fortunes of the best-recorded fossils. These are from invertebrate animals in the sea, such as shrimps and octopuses, or the extinct trilobites and ammonites.

They tended to be richest in their variety when continents were drifting apart and sea levels were high and less varied when the land masses gathered 250 million years ago into the supercontinent called Pangaea and the sea-level was lower. But this geophysical effect was not the whole story. When it is removed from the record of biodiversity, what remains corresponds closely to the changing rate of nearby stellar explosions, with the variety of life being greatest when supernovae are plentiful. A likely reason, according to Prof. Svensmark, is that the cold climate associated with high supernova rates brings a greater variety of habitats between polar and equatorial regions, while the associated stresses of life prevent the ecosystems becoming too set in their ways.

He also notices that most geological periods seem to begin and end with either an upturn or a downturn in the supernova rate. The changes in typical species that define a period, in the transition from one to the next, could then be the result of a major change in the astrophysical environment.

Life’s prosperity, or global bioproductivity, can be tracked by the amount of carbon dioxide in the air at various times in the past as set out in the geological record. When supernova rates were high, carbon dioxide was scarce, suggesting that flourishing microbial and plant life in the oceans consumed it greedily to grow. Support for this idea comes from the fact that microbes and plants dislike carbon dioxide molecules that contain a heavy form of carbon atom, carbon-13. As a result, the ocean water is left enriched by carbon-13. The geological evidence shows high carbon-13 when supernovae were commonest – again pointing to high productivity. As to why this should be, Prof. Svensmark notes that growth is limited by available nutrients, especially phosphorus and nitrogen, and that cold conditions favour the recycling of the nutrients by vigorously mixing the oceans.

Although the new analysis suggests, perhaps surprisingly, that supernovae are on the whole good for life, high supernova rates can bring the cold and changeable climate of prolonged glacial episodes. And they can have nasty shocks in store. Geoscientists have long been puzzled by many relatively brief falls in sea-level by 25 metres or more that show up in seismic soundings as eroded beaches. Prof. Svensmark finds that they are what can be expected when chilling due to very close supernovae causes short-lived glacial episodes. With frozen water temporarily bottled up on land, the sea-level drops.

The data also support the idea of a long-term link between cosmic rays and climate, with these climatic changes underlying the biological effects. And compared with the temperature variations seen on short timescales as a consequence of the Sun’s influence on the influx of cosmic rays, the heating and cooling of the Earth due to cosmic rays varying with the prevailing supernova rate have been far larger.

The director of DTU Space, Prof. Eigil Friis-Christensen, comments: “When this enquiry into effects of cosmic rays from supernova remnants began 16 years ago, we never imagined that it would lead us so deep into time, or into so many aspects of the Earth’s history. The connection to evolution is a culmination of this work.”

See full paper here. This is a 20-page paper with many figures, 4Mb.

The University of Arizona has produced a short (3 minute) video of beautiful mineral crystals. The video photography and narration are by Kenneth Don, a UA electronic technician for the Steward Observatory. I know Kenny; he is frequently out at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum photographing plants and animals.

Enjoy the video: http://www.uanews.org/node/46051