In the last 260 million years, our planet has witnessed many great events. Dinosaurs came and went, the continents that were once a single piece of land called ‘pangea’ were divided into seven parts and took their current form, and the world began to change rapidly and irreversibly with the entry of humans into the theater stage of life.
And while all this was going on, the Earth continued to ‘time’. A recent study of ancient geological events showed that our planet had a slow and steady ‘heartbeat’ of geological activity.
Earth’s ‘heart’ beats every 27.5 million years
According to a study published in Geoscience Frontiers, volcanic activity, mass extinctions, Representing these clustered geological events, including plate realignment and sea-level rise, this heartbeat is an incredibly slow 27.5 million-year cycle of catastrophic tides and flows. In other words, this heartbeat occurs every 27.5 million years. “Many geologists believe that geological events are random over time,” said Michael Rampino, a New York University geologist and lead author of the study, “However, our study provides statistical evidence for a common cycle,”
said in 2021. , which suggests that these geological events are interrelated and not random.” saves as.
The team performed an analysis over the ages of 89 well-understood geological events that took place over the past 260 million years. According to the analysis, some of the times when such events occurred were particularly difficult as more than eight world-changing events combined in geologically small time periods to create a catastrophic ‘pulse’ as you can see in the chart below:
These events include “marine and non-marine extinctions, great oceanic anoxic events, continental flood-basalt eruptions, sea-level fluctuations, global intraplate magmatism pulses, and times of change in seafloor spreading rates and plate reconstructions”. “Our results show that global geological events are generally related and come in pulses with an underlying cycle of ~27.5 million years.”
The cause of the heartbeat is unknown
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On the other hand, the same research supplement published in 2020 Another study by 1,000 suggests that this 27.5-million-year period was also the time of major extinction events.
However, it is unknown what causes the Earth’s heartbeat every 27.5 million years. While other research by Rampino and his team thinks that the cause may be comet impacts, a space researcher claims that the reason may be the 9th planet, ‘Planet X’, which is claimed to be in the Solar System but has not been proven yet.
However, the research team also speculates that this may be because it is closer to our planet than previously thought. In a statement on the subject, the team notes that the heartbeat may be “the result of geophysical processes related to these cyclical pulses of tectonic and climate change, plate tectonics and dynamics of mantle plumes,” or alternatively, it may be accelerated by “astronomical cycles associated with Earth’s movements in the Solar System and Galaxy.” .
When will the next ‘heartbeat’ be?
According to the calculations made by experts, it is thought that there is about 20 million years ahead for the ‘heartbeat’ full of the aforementioned chain of disasters. Observing the previous ‘heartbeat’ in the graph they created was approximately 8 million years ago, the researchers point to a time far enough for us to take a deep breath for the next.
However, if we consider the disasters experienced today, from climate change to wars, from earthquakes to volcanic eruptions and wars, we can say that today’s people create their own ‘heartbeat’ with their own hands, even if there is no giant heartbeat.
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