IS life's fate extinction?

This is my little haha to my group members because they are being bad students and they want to do homework for other classes rather than this.


As I write this, none of my group members on on the internets to help discuss what our point of view is on this. I'll just go with what my opinion is on it, and they'll have to go along and smile and nod. By this time in the presentation, they should be smiling and nodding because they are such wonderful sports about it.


The best part is that they probably won't check what I've written until it's time to present and then TAH-DAH! this pops up. And they won't be able to do anything about it.


Back on topic.


Life's fate is most definitely extinction. In the 13.7 billion years that we have estimated the universe to be in existence, the Earth has only been around for 4.5 billion years of that and life on Earth just 2 billion.


There have been so many extinctions that killed off more than half of the species and eventually, there will be one that kills life off completely because something or some species ruins it for everyone.


That doesn't mean that somehow, somewhere in the universe, there's other life. But it's unlikely that we'll find them and they'll probably end up going extinct, just like us.


Life will probably continue to pop up in places all over the universe, but they will all inevitably die out.

DIE HUMANS, DIE! ~ The Animals.

Humans have caused the amount of CO2 released into the air to increase significantly, causing the global temperature to rise by 1 degree. We have caused some soils to become unfertile when farming, and we have poured chemicals into the water and earth. Basically, we suck. We kill the earth. Antarctica is melting, all because of global warming. The seals and penguins and fish are losing their habitats.

LARUSSIA COLLIDES WITH GONDWANALAND! Does this spell disaster?

Geologically, the Late Carboniferous collision of Laurussia (present-day Europe and North America) into Gondwanaland (present-day Africa and South America) produced the Appalachian mountain belt of eastern North America and the Hercynian Mountains in the United Kingdom. A further collision of Siberia and eastern Europe created the Ural Mountains.

Hey, look, Larussia and Gondwanaland! And French!
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/carboniferous/carboniferous.html

Continental Jigsaw Puzzles! Buy yours now!

Earthquakes and volcanoes show the edges of the plates. Earthquakes and volcanoes are distributed at the edges of the tectonic plates, because the crust is thinnest there. When the crust is thin, the mantle inside the earth has an easier time of getting up. Also, at the edges of plates, when the plates collide or slip underneath each other, the friction causes earthquakes.
Here is a website, where there is a picture of earthquake predictions at the bottom!

Fossil distribution also shows evidence of plate tectonics. Archaeologists have found fossils on the west coast of Africa of the same species as fossils on the east coast of North America. These fossils are mostly of land-locked animals that would not have been able to cross oceans. Clearly, these continents were once the same continent, but broke apart.
Here is a picture of fossil distribution across S.America, Africa, Antarctica, Australia, and India...

Closer to the ridges, the sea floor is newer. Because of the recycling of the oceanic crust, the sea floors closer to the ridges are newer, while the sea floors closer to the trenches are older.
Here is a picture of the ages of the sea floors...

What died?

In the Carboniferous Period, extinctions were mostly marine organisms. Species that went extinct were mostly invertebrates that lived entirely in the seas. Horn corals, trilobites and some forms of crinoids began to go extinct as the Permian Era began.

During the Permian Era over 90% of oceanic species went extinct or were severely harmed. Land species were not as severely decimated, but some species, (like the pelycosaurs) died out completely.

Pictures: Upper Left: Horn coral

Left: Artist rendition of Pelycosaurs.

The coolest comic on plate tectonics ever.

Merriam-Webster defines plate tectonics as "a theory in geology: the lithosphere of the earth is divided into a small number of plates which float on and travel independently over the mantle and much of the earth's seismic activity occurs at the boundaries of these plate".


 The earth is like a giant stove and the continents are like the water in the pot on top. The things on the sides spread away and in the middle, it goes upwards, so everything else spreads around.

The Earth has trenches in the ocean and at the bottom of the trenches, new land from magma is being created, spreading the other Earth outward. In other places in trenches, one plate goes under, while the other goes up. This is called subduction.

Probably the most boring post of this whole thing.

 The world during the current mass extinction looks a little something like this.