How is Planet Earth able to regenerate itself even after a devastating event?

Question

Look at the dinosaurs. Many creatures perished when a meteorite struck, but new animals developed out of the blue and populated the earth. The same thing will probably happen when humans bite the big one also

Answer 1

Earth is constantly undergoing change... on scales vastly beyond the scope of the human story.. we've hardly been in existence for a mere flicker of time compared to the planet, and life of any kind is still (relatively) a more recent chapter in the story of Earth..

Answer 2

It doesn't even take that long! The noted author Roger Zelazny wrote an essay on the Trinity Site, where the first experimental atomic bomb was set off. You'd think that it would be radioattive until the end of time. But the fact is that only 25 years after the blast, without the help of any man made machinery, the desert sands filled the crater with sand and plants and animals moved back in, and no, they were not hideously mutated because the radiatiopn level was only a little bit above background level.

Another example is found in the National Geographic issue one year after the eruption of Mt. Saint Helens; the largest and most devastating volcanic eruption ever in the history of the United States. It put over four cubic miles of rock turned to dust, gas, ashes and soot into the atmosphere (including radioactive particles, from deep inside the Earth!) into the atmosphere.

National Geographic did a two page spread. On the left side was apicture that showed the area one week after the eruption. It looked like the surface of the Moon-- it was just cold grey ashes, with little craters (ponds) and dead tree trunks sticking out.

But on the right side, everything was green and growing. You could tell it was the EXACT SAME SPOT because of the terrain-- there were the same hills and valleys and ponds and dead trees there! The heat of the volcanic ashes had burned away dead underbrush that prevented sunlight reaching the forest floor. And the heat also caused long-buried seeds to germinate.

In a spot where it looked like it would be dead for eternity, life had returned.

What's more, on the world wide scale, Mt. Saint Helens wasn't unusually large. There is a comparable eruption like that at least twice or three times a century. And the planet survives.

I'm not saying that I'm in favor of crapping up the Earth. We have been given a position of trust, and we should take care of the place we live in. We should pollute less and less as time goes on, and leave it to the volcanoes and lightning-caused forest fires to do the polluting. But Man is not capable of destroying the ecology.

(I have deliberately not touched upon global warming, beacuse that is a separate topic, and very politically charged. However, if you want to, you are welcome to review some of my previous Best Answers on the topic of global warming, where I demonstrate that it is not man-made, and cannot be stopped. I refer to photos from NASA and physical evidence brought back by NASA from the Moon for proofs.)

4 NOV 06, 1451 hrs, GMT.

Answer 3

It`s called evolution i.e.man Homo erctus, H.hablis, H sapien or any other species. There small changes over a peroid time + as well as envorment i.e. Darwins Finches.

Answer 4

Yep, it just takes a very long time...

Answer 5

... a very very long time.