Over the past 260 million years, dinosaurs have come and gone, Pangea has split into the continents and islands we see today, and humans have rapidly and irreversibly changed the world we live in. But despite all this, the Earth seems to keep track of time. Studies of ancient geological events show that our planet has a slow, steady “heartbeat” of geological activity approximately every 27 million years.

This pulse of clustered geological events, including volcanic activity, mass extinctions, plate realignment, and sea level rise, is incredibly slow; It is a cataclysmic tidal cycle of 27.5 million years. But luckily for us, researchers believe we have another 20 million years until the next “pulse.”

“Many geologists believe that geological events occur randomly over time,” Michael Rampino, a geologist at New York University and lead author of the study, said in a 2021 statement. said. “But our study provides statistical evidence of a common cycle and suggests that these geological events are interrelated rather than random.”

The team analyzed 89 well-studied geological events over the last 260 million years.

As you can see from the chart below, some of these times were challenging; More than eight world-changing events came together in geologically short periods of time to create a catastrophic “pulse.”

“These events include times of marine and non-marine extinctions, major oceanic oxygen events, continental floods and basalt eruptions, sea level fluctuations, global pulses of intraplate magmatism, and times of changes in rates of seafloor spreading and plate realignment.” the team wrote in their article.

“Our results show that global geological events tend to be interrelated and occur in pulses, with a major cycle of approximately 27.5 million years.”

Geologists have long studied the potential cycle of geological events. In the 1920s and ’30s, scientists of the time suggested that the geological record had a 30-million-year cycle, while in the 1980s and ’90s researchers used the best-dated geological events of that time to give them a “range of length between . The age of legumes increased from 26.2 to 30.6 million years.

Everything seems fine now; The time we expected was 27.5 million years. A study published in late 2020 by the same authors suggested that this 27.5-million-year milestone was also when mass extinctions occurred.

“This article is pretty good, but I actually think the best article on this phenomenon is this: [стаття 2018 року] Muller and Dutkiewicz, tectonic geologist Alan Collins from the University of Adelaide, who was not involved in the study, told ScienceAlert. In 2021.

This 2018 paper, written by two researchers from the University of Sydney, looked at the Earth’s carbon cycle and plate tectonics and concluded that the cycle is approximately 26 million years long. Collins explained that many of the events the team investigated in this latest study were causal, meaning one directly caused another, meaning some of the 89 events were linked: for example, anoxic events that caused sea extinction.

“However,” he added, “this 26-30 million year cycle appears to be real and spans a longer period of time, and it is not clear what causes it!”

Other studies by Rampino and his team suggest that collisions with comets may be the cause, and one space researcher even suggests that the ninth planet is to blame. But if Earth truly has a geological “heartbeat,” it might be due to something closer to home.

“These cyclical pulses of tectonics and climate change may arise from geophysical processes related to plate tectonics and the dynamics of mantle plumes, or alternatively, they may arise as a result of astronomical cycles related to the Earth’s motion in the Solar System and the Earth’s motion across the Galaxy.” wrote the following in their teamwork. Source