The fantastic film "Highlander-2" becomes prophetic.
Animals on our planet died out en masse five times. It happened that she was almost gone. The reasons for four such catastrophic events are roughly known - either asteroids, hitting and raising dust, created unbearable conditions, then the eruptions of a huge number of volcanoes at once poisoned everything around - down to the upper layers of the atmosphere, then something happened in space, from which it became sharply colder.
But one mass extinction - the Devonian, which began about 360 million years ago, remained mysterious. Neither asteroids nor volcanoes did much of a dirty trick then. And it was not cold. On the contrary, it was then rapidly warming on Earth. But the living creatures disappeared - both the sea and the one that had time to appear on the surface. Disappeared along with the plants.
What had such a detrimental effect on the inhabitants of our planet? Undertook to understand the British scientists from the University of Southampton, led by Professor John Marshall (John Marshal). In samples taken from rocks in the polar regions of the Earth - in Greenland and Spitsbergen, they found spores of "Devonian" plants. Many had genetic defects: dark, as if, tanned areas of the shell and deformed thorns, the number of which, moreover, was less than necessary. Plants reacted in a similar way to excessive ultraviolet radiation.
Normal spores D and E, the rest are defective - with DNA damaged by ultraviolet light.
That is, there is a lot of ultraviolet radiation. The professor and his colleagues dawned on why: dangerous solar radiation has ceased to contain the protective ozone layer. It thinned so that the entire atmosphere became one big ozone hole.
The cause of the cataclysm was global warming, which began after another ice age ended 360 million years ago. The temperature began to rise, the soil began to free itself of ice, warm up and release natural organic compounds into the atmosphere, destroying ozone molecules in much the same way as chlorofluorocarbons contained in refrigerants and freon from air conditioners. The cause of the cataclysm was global warming, which began after 360 million years ago, another ice age ended. The temperature began to rise, the soil warmed up and released natural organic compounds into the atmosphere, destroying ozone molecules in much the same way as chlorofluorocarbons contained in refrigerants and freon from air conditioners. In Science Advances - in a publication titled "UV-B radiation was the Devonian-Carboniferous boundary terrestrial extinction kill mechanism" - scientists point to chloromethane, fluoromethane and chlorine dioxide.
And the most important thing. Long history would not be worth close attention if not for disturbing coincidences with modernity. As Marshall assures, the current global warming is developing at the same pace as the Devonian. The average annual temperature on Earth is rising and is approaching what it was 360 million years ago. Just before the mass extinction. Dangerous compounds are already oozing from places previously covered with ice or well-frozen. Therefore, scientists are quite seriously afraid that the cataclysm could be repeated. That is, the ozone layer will again become catastrophically thin. People will, of course, protect themselves. They will hide or smear themselves with powerful sunscreens - some 1000+. What about animals and plants? They may die. It is likely that the same 80 percent will disappear as the last time - 360 million years ago.
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By the way, about the prophecy. Many people remember that the plot with the impending depletion of the ozone layer was played back in 1990 in the film Highlander 2 - about the long-liver Duncan Macleod. The scriptwriters set the cataclysm for 1999. We hurried. But on the whole, they predicted correctly, as it has now become clear after 30 years.
To protect them from ultraviolet radiation, people built a "dome" - a giant energy shield, which, however, became, as a result, not happy - based on the film 35 years later. The shield, which looked like a grid of many beams, was happily turned off when they learned that the ozone layer had recovered. Fantastic, however. In the sense that in real life it is unlikely to fully recover so quickly. It took several thousand years 360 million years ago.
VLADIMIR LAGOVSKY