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A Giant Sea Belch Spawned the Dawn of Mammals

November, 23rd, 1999
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A giant belch of methane gas from deep under the sea 55 million years ago may have helped mammals take over the world, researchers said on Friday.
They said they had found strong evidence of a huge release of the gas -- the fuel behind "natural gas," swamp gas and the belches of cud-chewing animals -- which coincides with a period of dramatic global warming.

The idea has been around for a few years, but Miriam Katz, who is earning her doctoral degree in geology at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and colleagues said they found evidence of this methane release in the Atlantic ocean off the coast of Florida.

"We know that 55.5 million years ago, carbon dioxide was added to the atmosphere at a rate comparable to present-day fossil fuel input, providing the potential to use the past changes in carbon dioxide levels to shed light on future climate change possibilities," Katz said in a statement.

Right about the same time, which was 10 million years after the dinosaurs started dying off, many species of mammals arose. Scores of deep-sea species became extinct as water temperatures soared by 7 to 14 degrees Fahrenheit.

Katz's team looked at changes in tiny fossils of microscopic shelled creatures known as foraminifera, taken from ocean sediments from the Blake Nose, 250 miles east of Tallahassee, Fla.

The area once contained methane deposits in the form of ice, made solid by the heavy pressure of the water or sediments above, which sat on the ocean floor in big chunks. Similar deposits exist around the world today.

They said the methane appears to have escaped, in what would have been big bubbles, from a pressure zone created by an underlying ancient reef.

They find suggestions that temperatures in the water rose by 11 degrees or more in that area.

But they do not know what caused it.

"The triggering mechanism for methane release is still open to debate," they wrote. So it is unclear if such an event could happen again. 

A Giant Belch gave birth to all mankind, proof once again that Belch.Com was destined to be, and possibly the culmination of all of humanity's technology and science.
Or maybe just pure luck.

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