It never ceases to amaze me. You know? If these scientists just accepted creation and the flood, they'd be out of jobs. I think that is part of why they stay in denial. So now, they find layers and layers of sediment, something that to me would suggest lots of water covered the whole earth because the sediment is uniform around the world, and what do they say? There was a great oxygen deprivation and release of methane gas that created a massive global warming along with lava flow! Yes there was oxygen deprivation. Yes massive numbers of creatures in the ocean and on the earth died all at once. The suffocated and drowned in the flood! I could just be soooooo exasperated if I let myself.
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Volcanic activity eyed in "Great Dying" 250 million years ago
By Guy Gugliotta
The Washington Post
WASHINGTON — Scientists call it "The Great Dying," a 250 million-year-old catastrophe that wiped out 90 percent of ocean species and 70 percent of land species in the biggest mass extinction in Earth's geologic history.
The cause of the cataclysm is a matter of great dispute among paleontologists, but research released yesterday offers new evidence that global warming caused by massive and prolonged volcanic activity may have been the chief culprit.
Huge amounts of carbon dioxide were released into the air from open volcanic fissures known to geologists as the "Siberian Traps," researchers said, triggering a greenhouse effect that warmed the Earth and depleted oxygen from the atmosphere, causing environmental deterioration and, finally, collapse.
A second set of findings suggested that the warming also crippled the oceans' ability to refresh their oxygen supply, causing the seas to go sterile, destroying marine life and allowing anaerobic bacteria (which do not require oxygen) to release poisonous hydrogen sulfide into the air.
The two reports, prepared independently, cast doubt on another theory: that "The Great Dying" was caused by the impact of an asteroid or comet like the one that triggered the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Both studies were published yesterday by Science Express, the online version of the journal Science.
"This is not a world that is happy and then goes 'bang!' " said University of Washington paleontologist Peter Ward, leader of one of the studies. "This is a world that's in trouble for a long time, and then it gets in even worse trouble."
Ward led a team of scientists in a seven-year project to chronicle 126 fossil skulls in a 1,000-foot-thick deposit of sedimentary rock in southeastern South Africa's Karoo Basin.
Ward said the team's excavations showed a steady decline in the number of species over about 10 million years, followed by a sudden plunge 250 million years ago at the boundary between the Permian and Triassic periods of geologic time. The interval corresponds to a period of prolonged volcanic activity over one-third of modern-day Siberia.
Temperatures climbed globally as carbon dioxide poured into the atmosphere and oxygen levels fell, forcing gasping animals to gather at sea level, he said. "And the plants are not dealing well with the heat" either, he added. "Eventually, the imbalance reaches a critical point and everything dies."
The warming also meant that polar oceans were not cooled as much as they are today, and the cycle that circulates cold, oxygen- and nutrient-rich water between the poles and the tropics was slowed and even stopped, according to the second paper by a team of researchers led by Kliti Grice of the Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Australia.
"This has devastating effects on the marine organisms that rely on oxygen and nutrients to survive," the team said in an e-mail. "In the worst-case ... a major part of the water column above the sea floor is devoid of oxygen."
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