Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Friday December 14 2018, @08:08AM   Printer-friendly
from the supernovae-have-that-effect-on-planets dept.

Researchers consider whether supernovae killed off large ocean animals at dawn of Pleistocene

About 2.6 million years ago, an oddly bright light arrived in the prehistoric sky and lingered there for weeks or months. It was a supernova some 150 light years away from Earth. Within a few hundred years, long after the strange light in the sky had dwindled, a tsunami of cosmic energy from that same shattering star explosion could have reached our planet and pummeled the atmosphere, touching off climate change and triggering mass extinctions of large ocean animals, including a shark species that was the size of a school bus.

[...] The effects of such a supernova — and possibly more than one — on large ocean life are detailed in a paper just published in Astrobiology.

[...] A supernova 2.6 million years ago may be related to a marine megafaunal extinction at the Pliocene-Pleistocene boundary where 36 percent of the genera were estimated to become extinct. The extinction was concentrated in coastal waters, where larger organisms would catch a greater radiation dose from the muons.

According to the authors of the new paper, damage from muons would extend down hundreds of yards into ocean waters, becoming less severe at greater depths: "High energy muons can reach deeper in the oceans being the more relevant agent of biological damage as depth increases," they write.

Indeed, a famously large and fierce marine animal inhabiting shallower waters may have been doomed by the supernova radiation.

"One of the extinctions that happened 2.6 million years ago was Megalodon," Melott said. "Imagine the Great White Shark in 'Jaws,' which was enormous — and that's Megalodon, but it was about the size of a school bus. They just disappeared about that time. So, we can speculate it might have something to do with the muons. Basically, the bigger the creature is the bigger the increase in radiation would have been."

Megalodon (Carcharocles megalodon).

Hypothesis: Muon Radiation Dose and Marine Megafaunal Extinction at the End-Pliocene Supernova (DOI: 10.1089/ast.2018.1902) (DX)


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by MostCynical on Friday December 14 2018, @11:11AM

    by MostCynical (2589) on Friday December 14 2018, @11:11AM (#774344) Journal

    I meant one, typed the other. Links are for the correct beast.

    --
    "I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2