Evil genie pops cork. News at 11:59pm

I've been working on the little garden to the right and tomorrow I begin my 6 months of work at PeaceHealth. Last night I finished the second part of a documentary that is on ABC in Australia via the web and it had a big "aha!" in it for me. Before I launch into that there is a post by Phil Churchill on the main site that is here. Check it out.

Evil genie in the bottle:
In the age of the dinosaurs the big plates of the earth began to separate. Volcano's formed everywhere along the edges and spewed out humongous amounts of carbon dioxide. Over 100 million years the earth got hotter and hotter because carbon dioxide lets warm sunlight in, but doesn't let it out. It is like a piece of glass in a greenhouse.

The polar ice caps melted entirely. You know that can't be good. When there is no cold ice cap the cool the warm water flowing up from the equator (the sun heats the equator's water more than the poles), then the warm water can't cool and drop deep to create the flow that mixes the oceans of the world through currents.

So the oceans became stagnant. Plankton went nuts, yahoo - good eats, warm water, heaven - in the warm water and used the oxygen in the water, the carbon dioxide in the air and sunlight to grow more of themselves. Because of the humongous amount of CO2 in the air, the plankton thrived and created a thick soup of the stuff in the oceans of dinosaur times.

Just like us, the plankton won't stop until something stops them. They used up all the oxygen in the water and began to die, leaving the seas, pitch black and without any oxygen at all. The began dying and drifted to the bottom. There over millions of years they built up, forming a thick, gooey, stinky mass of lipids and cell walls, and icky icky black decay. At some point in the cycle, H2S - hydrogen sulfide began to bubble and poison the remaining life in the ocean as there was no oxygen in the water to oxidate it. Acid rains began to sweep the globe and a hell, from the human perspective, was created. The continents were washed into the seas with terrific storms of acid rain. Soils swept into the sea and began to cover the stinky ooze of dead plankton. Good riddance.

But the earth is a dynamic balance engine. Those very stinking half decayed plankton had each pulled a little bit of CO2 from the atmosphere. Since were buried without O2, they kept the carbon dioxide and the slow miracle began. In their act of dying, these little plankton had taken the evil tiny bits of CO2 with them to their dark graves deep in the oceans. They rained down in the ocean floors for millions of years. And the miracle began. Without the CO2, the earth's atmosphere began to cool. The polar ice returned. AND THEN: The ocean currents began to flow again, they stirred the waters and oxygen was once again reabsorbed into the seas. Life returned to the ocean depths. Our blue planet reborn as we know it today, well, a hundred and fity years ago, and life began again, without most of the dinosaur clan though.

In a good dramatic book, the story would end with the blue skies clearing, birds (dinosaur cousins) flying and a then a cut to a bubbling cauldron of stinking ooze imprisoning the dangerous CO2 deep under the oceans floor, where under pressure and no oxygen, the ooze was slowly compressing, creaking, groaning, waiting. Waiting once again to be released to the surface to begin the process the volcanos had started 120 million years ago, returning the earth to the hell of stagnant death. Waiting for the sequel.

Not to worry, all that ooze turned to oil source rocks and most if it was buried thousands of feet down under the surface of this new eden (from the human perspective). There is no wise human who would release that evil genie by pumping it up and burning it because it would spell the end of Human Kind. Sleep easy, we're not that dumb. Oh, wait.