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Volcanic Eruptions That Shaped Oregon May Have Had a Chilling Effect

John Wolff
John Wolff

There are signs of it all over Oregon and Washington: the dramatic cliffs of the Columbia River Gorge, the layered rock along the Palouse River, the ash deposits around the Zumwalt Prairie. A series of volcanic eruptions, starting 17.5 million years ago, formed the Columbia River Basalt Group, a complex of rock formations that was created over a few million years as lava erupted from fissures in the ground and seeped over the landscape.

The eruptions deposited about 10,000 cubic miles of rock and, according to new research, probably released enough sulfur gas to cool the whole planet down.

“The climate was already warming up rapidly before the whole eruption period started,” says John Wolff, a geologist at Washington State University and coauthor of the study. “Right at the peak of the [Miocene] Climatic Optimum, when these eruptions happened, there’s a little downturn in temperature. It’s actually two peaks of warming, separated by this cooling period.”

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Atlas Obscura

The surface of Mars is probably too toxic for bacteria to survive

 

Dirk Schulze-Makuch
Dirk Schulze-Makuch

Mars is not a very welcoming place. It’s cold, there’s hardly any atmosphere, and its bombarded with deep space radiation. Even the soil wants to kill you; as the Phoenix lander confirmed in 2009, the Martian regolith is laced with perchlorates—chlorine-based compounds that, when heated up, can rip apart organic materials, like cells and their building blocks.

To try to find out exactly what those perchlorates might do to Martian microorganisms, researchers at the University of Edinburgh pitted bacteria against this compound in a battery of tests. What they found does not bode well for the search for life on Mars: Under Mars-like conditions, the perchlorates were indeed toxic to the microbes.

“We knew before that any life would have an incredibly hard time to survive on the surface, and this study experimentally confirms that,” says Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist at Washington State University, who wasn’t involved in the new study.

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Popular Science

Ask Dr. Universe: Why do volcanoes ‘die?’

John Wolff
John Wolff

Each volcano’s life is a little different. Many of them are born when big chunks of the Earth’s crust, or tectonic plates, collide or move away from each other. The moving plates force hot, liquid rock, or magma, to rise up from deep within the Earth. Some volcanoes can spew ash and lava several miles into the sky. Others will slowly ooze out lava.

Just as each volcano is unique, so are the reasons they go extinct. Generally, though, if a volcano doesn’t have a source of magma, it won’t erupt. That’s what I found out from my friend John Wolff, a geologist at Washington State University.

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Ask Dr. Universe

Should scientists be looking for the last life-forms on Mars?

Dirk Schulze-Makuch
Dirk Schulze-Makuch

Dirk Shulze-Makuch, a professor in the WSU School of the Environment, is a co-author of an upcoming paper that suggests scientists should look for evidence of life-forms that survived on the Martian surface when most or all of the liquid water had disappeared. » More …