I’ve often wondered why we can’t just stuff an alligator and a rattlesnake and put them in a museum and allow the rest to become extinct, instead of breeding and protecting them when they get scarce.
How many species do you think have come and gone over the ages before humans ever arrived? How do you define "evolution" or "survival of the fittest" or "punctuated equilibrium"? How arrogant are humans to decide that all critters we are first-hand familiar with must be "protected"? Why would we expend efforts to keep a particular species of snake alive in some lab for the mere sake of saying there's a snake alive in some lab? Why???????? All these catastrophes over the eons and all the mass extinction that's occurred, yet life survived and even flourished...without our intervention. The planet and the ecosystem ain't "fragile." And to answer the rhetorical question: Yes, I believe the needs of human beings outweigh keeping Snail Darters (or Burrowing Owls) viable.
I was banned from a Facebook group for suggesting that species will evolve that thrive on plastics. If you're going to believe in either micro- or macro-evolution, that makes sense to me. We've kind of gotten away from the Tonga eruption though, haven't we? I don't regularly read or watch the news anymore since most of it's just crap, so I have not been following it. I was aware that it occurred and saw some film of the flooding resulting from it but that's about it.
It was put on my radar screen because I get emails from SpaceWeatherNews.com when such events occur. I guess they covered it because of the video caught by a satellite.
https://www.pennlive.com/nation-wor...rfed-the-largest-recorded-nuclear-blasts.html There are other sites that tell about how powerful the blast was. If it was on Earth's surface instead of on the ocean floor , how much damage would it have done?
Spaceweather attributes 50% of the temperature increase of the earth's surface to lack of recent volcanic activity. Volcanic ash in the atmosphere blocks UV rays. As the ash dissipates, more UV reaches the surface and our temps go up. Get too much ash, and we won't have to worry about the Vitamin D deficiencies because there won't be any food grown...and your stock in solar energy is gonna be worthless. There's side-by-side pics of lunar eclipses here of when there was lots of volcanic ash and pics of when the atmosphere is relatively free of it, along with the explanation. But you raise an interesting point...I wonder how much lava was solidified and started a new island.