| The great gas attack |
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It sounds like a rude way for civilization as we know it
to end, in a giant belch. But that's just what a U.S. scientist thinks was
responsible for one of the largest and more mysterious mass extinctions in
the Earth's history. Not only does Gregory Ryskin, a chemical engineer at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., feel that a deadly burp of methane from deep in the ocean wiped out much of life on the planet, it could happen again. One day, he says, humans could face the same gaseous fate as the strange mammal-like reptiles that roamed the planet 250 million years ago. Death came suddenly at the end of what is known as the Permian period. We know what these ancient creatures looked like only by their fossils. Almost all of the species on land or water were killed in an environmental catastrophe even worse than the one that wiped out the dinosaurs less than 200 million years later. |
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