NOVA: "Ancient Earth: Inferno" (WNET Group, ARTE, BBC, PBS, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, October 25) I watched a couple of science shows on PBS, a NOVA episode called “Ancient Earth: Inferno” and a Secrets of the Dead episode called “Eiffel’s Race to the Top.” “Ancient Earth: Inferno” was apparently an episode in a mini-series-within-the-series set of NOVA shows, since next week’s episode is going to be called “Ancient Earth: Humans.” This episode was about a cataclysmic set of climate events that took place at the end of the Permian era 252 million years ago and rendered extinct 90 percent of the then extant species of life on earth. At that time over two-thirds of the earth’s surface was water (which is just about the case today!), and the land masses we know were all congealed into a giant super-continent called “Pangaea” before tectonic forces under the earth separated them and moved them apart from each other to form the continents we know. The volcanoes were apparently centered in Siberia in an area called the “Siberian Traps” but their effect was worldwide. Not only did the volcanoes themselves throw a lot of hot matter out and therefore heat up the world, they also covered much of the landmass of Pangaea with super-heated coal, which thanks to the enormous heat caught fire spontaneously and released lots of sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide. Sulfur dioxide isn’t a greenhouse gas but carbon dioxide certainly is, and the volcanoes thus contributed to an era of global warming. The show’s narration argued that the volcanoes had much the same effect as the burning of fossil fuels today, albeit orders of magnitude more intense. A few species survived and even thrived in the intense heat – mostly aquatic animals who were stimulated by the warm temperatures (the show argued that the world’s oceans became giant hot tubs) – but most animals and plants couldn’t handle it and died off.

The heat lasted for about 20 million years until yet another major climactic shift, the “Carnian Pluvial Episode,” drenched the world in intense rains for 1 to 2 million years. (Wikipedia’s page on the Carnian Pluvial Episode, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnian_pluvial_episode, begins with an admission, “This article may be too technical for most readers to understand.” You can say that again.) All this happened while the Permian era was giving way to the Triassic era, which ended with yet another mass extinction event that cleared the way for dinosaurs to rule the earth during the next two eras, the Jurassic and the Cretaceous. One thing the great volcanic eruption and the resulting heat wave did was destroy almost all coral and the organisms that create it, bleaching it white and making it crumbly and delicate. Similar phenomena are happening in the world today, and for the same reason: a massive increase in the temperature of the ocean (now caused not by super-volcanoes but by humanity’s continuing use of fossil fuels) has created so much heat in ocean waters that corals could not survive. The commentary on this program admitted that the climate cataclysm that suddenly killed off the dinosaurs – the fall of a huge meteor that so totally changed the world’s weather patterns that both dinosaurs and the plants they fed on, directly or indirectly, died out en masse – is far better known than the one they were talking about, or the intermediate one that ended the Triassic era and launched the Jurassic one and the rise of the dinosaurs.

It’s ironic, to say the least, that an episode of NOVA, a show that until the late and (to my mind) very un-lamented death of David Koch was largely sponsored by something called “The David H. Koch Fund for the Advancement of Science” (now it’s just called “The Science Fund”), when David Koch and his brother Charles, who had made their fortunes in fossil fuels, were giving enormous sums of money to political candidates and parties that denied that human beings were changing the earth’s climate, took this hard a line that human-caused climate change is real and threatens the very survival of the human species on earth. The interviewees – mostly a succession of scientists from universities around the world who blended into a pretty anonymous mass (though some figures stood out, among them Cindy Looy of UC Berkeley, Kiersten Formoso of USC, Priyu Shikub of UC Davis and Evelyn Kustascher of South Tyrol; there was also Jeffrey Binca of UC Berkeley, a relatively young and cute man who almost alone among the scientists was shown wearing shorts and actually working in the field instead of just sitting in an office or lab and pontificating) – made the point that even the worst mass extinction events have some surviving species. The point of the show was we may be re-creating the conditions of the great extinction 252 million years ago through the overuse of fossil fuels to produce energy, and though some forms of life on earth will undoubtedly survive and adapt through evolution, human beings may not be one of the surviving species.