Permian-Triassic mystery solved; cute baby sighted; the nine-day 2023 seismic event

This week, a billionaire made a spacewalk, archaeologists found a new, isolated Neanderthal lineage and the James Webb Space Telescope revealed the extreme outskirts of the Milky Way. And a few other things happened:

Rumble elucidated

If you’re super-sensitive to longitudinal P-wave seismic frequencies, you may have noticed a rumbling under your feet in 2023 that reverberated through the entire Earth for nine straight days. “What is that?” you might have wondered as scientists hooked up electrodes to your body to study your seismologically weird, earthquake-detecting physiology.

An international team has been studying this mystery and landed on a likely solution: A mountaintop in an East Greenland fjord collapsed into the sea, triggering a mega-tsunami with 200-meter-high waves that echoed back and forth for nine days within the fjord and generated seismic waves that reverberated throughout the earth. Seismologists at the time thought it was pretty weird. And like most catastrophic phenomena these days, it was caused by climate change, according to the new study.

The warming climate melted the glacier at the foot of the Dickson Fjord mountain, which destabilized 33 million cubic yards of rock and ice, which plunged into the sea. “Climate change is shifting what is typical on Earth, and it can set unusual events into motion,” said seismologist Alice Gabriel of UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography in what can only be described as a seismic understatement.

Baby cute, endangered

Officials at an Indonesian national park announced the sighting of a young Javan rhino calf in the wild, evidence that the endangered species is still viably reproducing. The female calf, named Iris, appears to be between three and five months old. A camera trap caught the baby Rhinoceros sondaicus walking with her mother, totally chill, no big deal, just an adorable and highly endangered animal coming through.

Ujung Kulon National Park, the only existing refuge for the species, announced the sighting of two other calves in the park earlier this year. Despite the good news, the species is still endangered by rampant poaching and natural disasters. According to the International Rhino Foundation, there are only 80 living Javan rhinos globally.

Study objectively terrifying

There are few things as unsettling, or as likely to send me spiraling into a dissociative fugue, as the widespread scientific consensus that the mass extinction of the Permian-Triassic period 252 million years ago was caused by an accumulation of carbon dioxide emissions from volcanoes saturating the atmosphere, resulting in climate change and the collapse of terrestrial and marine ecosystems. However, the linked decline in normally resilient insect and plant life has remained a mystery—generally, when temperatures in the tropics rise, plants and insects spread to cooler climates.

Now, researchers at the University of Bristol and China University of Geosciences have published a paper arguing that the effects of rapid climate change were so devastating due to prolonged El Niño events compared to those today. During these decades-spanning events, weather and climate variability were extreme, and temperature gradients collapsed—essentially, it was too hot everywhere. The lengthy El Niño that caused the June 2024 heat wave raised temperatures globally by around 15 degrees Celsius higher than normal.

Paul Wignall, professor of paleoenvironments at the University of Leeds, says, “Fortunately, such events so far have only lasted one to two years at a time. During the Permian-Triassic crisis, El Niño persisted for much longer, resulting in a decade of widespread drought, followed by years of flooding. Basically, the climate was all over the place, and that makes it very hard for any species to adapt.”

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