Earth’s 27.5-Million-Year ‘Heartbeat’
A new study of ancient geological events suggests that our planet has a slow, steady ‘heartbeat’ of geological activity every 27 million years or so.
This pulse of clustered geological events – including volcanic activity, mass extinctions, plate reorganizations and sea level rises – is incredibly slow, a 27.5-million-year cycle of catastrophic ebbs and flows. But luckily for us, the research team notes we have another 20 million years before the next ‘pulse’.
“Many geologists believe that geological events are random over time,” said Michael Rampino, a New York University geologist and the study’s lead author.
“But our study provides statistical evidence for a common cycle, suggesting that these geologic events are correlated and not random.”
The team conducted new analysis on the ages of 89 well-understood geological events from the past 260 million years.
As you can see from the graph, some of those times were tough – with over eight of such world-changing events clustering together over geologically small timespans, forming the catastrophic ‘pulse’.
“These events include times of marine and non-marine extinctions, major ocean-anoxic events, continental flood-basalt eruptions, sea-level fluctuations, global pulses of intraplate magmatism, and times of changes in seafloor-spreading rates and plate reorganizations,” the team writes in their paper.