Our planet is becoming a pretty unwelcoming place in the last decades; therefore, we should focus our attention more on NASA’s or Elon Musk’s intention to find us a new world. Mars is the candidate, but will we find little green men there who can provide us a more habitable place and not pierce us with laser guns?
Climate scientists have warned us once again about the intense acidification of the oceans as being a dangerous thing for our planet. Now it turns out that this acidification is reaching worrying heights.
Carbon emissions are pumping up too much
A new scientific study led by Michael Henehan is confirming us that we should be worried about our planet, since those carbon emissions are going up too much and could lead to ecological collapse. A similar turn of events led to a mass extinction about 66 million years ago, and you all know who were the unlucky fellows. The dinosaurs were the ones, and they didn’t even get to invent the wheel nor the Internet.
“We show ocean acidification can precipitate ecological collapse,” Michael Henehan said for The Guardian.
Researchers came to the conclusion that we should be alarmed and do something before it’s too late after they examined a bunch of shell fossils. They were in sediment dating back to the amount of time just after the meteorite struck the planet and killed the dinosaurs. This showed that the oceans’ pH dropped by about 0.25 units in the 100 to 1,000 years after the strike.
“In the boundary clay, we managed to capture them just limping on past the asteroid impact,” Henehan said.
And yes, the asteroid killed most of the dinosaurs, but it was the effects of acidification and the nuclear winter that followed the impact which led to the complete extinction.
“If 0.25 was enough to precipitate a mass extinction, we should be worried,” Henahan told The Guardian.
Some of the factors that are causing ocean acidification are the continuous burning of coal, oil, and gas. We have been warned once again, and we should think more about the future of our world and actually do something to get it better.
Therefore, things are looking pretty bad for our planet. Do you have any ideas for how can we move to Mars faster?
