Tea at Trianon: The Ordovician Extinction

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, January 25, 2021

The Ordovician Extinction

The only thing certain about living on planet earth is change. From Discover Magazine:

But many researchers are beginning to think that “cooling itself may not be solely responsible for these extinctions,” as Thijs Vandenbroucke and colleagues wrote in a 2015 paper that links some deaths to changing ocean chemistry. They found fossilized plankton with fatal deformities dating to the event, suggesting the release of toxic metals like iron and lead from the ocean depths may have been an important kill mechanism.
Some evidence in recent years even points the finger at glaciation’s elemental opposite: volcanism. The Ordovician extinction, if caused by the cooling climate, would be an outlier. Extreme volcanic activity is widely accepted as a main catalyst in most other mass die-offs, since it leads to inhospitable global warming. Now, with the discovery of mercury deposits from the era, the telltale signature of eruptions has surfaced in this extinction too. Rewriting the story with a fiery culprit would “make the late Ordovician stand out less,” Finnegan says, though he’s not convinced yet. (Read more.)