Mother Earth: When Volcanoes Ruled the World
Environmental Graffiti - December 19, 2007
Welcome to the second post in Environmental Graffiti’s Mother Earth series.
Yesterday, we discussed the big bang to the formation of Earth as a planet. If you missed that article, check it out here. Today we travel back billions of years to a time when the Earth was young and volcanoes ruled the world.
An Explosion of Heat
Volcanoes have fascinated mankind for centuries. The ancients held the explosions of molten rock and gases to be the work of the gods. Johannes Kepler, the legendary astronomer, believed them to be the Earth’s tear ducts.
The early planet was covered in volcanoes. These volcanoes had a major effect on earth and helped to create the atmosphere and possibly even complex life forms.
Although today we think of greenhouse gases as an evil that must be stopped, in Earth’s early days these gases allowed the planet to develop the conditions to support life.
The sun did not shine as brightly 4.5 billion years ago as it does today. The early sun was about 25% less bright than our own shining star. Without the heat of a brighter sun, the Earth needed something else to ensure it wasn’t just a gigantic frozen rock. Enter volcanic blasts.
The Early Atmosphere
Our atmosphere today contains mostly nitrogen and oxygen. The early atmosphere was quite different, and contained far more greenhouse gases than we could stand today. Volcanoes helped create the warm Earth with their eruptions, which shot a mix of water vapor, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, hydrochloric acid, methane, ammonia, nitrogen, & sulfur gases into the atmosphere.
Those emissions did two things for the Earth. All that water vapor the volcanoes were spewing eventually condensed and formed the oceans that covered the earth. All those greenhouse gases kept the Earth warm enough for the planet not to turn into an icicle, for a while at least. Water stays warm and on the surface, and all of a sudden there’s life.
Once there was water, life was possible. Nobody really knows how life started on the planet, but there is a volcano based theory. Many scientists believe amino acids, the building blocks of life, arrived on the planet after collisions with meteors. These amino acids, however, need to combine into peptides, a protein that forms the basis of cells, before life is possible.
One theory of how peptides were created deals with undersea volcanoes. Scientists at the Scripp’s Research Institute in California showed that carbonyl sulfide, a common volcanic gas, helps amino acids form peptides. They theorized that undersea volcanic eruptions could have spurred peptide formation and resulted in the first proto-life forms. Of course, this could all be wrong. It’s one of like 10,000 origin of life theories. Moving on, life now exists in a very very simple form, cyanobacteria.
Fresh Air
Cyanobacteria, one of the earliest life forms, swimming around in earth’s nice warm oceans, sucking up carbon and shooting out oxygen. There’s a problem, though. All that oxygen, which should be up in the atmosphere, is nowhere to be found. Something is sucking it all up.
It’s volcanoes again. This time they both helped and hindered life, albeit at different periods. For a long time, most of the volcanoes in the world were underwater. Underwater volcanic eruptions differ in some significant ways from above ground eruptions. The lower temperatures of underwater eruptions mean that magma chills quickly and produces gases like hydrogen sulfide which suck up available oxygen. This would take all the nice oxygen out of the air. But a coming shift in the location of Earth’s volcanoes might rectify all that.
Above ground volcanoes release gases that can stay hot and don’t end up sucking all the oxygen out of the environment. When large continents began to form, more volcanoes were above ground than below. Shortly after this period, atmospheric oxygen levels began to rise. After the Earth’s oxygen levels rose, we started seeing more and more of something truly miraculous; complex life.
Our next article in The Mother Earth Series, “From Noxious Fumes to a Breath of Fresh Air” will explore the atmosphere of the early earth in greater detail. To keep up with the rest of the series, why not subscribe to our RSS feed. We’ll also give you a free album.
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Posted by Environmental Graffiti at December 19, 2007 01:51 AM
Comments
1. Posted by
Keith
![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.intentblog.com/nav-commenters.gif)
on
December 19, 2007 03:47 AM
These Earth images reveal what a passionate being She is! So very e-motional in expression! And the text can be absorbed and digested by this dominantly right-brained woman! Heartfelt thanks!
Trish~~
2. Posted by
Trish
on
December 19, 2007 06:43 AM
Keith, well said...as your personality shines through.
Trish~~
3. Posted by
Trish
on
December 19, 2007 06:53 AM
It's been suggested by some that Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, as well as other gloomy works of art, in a year in which the entire planets atomophere was influenced by a huge eruption. Beautiful sunsets that year also. One artist in London painted about 500 painting of the volcanic ash disrupted sunsets. It was Krakatoa, but another volcano. Began with a T. Krakatoa was an island volcano that complete disappeared in the late 1800. Kill 250,000, some of who were found floating in pumance months later and thousands of miles away. The explotion was heard 3000 mile away, like hearing something in san fran in new york. Krakatoa is back and has been in the news again lately for rumbling.
4. Posted by
bobby
on
December 19, 2007 04:04 PM
Anyone who lives near a live volcano comes to respect its power. I live near Mt Rainier in Washington State. One day I was hiking up on the mountains base when I heard thunder. It was a completely clear blue sky day. I kept looking up wondering where the storm cloud was.
Then it hit me. The thunder wasn't coming from above me. It was coming from the mountain I was standing on.
Talk about a humbling moment of respect for nature!
The mountain's Indian name is Tahoma - "Thunder God." When I first heard that before hiking on the volcano I thought that the Indians were just doing their panthieistic thing and worshipping a natural phenonmenon.
After many visits to the volcano, I have to say, I'm a believer - calling the mountain a god is now, in my view, dead-on accurate.
Everyone was rocked out here in 1980 by the explosion of Mt St Helens in Oregon in 1980. I visited the site there first in 1986. Six years later, the forests were still flattened, with trees laid out like toothpicks from the force of the blast. St Helens was about 7000 ft tall when she blew.
Mt Rainer is twice as tall, and scientists believe a blast would be several times bigger if it it blew. It would also blow out one side, just as St Helens did.
That weak side of the mountain faces Seattle directly, and there are several towns and small cities built on top of the lava fields from the last Rainer eruption, sometime in the 1200s.
Volcanologists say its overdue, since it apparently has been erupting every 700 years or so.
5. Posted by
yogi-one
on
December 20, 2007 01:33 AM
Thanks for continuing this series.
love, Heath
6. Posted by
hgquinn
on
December 20, 2007 02:01 AM
Anyone who lives near a live volcano comes to respect its power. I live near Mt Rainier in Washington State. One day I was hiking up on the mountain's base when I heard thunder. It was a completely clear blue sky day. I kept looking up wondering where the storm cloud was.
Then it hit me. The thunder wasn't coming from above me. It was coming from the mountain I was standing on.
Talk about a humbling moment of respect for nature!
The mountain's Indian name is Tahoma - "Thunder God." When I first heard that before hiking on the volcano I thought that the Indians were just doing their panthieistic thing and worshipping a natural phenonmenon.
After many visits to the volcano, I have to say, I'm a believer - calling the mountain a god is now, in my view, dead-on accurate.
Everyone was rocked out here in 1980 by the explosion of Mt St Helens in Oregon in 1980. I visited the site there first in 1986. Six years later, the forests were still flattened, with trees laid out like toothpicks from the force of the blast. St Helens was about 7000 ft tall when she blew.
Mt Rainer is twice as tall, and scientists believe a blast would be several times bigger if it it blew. It would also blow out one side, just as St Helens did.
That weak side of the mountain faces Seattle directly, and there are several towns and small cities built on top of the lava fields from the last Rainer eruption, sometime in the 1200s.
Volcanologists say its overdue, since it apparently has been erupting every 700 years or so.
7. Posted by
yogi-one
on
December 20, 2007 06:15 AM
A tree, the night falling and alone...
On my left hand, the deep-dark
On my right, yes, the white-bright
And
Boom!
Crossing the wall of extremists
Multi-color rainbow linking the poles
In bright transparent lights
Angels from hells appeared
Full of charm, beautiful, seductive
Wake up desires
After a moment of voodoo-movements
Accepting there presences, with many welcomes
The charm finished to infect us-all
A blood-venom flowing their streaks
A power well show
Quiet with fix eyes
Walking slowly the rainbow-path
With so many precautions
I was not expecting better
Inside, I smiled to myself
And see the most wonderful
Mirror-show, in their eyes-seekers...
8. Posted by
Jean-François Désaulniers
on
December 20, 2007 01:56 PM
That's about the time the first ships showed up. Delivering the life to transform the rocks and produce oxygen.
Stateful universe aside..
9. Posted by
Richard Thomas ∞Φ
on
December 20, 2007 04:40 PM
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Recent Comments
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Richard Thomas ∞Φ commented on Mother Earth: When Volcanoes Ruled the World
That's about the time the first ships showed up
-
Jean-François Désaulniers commented on Mother Earth: When Volcanoes Ruled the World
A tree, the night falling and alone... -
yogi-one commented on Mother Earth: When Volcanoes Ruled the World
Anyone who lives near a live volcano comes to r
-
hgquinn commented on Mother Earth: When Volcanoes Ruled the World
Thanks for continuing this series.
love
-
yogi-one commented on Mother Earth: When Volcanoes Ruled the World
Anyone who lives near a live volcano comes to r
How awesome be the perfection of our designated home!
How unlikely! What luck to have landed here, alien as all get out!
An untold number of combinations go into our pattern of Life!
B-b-b-b-b-billions of possibilities inherent in the simplest system of order.
The Creator has endowed us. Our job, if we so choose to take it,
is redemption. Thus may we take our rightful place in the Universe!
Merry Christmas, Mother Earth! May your Son shine on forever and ever. Amen.