Global warming may accelerate evolution
Posted: Friday, June 2nd, 2006 by StanleyTags: Climate Change, Energy, Science
A study released this week may explain the increased biodiversity at the Earth's tropical regions. It's not because the temperature is so nice and life is so comfortable that animals flock there. Although, that's why most human's vacation there I presume. These findings suggest that the increased heat leads to faster metabolisms, and hence faster genetic mutations. They have determined through the study of plankton mutations, that the amount of energy required to create a new species is huge.
Get ready for this, it takes 1023 or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules of energy to result in a new species. According to Wikipedia, "1 joule is the absolute minimum amount of energy required (on the surface of Earth) to lift a one kilogram object up by a height of 10 centimetres". These scientists are talking 1023 J, damn that's a lot of power.
According to this site, that's the same amount of energy as:
- Released by the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction theory meteorite (ironically)
- All the Energy contained in the all the Earth's Fossil Fuels
- One full year of U.S. sunshine.
To further help put this in perspective the following items also equal about 1023 J of energy.
- 1 Million – 100 Megaton H-Bombs
- 10 Billion space shuttle launches
- 1 Quadrillion – gallons of gasoline… at $3.50/gallon ouch!
- 1 Sextillion – AA batteries.
Of course with global warming, we are adding more energy to our global system. What will this mean for biodiversity in the long run?
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