On 8 Jan, 16:25, Tom Gardner wrote:
..

Um, which planet earth do you live on? There have
been multiple "extinction events" which take all of 5
seconds to find on wackypedia.

In particular, the "clathrate gun hypothesis" is particularly
relevant.

A snippet to whet your appetite...

* The clathrate gun hypothesis is the popular name given
* to the hypothesis that rises in sea temperatures (and/or
* falls in sea level) can trigger the sudden release of
* methane from methane clathrate compounds buried in
* seabeds and permafrost which, because the methane
* itself is a powerful greenhouse gas, leads to further
* temperature rise and further methane clathrate
* destabilization – in effect initiating a runaway process,
* as irreversible once started as the firing of a gun
* ...
* However there is stronger evidence that runaway methane
* clathrate breakdown may have caused drastic alteration of
* the ocean environment and the atmosphere of earth on a
* number of occasions in the past, over timescales of tens
* of thousands of years; most notably in connection with the
* Permian extinction event, when 96% of all marine species
* became extinct 251 million years ago.

Sounds pretty drastic to me!

Er! Did I say there hadn't been any mass extinctions? There have been
lots of them, including the large dinosaurs (large meteorite strike?),
woolly mammoths (hunting, loss of habitat), dodos (stupid birds) and
even our near relatives the neanderthals (climate change - the last
ice age, probably nothing to do with CO2 emissions or methane
clathrates).

The fact of the matter is that all life forms on Earth are water
based, and with a few exceptions can only exist between about 0 - 60
degrees Centigrade, which is a tiny range in the scale of all things
in the Universe. The Earth is supposed to be a 'Goldilocks' planet:
Not too close to the Sun, not too far away, but just right!

I believe that methane releases are one possible explanation for the
many ships lost in the Bermuda Triangle. If there are a lot of methane
bubbles in the sea water, then it becomes insufficiently dense to
support the vessel and it just sinks! Of course it could just be
pirates.

Derek Copeland