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Very few times we take a moment to think about the huge process that took life to where it is now, and nature means to our world. After 3.500 million years since life began on our planet, everything seems to be taken for granted, but do you know what golbal warming could cause?

It is important to reflect and ponder a little about this issue, for we need to grasp and comprehend the dimension of the damage that we may inflict in our planet home if we continue to act carelessly; animal and vegetal species, as well as ourselves, could suffer enormously, according to palaeontological and geological evidence now in our hands. We could just use our time to comment about the kind of products and services offered by the sites that are included in Andinia's database, but this is really important.

What some know as Gaia and others as the global environment is now at risk, and more seriously at it than most could even imagine. This is no apocalyptical message, but an expression of proven information of scientific quality.

We now know that even a small change in the average temperatures in our world could have a significant impact on our climate, but what has been recently discovered and is not still quite known by the public, should make us wonder. The extinction of the dinosaurs was not the biggest ecological catastrophe of all times: today we know that 245 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period there was another global event which was far more destructive: in less than 80.000 years, almost 95% of all life in the planet ceased to exist, allmost in an instant.

This, the P-T event, was not caused by a meteor; it originated in extensive and continuous volcanic activity that took place in Siberia, forming the Putorana highlands. These volcanic eruptions caused a green house effect due to the emission of gasses and ash, which in turn, increased the global average temperature in just four degrees Celsius.

Seems little, but was enough to start killing species; however, it also raised the temperature of the seas, and that, in turn, heated very slightly the oceanic deep bottom. Underneath it, and along the limits of almost all continental plaques, there are vast deposits of frozen and combined methane gas, which then were disturbed.

Huge emissions of methane began, intoxicating very rapidly all aquatic life, and then went into the atmosphere, where it also began killing species of aerial and land based environments, aided by the rupture of the food chain that begins with marine and water plants and animals. Plus, it raised the global temperature a further four or five, turning the whole planet into a desert.

This was a natural disaster, but now we have the dubious ability of inducing a greenhouse ourselves, and our world has so much sinnergy in it that we may trigger such events without realising; 80.000 years seems much to us, but is an eye'a blink in evolutionary and geological terms. This is an important piece of information that we believe that you, a lover of nature and plants, should disseminate; what happened at the end of the Palaeozoic era, when the Permian ended in disaster could happen again, and this time, without the need for massive volcanoes erupting.

Take the initiative and put a link to this page from your site and let others know about this, for plant lovers may well be deprived of them sooner than expected.

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