Lessons in Extinction 3
Contents Updated: Monday, September 13, 1999
Pollution and Entropy
Many of the main theories of the death of the dinosaurs boil down to the effect of pollution, the source of which was impacts with asteroids or erupting volcanoes. Maybe the truth was more mundane—the anthroposaurs drowned themselves and their planet in their own waste, just as we are doing!
Pollution is a symptom of increasing entropy, a scientific measure of disorder. By creating greater order in constructing themselves, lifeforms reduce entropy within their bodies and perhaps in their immediate surroundings but in so doing they vastly increase entropy in the world at large. The more such creatures there are, the more disorder, the more entropy, they create. When the entropy of their world gets too high they die.
Entropy is waste. Organisms trapped in a sealed environment with plenty of food quite often poison themselves to death on their own waste. A ferment of home brew will stop working even though there is plenty of sugar and nutrient left. The yeast is poisoned by the alcohol that it makes as waste. The anthroposaurs poisoned themselves on their waste. We are doing the same. The earth is effectively a sealed environment and if we fill it with waste products we shall die.
Entropy is sewage. Sewage destroys life in surface water as bacteria decompose it into carbon dioxide thus removing dissolved oxygen. More oxygen can dissolve in the water from the air but, when sewage pollution is heavy, replacement can be a lot slower than consumption. The oxygen gets used up and life in the polluted water dies of suffocation. In inland and shallow continental seas, the leaching out of soluble inorganic fertilizers like nitrates and phosphates adds to this effect. They promote the growth of surface algae in unpleasant masses, blocking light from the water below and adding to the oxygen demand when they decay.
Entropy is acid rain. The final Cretaceous atmosphere was acidic. The source of the acidity, we are told, was either volcanic emissions or the formation of nitrogen oxides as the death star burned its way through the air prior to impact. Dramatic! Reality could have been as commonplace and stupid as it is today. Anthroposaurs pouring acid into their environment, as we are doing, would not have survived long. Greenland core analysis shows that the air today is four times more acid than it was in the 16th century. This modest ratio disguises the fact that local levels close to the source of the acidity were much higher.
Moreover, the pH scale of acidity is logarithmic not linear. This means that a change in pH of one unit from say 6 to 5 represents an increase in acidity on a linear scale of ten times: every unit reduction in pH is another ten-fold increase in acidity. Rain which has fallen in the industrial parts of the world tested to be pH 4 is a thousand times more acidic than pure water which is pH 7.
But it is not only the acidity itself that causes damage. The geographical extent of the acid damaged forests in Germany increased from eight per cent to more than 50 per cent in only a few years. Though this loss of forest is distressing enough, the main danger to higher animals comes from the acid leaching out the salts of heavy metals, which then poison the ground water.
Heavy Metals and Entropy
Entropy is pollution by heavy metals. Each metal has a threshold level of acidity below which it remains bound in the soil but beyond which its salts dissolve into the water. According to Bernhard Ulrich, a West German chemist, toxic aluminium ions begin to be released from the soil into the water when the pH reaches 4.2. Aluminium is now being linked with senile dementia, Altzheimer’s disease. Did the dinosaurs suffer from premature senile dementia caused by acid rain?
How are we creating this acidity? Mainly through industry: burning fossil fuels and sintering metalliferous ores to extract the metals. The by-product is sulphur dioxide, a noxious gas that eventually turns into sulfuric acid, one of the most corrosive mineral acids. The top ten sulphur dioxide polluting countries in the world in 1980 were emitting 100 million tons of sulphur dioxide a year. If anthroposaurs reached an advanced society they must have added acids to the air and thence to the groundwater. It takes 5000 years for the world’s groundwater to replenish. If it became a poisonous soup of acid and heavy metal ions, it would be 5000 years before it became usable again. Even in the Cretaceous, with its higher rainfall, it could have remained polluted for 1000 years. The poisoning of the earth’s groundwater could be a very effective way of initiating a mass extinction.
Plenty of heavy metals are associated with the end of the Cretaceous and the death of the dinosaurs. The experts say they came from metal bearing meteorites or local volcanoes. But if human beings are anything to go by, an intelligent creature can easily produce enough heavy metals to pollute the environment without having to resort to natural causes. Nature causes 325,000 tons of copper to leach into the world’s water supply every year, but humanity annually extracts 7.5 million tons of copper and most of that will finish up as waste. The figure is increasing.
Cores from the Arctic ice cap show that lead in the air is now 500 times its natural level, the increase having principally occurred since the industrial revolution. Lead is a cumulative poison—it is stored in the body until danger levels are exceeded. Our own bodies contain more than 1000 times more lead than our recent ancestors. Lead poisons the nervous system and the brain by interfering with enzymes. Young minds are particularly affected. The symptoms, at dosages that may well be far below the official toxicity level, are distractibility, impatience, frustration, restlessness, impulsiveness, destructiveness and violence—symptoms typical of the behavior of much of our urban youth!
The clay band of the Alverez’s does not only contain iridium; it is full of heavy metals. Other metals in the boundary layer at abundances higher than normal are osmium, palladium, arsenic, chromium, cobalt, selenium, nickel and tin. These metals are not only found in extra-terrestrial sources. Terrestrial sources such as copper-nickel ores and molybdenum sulfide ores also contain many of these unusual metals, concentrated naturally by molecular filtration which traps the metal in the crystal lattice of the basic material of the ore. But such mechanisms occur in particular localities and cannot account for a worldwide distribution.
If, though, these metal ores had been mined, smelted and processed to get at the copper, nickel or molybdenum, the flue gases would have carried off the remaining metals to pollute the environment widely. The concentration of the metals in the boundary layer varies from place to place just as one would expect from sites that might have been close to, or distant from, an industrial area. Furthermore ores from different sources, processed in different places, would have had different compositions so the analysis of the boundary layer in different places would be expected to vary as researchers have found. A death star would have a fixed composition and would distribute its components fairly uniformly. Death stars may be more romantic but common industrial pollution fits the description better.
When heavy metals are around, the natural responses of the earth can make things worse. Professor Frederick Challenger of Leeds University, England, has shown that organisms rid themselves of unwanted or poisonous elements by converting them into their methyl derivatives which, being volatile, disperse into the atmosphere. Marine algae get rid of mercury, lead, antimony and arsenic in this way, not to mention sulphur and iodine in large quantities. Dispersion of the latter elements is beneficial to organisms on land since without it they would suffer from sulphur or iodine deficiency. But methylated heavy metals are very toxic.
Methyl mercury was the agent of severe poisoning at Minimata in Japan where, for many years, a factory discharged mercury wastes into a bay which provided seafood for the local people. In the West farmers using organic fungicidal dressings on their seeds get better yields because the grain does not rot in the ground. They also poison thousands of birds. The fungicides contain mercury.
Historians suspect that Napoleon died of arsenic poisoning from the arsenic salts used as a pigment in his bedroom wallpaper on St Helena. Fungi growing on the damp walls disposed of the unwanted arsenic by converting it into volatile methyl derivatives which the would-be emperor inhaled, slowly poisoning himself.
The authorities have banned a similar compound of tin used in an anti-fouling paint for boats because it causes genetic damage in shellfish.
Chemical Pollution and Entropy
Entropy is chemical pollution. Companies in the USA use over 60,000 chemicals and more than 13,000 of them are known to cause genetic damage. In the modern world dangerous poisons are bandied about like confetti, and supposedly all in a good cause. For every human being on earth, the world’s farmers apply a pound of pesticides to their crops every year.
H.K.Erben of Bonn University noticed that the eggshells of the species of dinosaur he was studying got thinner in more recent deposits. Pesticides like DDT and polychlorobiphenyls (PCBs) harm animals at the top of a food chain by absorbing into body fats and accumulating in the predator as it eats its prey. If sufficient accumulates at some point in the chain, the animal suffers physiological damage leading to death. Predatory birds, like eagles, have suffered notably. Their eggs become so thin and brittle they break in the nest. Bakker classifies birds as living dinosaurs!
Cancer-causing PCBs are never found in nature but are found in the bodies of 99 per cent of Americans. The sperm count of the American male is only half its value in 1940. The reason why is not known. What is known is that in the same period increasing amounts of organochlorine compounds have been found in sperm. Organochlorine chemicals kill pests so why shouldn’t they kill sperm? An expert tells us that dinosaurs died out because mammals killed and ate their young: another tells us that their young were all born the same sex. What if their young were not born at all because pesticides had sterilized all the males? Do our manufacturers and governments care if pesticides sterilize the human race?
Though PCBs are still widely used, advanced countries have banned DDT but still manufacture it for export to other, mainly Third World countries!
Every year industry dumps 250 million metric tons of dangerous waste that can cause cancer, birth defects, miscarriages, nervous disorders, blood diseases and permanent, possibly fatal, damage to the liver, kidneys or genes, according to James Bellini.
But dangerous quantities don’t have to be large. Daily each of us takes in one millionth of an ounce of vinyl chloride mainly from PVC. But Italian researcher, Cesari Maltoni, has demonstrated that only one part in a million of vinyl chloride causes mammary tumors in rats, and only 25 parts in a million causes cancers of the liver. Those are single doses. Continuous exposure to doses of only one tenth of these levels have similar effects.
Farmers bathe the land with chemicals. Many have the simpleton’s philosophy that, if a little fertilizer is good, a lot must be better. They pollute the water table, waste their money and destroy the quality of the soil. Loss of quality, through loss of fine particles, organic matter and water, reduces rooting depth which, paradoxically, results in less fertility. Poor quality soil coheres badly and therefore erodes more easily. David Pimentel, Professor of Entomology and Agricultural Science at Cornell University says that loss of soil depth is seriously reducing food production. The US is losing soil at seven tons an acre each year; a third of the topsoil has been lost in only two centuries of farming.
Because of overuse of fertilizers our lakes and rivers suffer from eutrophication. Prolific growths of algae and photosynthetic bacteria, thriving on the excess nutrients washed out of the soil, suffocate everything else by their excessive oxygen demand as they decompose. Organic deposits forms thick layers on the bottom, quite unable to be oxidized but eventually metamorphosed by anaerobic bacteria and then pressure to yield hydrocarbons.
Our main oil deposits today were laid down in the Late Cretaceous. Oil was originally formed in shallow, stagnant lakes or seas on continental shelves. The conditions were those of eutrophication. Did the stagnant waters of the lakes and shallow seas polluted by the anthroposaurs provide the conditions for the formation of the Cretaceous oil deposits? Perhaps a close analysis of the original oil bearing rocks will give us some indication of how polluted the environment was and where the pollutants originated from, whether excessive amounts of silt were brought down, and whether it has any characteristics that show the soil had been cultivated. Our farmers and industrialists are setting up suitable conditions. Could we, in such places as the Great Lakes and the Baltic Sea be initiating the next phase of petroleum formation?
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