A new model suggests that in 250 million years, all land will collide into a supercontinent that boosts warming and pushes mammals to extinction.
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    9 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    Alexander Farnsworth, a paleoclimate scientist at the University of Bristol who led the team, said that the planet might become too hot for any mammals — ourselves included — to survive on land.

    Dr. Farnsworth enlisted Christopher Scotese, a retired geophysicist from the University of Texas who had crafted the Pangea Ultima model, and other experts to run more detailed simulations of that far-off future, tracking the atmosphere moving over the oceans, the supercontinent and its mountains.

    Thanks to the turbulent movements of molten rock deep in the Earth, the volcanoes may release vast surges of carbon dioxide for thousands of years — blasts of greenhouse gases that will make temperatures rocket up.

    If global warming continues unabated, biologists fear it will lead to the extinction of a number of species, while people will be unable to survive the heat and humidity in large swaths of the planet.

    Wolfgang Kiessling, a climate scientist at University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany, who was not involved in the study, said that the model did not take account of a factor that might mean a lot for the survival of mammals: the gradual decline in the heat escaping from the Earth’s interior.

    As scientists begin using powerful space telescopes to peer at planets in other solar systems, they may be able to measure their continental arrangements to infer what kinds of life might survive there.

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