Snowball Earth and Spirulina algae: Why I like eating something that survived over 700 million years ago....

 "As improbable as it may sound, we see clear evidence that this striking climate reversal—the most extreme imaginable on this planet—happened as many as four times between 750million and 580 million years ago. " 

 https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/dschrag/files/24._the_snowball_earth_2000.pdf .... 

"Breakup of a single landmass 770 million years ago leaves small continents scattered near the equator. Formerly land-locked areas are now closer to oceanic sources of moisture. Increased rainfall scrubs more heat-trapping carbon dioxide out of the air and erodes continental rocks more quickly. Consequently, global temperatures fall, and large ice packs form in the polar oceans. The white ice reflects more solar energy than does darker seawater, driving temperatures even lower.This feedback cycle triggers an unstoppable cooling effect that will engulf the planet in ice within a millennium."... 

"When global temperatures drop enough that glaciers cover the high-latitude continents, as they do in Antarctica and Greenland, the ice sheets prevent chemical erosion of the rocks be-neath the ice.... If all the continents cluster in the tropics, on the other hand, they would remain ice-free even as the earth grew colder and approached the critical threshold for a runaway freeze. The carbon dioxide “safety switch” would fail because carbon burial continues unchecked... 

"The greenhouse atmosphere helps to drive surface temperatures upward to almost 50 degrees C, [122 F] according to calculations made last summer by climate modeler Raymond T. Pierrehumbert of the University of Chicago.".... "The extreme climatic events them-selves may have played an active role in spawning multicellular animal life."

So back around 700 million years ago the only main life on Earth was Algae - and some other small stuff. So then we had Snowball Earth several times - and this only allowed life to survive near the extreme volcano hot springs.

So whether we SURVIVE the abrupt global warming in the next five years or not - the Algae as Spirulina was here BEFORE the previous most extreme abrupt global warming on Earth.

New research indicates that simple life in the form of photosynthetic algae could have survived a "snowball Earth" event, living in a narrow body of water with characteristics similar to today's Red Sea. ... That would leave a small expanse of open water where the algae could survive.

 https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111011102001.htm

 Small pools of open water could be maintained above geothermal hotspots on coastlines of volcanic islands [Hoffman and Schrag, 2000], where the water is shallow enough that the geothermal heat is not diffused laterally and that the sea glacier becomes grounded and slowed by friction with the sea floor.

  A long narrow arm of a sea, for example as formed by continental rifting such as the modern Red Sea, located at low latitude and surrounded by desert land, would be invaded by a tongue of the global sea glacier, but this tongue would be impeded by friction with the sidewalls and thinned by sublimation, so that its thickness would diminish to zero before reaching the end of the sea, if the sea is long enough.

 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2011GL048846

 (3) the depth of the sea at its entrance, and throughout its length, must be great enough that seawater is able to flow under the sea glacier to replenish water loss from the refugium by evaporation/sublimation, and (4) water circulation in the inland sea must be adequate to allow nutrients to be delivered to organisms living in the bay at the landward end.

 Dry ice sublimates at -109 degrees Fahrenheit. Our classroom is about 72 degrees Fahrenheit. For dry ice, that's a piece of cake to sublimate and it will, quickly! 

 For sublimation we need a solid gas that has been super frozen and kept super frozen.  Dry ice doesn't need a heat source to trigger it to sublimate.  A warm room, a refrigerator, a freezer is warm enough to sublimate dry ice.  To turn dry ice into a liquid, we need pressure.  Where would this pressure come from?  According to the kinetic theory (particles moving), we need something that would create so much pressure, the gas atoms would be squeezed so close together that they would begin to flow.  This kind of pressure could be found in a gas planet that has a liquid core.  The gases are compressed by the mass of the planet and gravity, to make liquid. 

Safety tip: Dry ice is cold to the touch and can cause severe burns from freezing if it comes in contact with skin. Be very careful when handling dry ice and ensure to wear the proper safety gear and use the correct safety equipment.

 

Highlighted reply

Franco R 6 minutes ago

@Voidisyinyang Voidisyinyang Thats a false dichotomy pretending to put technology as an inheret enemy of ecology when in fact technological advances allow for more sustainable and effective methods of production. There is no turning back to the "good ol' days."

Voidisyinyang Voidisyinyang 1 second ago

@Franco R U.S. Farmers Call Out U.S. Ambassador for Pushing Agribusiness Agenda and Attacking Agroecology at the United Nations https://familyfarmers.org/?p=1798 

 

The U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance (USFSA), a network of 50+ grassroots organizations and grassroots supportive organizations, has just published an open letter denouncing the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (U.N.) Agencies for Food and Agriculture, Indiana agribusiness baron Kip Tom, for his unprecedented attacks on agroecology – a science, practice, and organizing tool for farmers and food producers that bases food production on ecological principles – and on the U.N. itself.  

 

So buddy - when you say "technological advances" it's possible you have not studied quantum biology that has proven how photosynthesis is the most advanced technology on Earth due to relying on quantum nonlocality for energy transfer. So in fact a supercomputer can not model the ecology of the rainforest since it is too complex. 

 

As Schroedinger posited in his book, "What is Life?" - it is from asymmetric coherent time as negentropy. A good book on this is, "Life on the Edge" by Professor JohnJoe McFadden - it won a science award. Thanks for sharing your view about the "advances" of technology - another good book on this is the "Religion of Technology" by Professor David F. Noble. So he points out that our most advanced technology is actually apocalyptic. 

 

In terms of food production that is also true. https://navdanyainternational.org/world-economic-forums-great-reset-plan-for-big-food-benefits-industry-not-people/ 

 

 "The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) The Great Reset includes a plan to transform the global food and agricultural industries and the human diet. The architects of the plan claim it will reduce food scarcity, hunger and disease, and even mitigate climate change. But a closer look at the corporations and think tanks the WEF is partnering with to usher in this global transformation suggests that the real motive is tighter corporate control over the food system by means of technological solutions."

"The Great Reset is meant to be all-encompassing. Its partner organizations include the biggest players in data collection, telecommunications, weapons manufacturing, finance, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology and the food industry. The WEF’s plans for the “reset” of food and agriculture include projects and strategic partnerships that favor genetically modified organisms, lab-made proteins and pharmaceuticals and industrial chemicals as sustainable solutions to food and health issues."

But quantum physicist Dr. Vandana Shiva said this is the wrong approach, because “all of the science” shows that diets should be centered around regional and geographical biodiversity. She explained that “EAT’s uniform global diet will be produced with western technology and agricultural chemicals. Forcing this onto sovereign nations by multinational lobbying is what I refer to as food imperialism.”

 

Franco R 6 minutes ago

@Voidisyinyang Voidisyinyang And how exactly my comment represent a endorsement to old methods and ideas regarding industrial agriculture?, what I challenge is any pretension of ignoring technological advances for some idealized "return to basics". There is no turning back when it comes to the use of modern techniques, such as IT, hidroponics and increase automation. Bucolic fantasies aside, humanity still demands an ever increasing amount of food and that will push for innovation on the matter. 

 

 

Voidisyinyang Voidisyinyang 1 second ago

 Here is an article I had published 14 years ago: https://www.tcdailyplanet.net/stop-cargills-destruction-amazon/ On May 22, Greenpeace, my former employer, took direct action against Cargill, shutting down their illegal soybean facility in the heart of the Amazon rainforest. As Greenpeace reports:

 “Our activists unfurled a banner on the conveyor belts at Cargill’s facility, but angry Cargill employees nearby blasted the sign down with high-powered hoses. Police arrived on the scene and arrested 16 of our activists. The Arctic Sunrise itself blockaded the Cargill port, preventing exports of soy from leaving the facility. In the nearby city of Santarém, a group of Cargill’s supporters surrounded the police station holding our activists, but were dispersed by military police.” 

   yes a nice "bucolic fantasy" is when Cargill, as I mentioned, installed ILLEGAL soybean elevators in the Amazon rainforest and so soybeans became a "hard currency" since Cargill buys as much as anyone can grow. https://ocj.com/2019/09/cargill-faces-fire-over-amazon/ So based on your mentality of "more food is better" then China now imports the soybeans from Cargill so that Chinese can eat more meat fed by the soybean pigs and Europe can have more KFC chicken fed by the soybeans. 

 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/business/brazil-deforestation-cargill.html This seems very prosperous and indeed the current "leader" of Brazil is now promoting the destruction of the equatorial rainforest - which has spiked to new levels of destruction - just as China gives out FREE CHAINSAWS to poor Africans so that rainforest timber can be imported into China. https://stories.mightyearth.org/cargill-worst-company-in-the-world/ 

  "Our 2017 report “The Ultimate Mystery Meat” investigated 28 different locations across 3,000 km producing soy in Brazil and Bolivia. It showed that Cargill was one of the two largest customers of industrial scale deforestation. In addition to their role in creating a market for deforestation-based soy, we found that Cargill finances land-clearing operations deep in virgin forest, building silos and roads, then buying and shipping grain to the US, China, and Europe to feed chickens, pigs, and cows."  

So these are the "bucolic fantasies" of "primitive accumulation" aka the raping of Mother Nature for "technological progress." And so you may think the Earth doesn't "need" the equatorial rainforest but the fact is that in terms of conservation biology, as Dr. Michael Soule pointed out, by the 1970s already "Large Mammals" (i.e. humans) STOPPED EVOLVING due to "lack of habitat." 

And so on a global level the Arctic ice is now disappearing for the FIRST time in three million years! In terms of "bucolic fantasy" that means cheaper access to oil and gas in the Arctic and so there is a race to "develop" as technological progress! In reality Mother Nature is about to have a huge Methane Bomb fart - that will double global warming making it too hot to grow food at scale.

  "As of 2015, an estimated 2.12 million West African children were still engaged in harvesting.30 Almost 96% of these child laborers in both Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire were involved in hazardous work. " 

- ah "bucoclic fantasies" at work! 70% of US chocolate is from Cargill or Nestle child slave-wage labor. So again for your "bucolic fanatasies" you envision new high tech genetic engineering and indoor hydroponics - but the question is if this is possible on any scale necessary to sustain "civilization." ? 

Who is going to take care of the 450 plus nuclear power plants that threaten to melt down? What about the thousands of nuclear missiles? the fact is that genetic engineered farming has just increased pesticide use for PATENT control - and so the soil has been increasingly destroyed as Mother Nature evolves new "super bugs" resistant to the genetic engineering. We could not "terraform Earth" with Biosphere II so the promotion of "synthetic ecology" by NASA and "science fridays" on National Petroleum Radio - is the real "bucolic fantasy." 

I'll stick with the truth of nonlocal quantum entanglement as the most advanced technologies of all technologies and it's how the algae survived Snowball Earth and the subsequent abrupt global warming cycles (which then spawned complex life for the first time as the Cambrian Explosion). That is the "biological annihilation" we face now on Earth - only the extremophiles living deep in the ocean next to hot volcanic vents will most likely survive. haha. 

Is that "bucolic fantasy" enough for you? 

 "Between Cargill and their doppelganger Bunge, they had cleared the equivalent of 10,000 foortball fields for soy. Indigenous Peoples who depend on forests have been forced off of their traditional lands, had their land encroached upon by soy plantations, have experienced sharp increases in cancer, birth defects, miscarriages, and other illnesses linked to pesticides and herbicides used to grow soy. "