From The CBC*: Earth has a 27.5-million-year 'pulse' of major geological events, says study

[abqtommy]

* Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

The research team was led by Michael Rampino

from article:

"The Earth behaves cyclically, and major geologic events like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that could lead to extinctions cluster in cycles, a new study has found.

snip

The research team analyzed mass geological episodes, such as fluctuations in the global sea level caused by changes in sea-floor spreading rates, that affected sea and land organisms. The extinction of dinosaurs dating back 66 million years — or three cycles ago — was one of the events the researchers looked at to find a pattern.

snip

According to the study, the most recent cluster of disastrous geological episodes was about seven to 10 million years ago, so it is safe to say that Earth is at least 15 million years away from experiencing this series of catastrophic events that will likely wipe out most, if not all, humankind.

Even if humans survive and develop the technology to deal with these events millions of years from now, Rampino said the Earth's pulse will keep on beating."

link to article: https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/what-on-earth-earth-pulses-1.6086249

There's no mention in the article of how events like comet or asteroid strikes that impacted our
planet tie into this. See search results at:

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=it+came+out+of+the+sky%3B+tunguska+and+the+yucatan+asteroid+strike&ia=web

Rather than feel helpless I think it's good for us humans to do all we can to minimize our effect on
our earthly environment since that's certainly something we do have control over.

[LiberatedUSA]

1. My first video game system was...

...the Intellivision. I wasn’t picking up the rotary phone and dialing friends quite yet, but that came pretty quickly in that time period.

Things have radically changed in my lifespan when it comes to video games and technology as a whole. I suspect 15 million years is more than enough time to be so advanced we are all making space lane changes to get to our jobs on the moon from our house on Mars.

[Polybius]

6. And coming out this year is this:

https://intellivision.com/

I can't wait!

[LiberatedUSA]

7. Well now that is interesting!

[MisterNiceKitty]

2. At least they're not still trying to say it was a meteor

Clearly environmental conditions on Earth itself can change adversely - just look at the continental shifts.

What was the make up of continents at the time the dinosaurs went extinct? Was all land based life located on one single
continent at the time? This does not lend itself to much ecological diversity or survivability.

I'm not a geologist or anything but the scientists themselves must know the straight dope by now. They have literally studied this problem for decades on end up the wazoo.

Adverse changes in the Earth's ecosystem are what are driving extinction events, not external factors, though those might exacerbate the problem. These changes may or may not run on regular cycles that can be accurately dated. I doubt all the pulse changes lead to
catastrophic extinctions. Was there an extinction comparable to the dinosaur extinction 15 m years ago?

More info on extinction events:

https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/dinosaurs-ancient-fossils/extinction/mass-extinction

There have been 5 major extinction events in Earth's history with the worst happening about 250 million years ago.

[BarackTheVote]

3. By the time of the Cretaceous period

the modern continents had more or less differentiated; there was no more Pangea.

[MisterNiceKitty]

10. That's partially true

According to the US Geological Survey:

"At the beginning of the age of dinosaurs (during the Triassic Period, about 230 million years ago), the continents were arranged together as a single supercontinent called Pangea. During the 165 million years of dinosaur existence this supercontinent slowly broke apart. Its pieces then spread across the globe into a nearly modern arrangement by a process called plate tectonics."

I know I understood all land based life was on one continent during the dinosaurs time, but I thought the breakup came after the extinction, my bad.

This breakup is how dinosaurs ended up on all the world's continents.

[LuvLoogie]

5. They are still ascribing a meteor impact to the dinosaur extinction.

See my post number 4

[lagomorph777]

8. Huh? You think that's a myth? Despite literally mountains of evidence?

... findings using high-precision radiometric dating analysis of debris kicked up by the impact now suggest the K-T event and the Chicxulub collision happened no more than 33,000 years apart. In radiometric dating, scientists estimate the ages of samples based on the relative proportions of specific radioactive materials within them. [Wipe Out: History's Most Mysterious Mass Extinctions]

"We've shown the impact and the mass extinction coincided as much as one can possibly demonstrate with existing dating techniques," researcher Paul Renne, a geochronologist and director of the Berkeley Geochronology Center in California, told LiveScience.
https://news.yahoo.com/asteroid-impact-killed-dinosaurs-evidence-191146621.html

https://www.cnet.com/news/scientists-discover-more-evidence-that-dinosaurs-were-killed-by-a-gigantic-asteroid/
https://msn.com/en-us/news/technology/new-evidence-from-chicxulub-crater-reveals-what-killed-the-dinosaurs/ar-BB19xXWQ
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/21/science/chicxulub-asteroid-ocean-acid.html
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/26/world/asteroid-dinosaurs-extinction-angle-trnd-scn/index.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater
https://www.space.com/19681-dinosaur-killing-asteroid-chicxulub-crater.html
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-dinosaur-killing-asteroid-spurred-evolution-modern-rainforest-180977390/

And, though I am not a geologist either, I come from a family of geologists, and have followed this research fairly closely for decades. I believe in evidence.

[MisterNiceKitty]

11. Please learn to read

Wherein did I say it was a "myth" (your word)?

I'll repost my point here:

"Adverse changes in the Earth's ecosystem are what are driving extinction events, not external factors, though those might exacerbate the problem."

I would say a meteor or comet hitting an already fragile ecosystem might exacerbate the problem.

[LuvLoogie]

4. This reminds me of theoretical physicist and cosmologist,

Sue Randall. She wrote a book a few years back called, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs. She often gives presentations on the book. She has three or four others. Here is a video of a recent presentation.

[abqtommy]

9. K&R