Podcasts about permian triassic

Get ready to embark on a time-traveling adventure with us as we welcome the extraordinary Dr. Bamforth, a leading paleontologist from the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum. From a childhood filled with dinosaur dreams to a career unveiling the secrets of prehistoric life, Dr. Bamforth's passion is nothing short of contagious. We'll walk through ancient landscapes, exploring how life evolved and survived against the odds, and draw inspiration from his stories to fuel our own curiosity about the natural world.Journey through Earth's past as we discuss dramatic ancient climate shifts and the profound tales they tell about survival and extinction. We'll unravel the mysteries of the Permian-Triassic extinction and the Cretaceous period's lush environments, shedding light on the small dinosaurs that thrived despite adversity. We also confront the multi-layered causes of mass extinctions, from volcanic eruptions to climate change parallels with today's environmental challenges—proving history has much to teach us about our planet's future.Join us for a hands-on exploration of fossil discoveries and the secrets lying in amber's golden depths. Celebrate Alberta's latest paleontological triumph with the first massive pachyrhinosaurus skull unearthed in nearly two decades. Plus, learn how you can step into the shoes of a paleontologist through interactive museum programs.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: An exhaustive list of cosmic threats, published by JordanStone on December 5, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Toby Ord covers 'Asteroids and Comets' and 'Stellar Explosions' in The Precipice. But I thought it would be useful to provide an up-to-date and exhaustive list of all cosmic threats. I'm defining cosmic threat here as any existential risk potentially arising from space. I think this list may be useful for 3 main reasons: New cosmic threats are discovered frequently. So it's plausible that future cause areas could pop out of this space. I think that keeping an eye on it should help identify areas that may need research. Though it should be noted that some of the risks are totally impossible to protect against at this point (e.g. a rogue planet entering our solar system). Putting all of the cosmic threats together in one place could reveal that cosmic threats are more important than previously thought, or provide a good intro for someone interested in working in this space. There is momentum in existential risk reduction from outer space, with great powers (Russia, USA, China, India, Europe) already collaborating on asteroid impact risk. So harnessing that momentum to tackle some more of the risks on this list could be really tractable and may lead to collaboration on other x-risks like AI, biotech and nuclear. I will list each cosmic threat, provide a brief explanation, and find the best evidence I can to provide severity and probability estimates for each. Enjoy :) I'll use this format: Cosmic Threat [Severity of worst case scenario /10] [Probability of that scenario occurring in the next 100 years] Explanation of threat Explanation of rationale and approach Severity estimates For the severity, 10 is the extinction of all intelligent life on Earth, and 0 is a fart in the wind. It was difficult to pin down one number for threats with multiple outcomes (e.g. asteroids have different sizes). So the severity estimates are for the worst-case scenarios for each cosmic threat, and the probability estimate corresponds to that scenario. Probability estimates Probabilities are presented as % chance of that scenario occurring in the next 100 years. I have taken probabilities from the literature and converted values to normalise them as a probability of their occurrence within the next 100 years (as a %). This isn't a perfect way to do it, but I prioritised getting a general understanding of their probability, rather than numbers that are hard to imagine. When the severity or likelihood is unclear or not researched well enough, I've written 'unknown'. I'm trying my best to ignore reasoning along the lines of "if it hasn't happened before, then it very likely won't happen ever or is extremely rare" because of the anthropic principle. Our view of past events on Earth is biased towards a world that has allowed humanity to evolve, which likely required a few billion years of stable-ish conditions. So it is likely that we have just been lucky in the past, where no cosmic threats have disturbed Earth's habitability so extremely as to set back life's evolution by billions of years (not even the worst mass extinction ever at the Permian-Triassic boundary did this, as reptiles survived). An Exhaustive List of Cosmic Threats Format: Cosmic Threat [Severity of worst case scenario /10] [Probability of that scenario occurring in the next 100 years] Explanation of threat Solar flares [4/10] [1%]. Electromagnetic radiation erupts from the surface of the sun. Solar flares occur fairly regularly and cause minor impacts, mainly on communications. A large solar flare has the potential to cause electrical grids to fail, damage satellites, disrupt radio signals, cause increased radiation influx, destroy data storage devices, cause navigation errors, and permanently damage scientific eq...

Life always seems to find a way. It inhabits every nook and cranny on Earth, from the upper atmosphere to the rocks below the bottom of the ocean. And even when there's a disaster, it bounces back—sometimes in a big hurry.An example comes from a quarter of a billion years ago, after the deadliest known mass extinction. Known as the Permian-Triassic event, it was the result of huge volcanic eruptions. They warmed the atmosphere and made the oceans far more acidic. That killed off most of the life on Earth, including 80 percent of life in the oceans.Early evidence suggested it took millions of years for marine life to recover. But a recent study found a fully developed ocean ecosystem just one million years after the event.Researchers dug up more than a thousand fossils in southwestern China. Layers of volcanic ash allowed them to date the fossils to about 251 million years ago—just a million years after the extinction event. The fossils represented an entire food web—everything from microscopic organisms to crabs and lobsters to fish up to about three feet long.Some of the life matched the life found before the mass extinction—hardy survivors of a dangerous era. But much of the life looked a lot more like species that are alive today. That suggests that life adapted quickly.Scientists had to suspend their fossil dig because of COVID-19. But they planned to return to the field in late 2023—looking for more evidence of life that found a way.

Biodiversity loss may be the harbinger of a more devastating ecological collapse, an international team of scientists have discovered. By exploring the stability and collapse of marine ecosystems during the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, researchers have gained worrying insights into the modern biodiversity crisis, given that the rate of species loss today outpaces that during the event, known as the ‘Great Dying'. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Pangea: The Worst of Times, published by John G. Halstead on the AI Alignment Forum. 260 million years ago, our planet had an unfamiliar geography. Nearly all of the landmasses were united into a single giant continent known as ‘Pangea' that stretched from pole to pole. On the other side of the world you would find a vast ocean, even larger than the present Pacific, called Panthalassa. The Pangean era lasted 160 million years, and 80 million of these were extremely inhospitable to animal and plant life, coinciding with two mass extinctions and four other major extinction events. This is why Paul Wignall, a Professor of Palaeoenvironments at Leeds has called the Pangean era ‘The Worst of Times'. Understanding why the Pangean era was so miserable helps inform several questions of interest to those studying existential risk. ● What level of natural existential risk do we face now, and have we faced in the past? ● What is the threat of super-volcanic eruptions? ● How much existential risk does anthropogenic climate change pose? 1. Background There have been five mass extinctions so far. The Ordovician–Silurian (450-440 million years ago) and the Late Devonian (375-360 million years ago) each preceded the age of Pangea. The Pangean period coincided with the two worst mass extinctions, the huge Permian-Triassic mass extinction (252 million years ago) and the Triassic-Jurassic extinction event (201 million years ago).[1] The last crisis, the Cretaceous–Paleogene event (65 million years ago), accounted for the dinosaurs and occurred once continental drift had done its business and Pangea had broken apart. With the exception of the end Cretaceous extinction, since the breakup of Pangea, it has been relatively plain sailing for Earth's various species, until humans started killing off other species themselves. [2] As one can see on this diagram, in the 145 million years since the start of the Cretaceous, the average rate of global genus extinctions from extinction events has been around 5% and never passed 15%, except for the death of the dinosaurs. But in the 80 million years from the first Pangean extinction event, the Capitanian, to the early Jurassic extinction events, the average rate of global genus extinctions in extinction events is more around 15-20%, and 12 events produced global genus extinction rates in excess of 15%. Below is a useful chart from Wikipedia on the Phanerozoic, which shows the long-term trend in biodiversity as well as the impact of different extinction events. Again, this highlights how unusually bad things were in the Pangean era - specifically the 80 million years after the Capitanian extinction event 260 million years ago. But it also highlights how good things have been since the end of the Pangean era and the start of the Cretaceous (145 million years ago). 2. What caused such ecological trauma in Pangea? Huge volcanic eruptions were implicated in all of the six major extinction events in the Pangean era. One can see this in the first diagram above, where the volcanic eruptions are shown at the top and the line traces down to corresponding extinction events at the bottom. Every Pangean extinction event coincided with the outpouring of enormous fields of lava that, once cooled, produced what geologists call Large Igneous Provinces (LIPs).[3] To put these LIPs in context, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 produced 10 cubic km of magma, which caused the Earth to cool by about half a degree. The eruption of the Siberian Traps which appeared to cause the end Permian extinction produced 3 million cubic km of magma. You can see the volume of magma for all major LIPs at the top of the first diagram above. These volcanic eruptions emitted sulphur dioxide, carbon dioxide and halogen gases, each of which could potentially have an effect on the ecosys...

Magmatic sulfide deposits have arguably the most quantified deposit model, but what are the game changers in our understanding? Despite a decades old foundational model for their formation, what is new and what should be considered in the search for new resources? This episode checks in with an expert in magmatic sulfides engaged in the global pursuit as well as those researching emerging ideas that shed new light on the model, including some which have implications for exploration.Peter Lightfoot, Lightfoot Geoscience and adjunct professor Western University,  began his career in academia and at a survey, but then seized the opportunity to make the switch to exploration and has never looked back. He gives us his five game changers in the understanding of the ore deposit model for magmatic sulfides, from mineral systems to big data and structural analysis.The recognition of ‘drobbles' – the coalescence of vapor and sulfides in the formation of magmatic sulfide ores stems from how we ask questions, the scale of observation and fundamental experimental work. Margaux Le Vallaint, CSIRO, Kensington, W.A., Australia, talks about her research into the role of gases in the formation of Norilsk massive Ni deposit, with implications for the Permian-Triassic extinction event.In the lead up to the early career Pt Symposium, in May 2022  (check it out on the MagSul website), keynote speaker, Eduardo Mansur,  Norges Geologiske Undersøkelse,  talks about developments in mineral analysis and potential applications for exploration. Plus, what does an early career scientist think the future holds for the science of magmatic sulfide deposits?Theme music is Confluence by Eastwindseastwindsmusic.com

The Permian-Triassic mass extinction was the deadliest extinction event this world has seen, with nearly 90% of all marine animals and 75% of land animals going extinct. ThePrint's Sandhya Ramesh explains new findings which explain the mechanism with which the massive volcanic eruptions on earth resulted in the largest mass extinction. Brought to you by  @Kia India  ----more----Geochemical study confirms cause of end-Permian mass extinction event https://phys.org/news/2021-06-geochemical-end-permian-mass-extinction-event.html

Sign up for our mailing list! It's another extinction event episode! This one's about the end-Permian AKA the Permian-Triassic AKA the GREAT DYING. Further Reading: Ancient mini-sharks lived longer than thought Lystrosaurus's fossilized skeleton: Lystrosaurus may have looked something like this but I hope not: This artist's rendition of lystrosaurus looks a little less horrific but it might not be any more accurate: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. It's time for our next extinction event episode, and this week it's the big one. Not the extinction event that killed the dinosaurs, but one you may not have heard of, one that almost destroyed all life on earth. I mean, obviously it didn't and things are fine now, but it was touch and go there for a while. It's the Permian-Triassic extinction event, or end-Permian, which took place just over 250 million years ago. It was so bad that scientists who aren't given to hyperbole refer to it as the Great Dying. Don't worry, we won't talk about extinction the whole time. We'll also learn about some interesting animals that survived the extinction event and did just fine afterwards. We have a better idea of what happened at the end of the Permian than we have about the earlier extinction events we talked about in episodes 205 and 214. Right about 252 million years ago, something caused a massive volcanic eruptive event in what is now Siberia. Some researchers speculate that the cause of the volcanic eruptions may have been a huge asteroid impact on the other side of the Earth, which was so powerful that it caused magma to move away from the impact like water sloshing in a jostled glass. The magma rose up toward the earth's crust and eventually through it onto the surface. The result was probably the largest volcanic event in the last half-billion years and it continued for an estimated two million years. Most of the eruptions were probably pretty low-key, just runny lava pouring out of vents in the ground, but there was just so much of it. Lava covered almost a million square miles of land, or 2.6 million square km. Ash and toxic gases from some eruptions also ended up high in the atmosphere, but one big problem was that the lava poured through sediments full of organic material in the process of turning into coal. Lava, of course, is molten rock and it's incredibly hot. It's certainly hot enough to burn a bunch of young coal beds, which added more ash and toxic gases to the air—so much ash that shallow water throughout the entire world became choked with ash. The carbon dioxide released by all that burning coal caused severe ocean acidification and ocean anoxia—a lack of oxygen in the water. But it gets worse! A lot of lava erupted into the ocean right at the continental shelf, where the shallow coastal water becomes much deeper. This is exactly the place where you find methane deposits in the sediments on the ocean floor. When those deposits were suddenly disturbed by lava flowing into them, all the methane in the formerly tranquil depths was released and bubbled to the surface. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, meaning that if a whole lot of it ends up in the atmosphere in a short amount of time, it can cause rapid global warming—much faster than that caused by carbon dioxide. This global warming would have happened after a period of global cooling due to reduced sunlight reaching the earth through ash clouds, which lasted long enough and was severe enough that sea levels dropped as glaciers formed. Then everything heated way, way up. The ice caps melted, which may have led to a stagnation of ocean currents. This in turn would have contributed to the water's anoxicity and toxicity. The average temperature of the ocean would have increased by almost 15 degrees Fahrenheit, or 8 degrees Celsius. Atmospheric warming may have been as much as 68 degrees Fahrenheit in places,

Hello and welcome to Episode Thirty Four of Page Turn: the Largo Public Library Podcast. I'm your host, Hannah! If you enjoy the podcast subscribe, tell a friend, or write us a review! The English Language Transcript can be found below But as always we start with Reader's Advisory! The Reader's Advisory for Episode Thirty Four is Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. If you like Braiding Sweetgrass you should also check out: As Long As Grass Grows by Dina Gilio-Whitaker, All We Can Save edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine Keeble Wilkinson, and Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake. My personal favorite Goodreads list Braiding Sweetgras is on is Ecosocialism & Degrowth. Happy Reading Everyone Today’s Library Tidbit is on Climate Change. Let’s start at the beginning, what is climate change? According to NASA climate change is a long-term change in the average weather patterns that have come to define Earth’s local, regional, and global climates. Global warming is the long-term heating of the Earth caused by human activity since the Industrial Revolution. The burning of fossil fuels has added unprecedented levels of CO2 to the atmosphere which is causing rapid global warming. The Earth has gone through several periods of climate change during it’s history. It is believed, based on geological records, that 2,400 -2,100 million years ago, during the Paleoproterozoic era, that the Earth’s surface froze over in response to the atmosphere and the ocean’s experiencing a rise in oxygen. This is referred to the Huronian glaciation. Fun note here our ocean’s are currently rising in temperature as more CO2 and methane are added to them. The event that is believed to have caused the Huronian glaciation is referred to by a few different things but most often the Great Oxidation Event or GOE. The rise in oxygen in the atmosphere over the next hundred of millions of years caused several different glaciation periods and mass extinction events. The differences between them being uninteresting unless you’re studying prehistoric geology or paleontology. Note paleontologists do not just study dinosaurs but all fossilized animal, plant, bacteria, and virus Around 251 million years ago the Great Dying or the Permian-Triassic extinction event occured. This event saw the most extreme mass extinction ever to occur on Earth to date with the extinction of an estimated 83% of all genera. Genera is the plural of genus which if you remember way back to biology is the rank above species in the taxonomic rank. Reasons for this mass extinction event are unknown but models using the available data say that it would have been caused by ocean acidification. The reason for this acidification is unknown. At about 199 million years ago the Triassic period ends and the Jurassic period begins. The Jurassic period is also the Age of the Dinosaurs. Scientists widely believe that the cause of the mass extinction that ended the Triassic period was increased volcanic activity in the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province. This volcanic activity released large amounts of CO2 in to the atmosphere raising the overall temperature of the Earth and causing ocean acidification. In general times of extreme cooling of the Earth have been caused by raised oxygen levels in the atmosphere and the oceans and times of extreme warming have been caused by raised CO2 levels in the atmosphere and the oceans. At about 66 million years ago the Cretaceous period ended and the Paleogene period began. This also marks the end of the Mesozoic era and the beginning of the Cenozoic era. This is also the event that caused the extinction of all dinosaurs but birds. There are a few theories behind this mass extinction event. One is a meteorite impact at the Chicxulub crater which is large enough to impact the climate of the planet and lead to potential extinction. Two the Deccan Traps in India, a large range of volcanic activity,

We had an unprecedented occurrence.... A cast memeber left half way through the episode. Will they ever return!? Join Josh, Kyle, Micah, Michael, and Joe as we talk about the Star Wars gaming license being freed from EA's clutches, CSPR's lame apology, and the Great Dying of the Permian-Triassic period. Check out our Patreon for exclusive and early content: https://www.patreon.com/themetalgamerspodcast Join the Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/themetalgamerspodcast/ Join the The Metal Gamers Podcast Discord Follow us on Instagram: @themetalgamerspodcast, @fullmetalmikage, @kanguskyle, @micah_mcg, @chiefbheef, @joe_dufflebag

In this week's episode, the Flannelcasters talk about NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission landing on an asteroid, imaging the Resurrection Plate under North America, and some new evidence suggesting that volcanic activity caused the Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction Event.

Dr. Christian Sidor tells the Nerds all about the ancestry of mammals, including a little creature that hibernated through the Permian-Triassic extinction, allowing reptiles to branch off and evolve into mammals.

The gang discusses two papers that use the trace fossil record to give us a more detailed understanding of the impacts of mass extinctions. Meanwhile, Curt has a new CSI, Amanda has too many synapsids, and James “understands comedy”.   Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition): Our friends talk about the marks that feet make on the ground and how these marks can tell us about things that died when really bad things happened. They look at two times in the past that a lot of stuff died all of a sudden. The first paper looks at when some big angry animals that are aunts and uncles to things with hair lived. This is from a place where there is a lot of dead things and also foot marks. The paper shows that the death of these big angry animals can be seen if you look for the dead parts or if you look at the feet marks. The second paper looks at a time when a huge rock hit the ground and nearly killed everything. This paper looks at how foot marks and other marks in the ground changed before and after the rock hit at the place where the rock hit. What they find is that, the rock hitting caused there to not be a lot of marks because things were probably dead. But after a pretty short time, there were a lot or marks again and those marks were not just at the top but also showed that animals were moving up and down as well in the ground.   References: Marchetti, Lorenzo, et al.  "Permian-Triassic vertebrate footprints from South Africa:  Ichnotaxonomy, producers and biostratigraphy through two major faunal  crises." Gondwana Research 72 (2019): 139-168. Rodríguez-Tovar, Francisco J., et al.  "Rapid macrobenthic diversification and stabilization after the  end-Cretaceous mass extinction event." Geology (2020).

Episode 101. Topic: The Permian–Triassic extinction event. Theme: Climate change. What was the biggest extinction event in history? What caused it and how does it compare to more recent extinction events?

The gang spends their 5th anniversary podcast discussing the evolution and distribution of early tetrapods. So basically, we messed up. But at least you can enjoy some insightful discussions about how to improve Sabrina the Teenage Witch. That's something, right?   Right?   Up-Goer Five (James Edition): The group forget and barely care about their day which comes around every year for five times now. This time they talk about animals with four legs at around the time where they just got out of the water and lived on land before a lot of them died when the things that are not animals and are green and make air went away and everything got less wet. The first paper looks at when these wet areas went away and whether these early animals with four legs ended up with fewer animals that are found over a wider area or lots of animals that are each found in only one area each. It had been though that this change in how much wet made these animals got moved into lots of small areas, but the new paper shows that actually animals with four legs got a lot moved to much wider areas, but that this is because the animals with four legs that lived in water became much less easier to be found while animals with four legs that live on land and have balls that their babies live in early on that don't need water take over and change how animals with four legs lived on the big ball of rock we live on. The second paper looks at where animals with four legs lived before and after the bad time where almost all life died. The paper is interested at whether more animals lived on the middle of the outside of the big ball of rock that we all lived on or whether more of them lived near the top or the bottom of the outside of the big ball of rock. The paper is looking at whether there really is a time where animals with four legs do not live at the middle of the big ball of rock during the bad times where everything was dying. The paper looks at this by seeing how much the rocks lie to us and hide animals that were really there. One way they do this is by looking at tracks as well as dead bodies. This leads to shouting but both people are right and it is okay. The paper shows that while there was some time where there were less animals with four legs in the middle of the big ball of rock, they were still there and so maybe there were just less of them than before but they were not all dead.   References:  Dunne, Emma M., et al. "Diversity change during the rise of tetrapods and the impact of the ‘Carboniferous rainforest collapse’." Proc. R. Soc. B. Vol. 285. No. 1872. The Royal Society, 2018.   Bernardi, Massimo, Fabio Massimo Petti, and Michael J. Benton. "Tetrapod distribution and temperature rise during the Permian–Triassic mass extinction." Proc. R. Soc. B. Vol. 285. No. 1870. The Royal Society, 2018.    Additional music by Russell Watson used in accordance with fair use under the creative commons license. Music was modified from its original form. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/

Curiosity Fruit Machine by S. Qiouyi Lu "What is it?" Alliq says. Jalzy runs eir hands over the object. It's a box of some sort, made from metal with organic paneling; a narrow lever sticks out from one side. Ey finds emself reaching out to the lever, eir fingers grasping the pockmarked knob at the end as if working from unearthed muscle memory. "I have no clue," Jalzy says. "But... I kinda wanna pull this and see what happens."   CURIOSITY FRUIT MACHINE and THE SLOW ONES are both GlitterShip Originals. [Full transcript after the cut]  ----more---- Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip, episode 33 for February 14, 2017. This is your host, Keffy, and I’m super excited to be sharing these stories with you. We have two stories this week, "Curiosity Fruit Machine" by S. Qiouyi Lu and "The Slow Ones" by JY Yang. Even better, S. narrated both stories for us! S. Qiouyi Lu is a writer, artist, narrator, and translator; their stories have appeared in Strange Horizons and Daily Science Fiction, and their poetry has appeared in Liminality and Uncanny. They are a 2016 graduate of the Clarion West writers workshop and a dread member of the Queer Asian SFFH Illuminati. Find them online at s.qiouyi.lu or follow them on Twitter at @sqiouyilu. JY Yang is a queer, non-binary writer and editor who has short fiction published or forthcoming in places like Uncanny, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons and Tor.com. Their debut novellas, THE RED THREADS OF FORTUNE and THE BLACK TIDES OF HEAVEN, will be out from Tor.com Publishing in Fall 2017. They live in Singapore, edit fiction at Epigram Books, and swan about Twitter as @halleluyang.     Curiosity Fruit Machine by S. Qiouyi Lu   "What is it?" Alliq says. Jalzy runs eir hands over the object. It's a box of some sort, made from metal with organic paneling; a narrow lever sticks out from one side. Ey finds emself reaching out to the lever, eir fingers grasping the pockmarked knob at the end as if working from unearthed muscle memory. "I have no clue," Jalzy says. "But... I kinda wanna pull this and see what happens." Alliq frowns. "Don't. For all we know, that thing could be some sort of weapon. We should probably wait for the others to catch up so we can get the engineering team to take a proper look." Alliq's voice fades into a mumble. Jalzy presses eir nose to the glass front of the object and brushes a tight curl of hair out of eir face. Ey can just barely make out some lettering—PAY. Eir grasp of 21st-century English is weak, but this seems to be a money machine of some sort. Surely, ey thinks, bringing eir arm down, a money machine can't hurt em... "Don't—!" The object whirs to life, three wheels inside the glass case spinning; a few of the bulbs lining the edge buzz and spark. Jalzy jumps back. Oh crap. Ccccccclackkkclackkclackkk—didn't old-timey explosives make that sound? Or were explosives more of a tick-tock sound? One of the wheels clicks as it stops—Jalzy grabs Alliq by the wrist, drags xem to a safe spot behind a wall of heavy crates—then another click—they brace themselves—and—click! Alliq flinches. Jalzy waits a moment—a dud, perhaps?—before peeking past the edge of the crates. The object's face shows one symbol, then two of the same symbol. The first is an oblong, yellow shape, and the next two are round, red orbs connected by an inverted green V. "I think we're safe," Jalzy whispers. Alliq comes up from xyr braced position. "Goddammit, don't do this to me," Alliq hisses. Xe's sweating a little, xyr forehead shining, and Jalzy has to suppress a giggle. "Hey, we're fine, right?" Ey steps out from behind the crates and goes back to the object. Ey crouches down. There's a metal trough underneath the symbols, but it's empty. Do they need to put something in there? "Jalzy," Alliq says from over eir shoulder, "those are—those are pictures of fruit." "What's a fruit?" "Seriously?" Alliq says, voice laden with exasperation. When Jalzy gives xem a blank stare, Alliq points at the oblong symbol and says, "Look, the first one is a lemon. Those two on the right, those are cherries." Jalzy squints. "I thought 'cherry' and 'lemon' were just colors. You know, like how we also have orange nutriblocks in our sustenance packs." Alliq snorts. "You know there used to be a fruit called 'orange', right? It wasn't just a color. Those are actually flavors. They came from these." Jalzy straightens up and paces around the object. "So what is this, a fruit-making machine?" "Did you never take terrabiology?" Alliq says. "History of Earth? Anything?" "Look, I took astrophysics so I wouldn't have to deal with so much reading, okay," Jalzy says, flipping eir crown of curls over eir shoulder. "So just educate me already, O All-Knowing Alliq." Alliq crosses xyr arms over xyr chest in a huff. "Fruit comes from seeds, not machines. I mean, we perfected the science to duplicate the flavors all the way back in the 21st century, but we never really got down how to duplicate the organic material. So the best we've got now is our nutriblocks." Xe unfolds xyr arms and circles around the object. "This—this is something else entirely. I don't think it actually has anything to do with food." "So, if it doesn't seem to be a weapon, and it doesn't produce anything... wanna pull the lever again and see what happens?" Jalzy grins slyly at Alliq, who raises xyr hands in surrender. "I'm going to check out the other room. If I were you, I'd just keep doing inventory until engineering gets here and can confirm what kind of object that is." Jalzy sticks out eir tongue. "Good thing you're not me," ey says. And ey pulls the lever again.   END       The Slow Ones by JY Yang   "The grass is dying." Kira looked up from squeezing a sachet of turkey-flavored sludge into the cat's bowl. Thom was standing by the living room window in his bathrobe still, holding a chipped mug of coffee and gazing out. "What?" she asked. "The grass. In the garden. It's gone all brown." She dumped the sachet in the trash and almost rinsed her sticky fingers under the kitchen faucet. But she remembered in time, and instead wiped them on the dishtowel she'd hung up. She hurried into the living room. "There," Thom said, "see?" In the small rectangle of dirt they called a garden the sparse tufts of grass had shriveled and turned colorless like the hair on an old man's head. A flap of crisp packet gleamed in the far corner, silver-underside-up, chicken bones scattered around it. The neighborhood kids. Kira wondered how long they had been there. Maybe forever. Everything seemed stuck in stasis these days. The grass had been in decline for a long time, months before the invasion began. Once upon a time Kira had plans for that patch. She had imagined cultivating flowers: Tulips, daffodils, rosebushes. Climbing ivies for the trellis. Maybe even one of those outdoor water features. But there hadn't been any time, had there? "Hasn't rained in weeks," Thom said. "Might never rain again." Kira exhaled and stormed back to the kitchen. The clock said five to three and she wished it didn't. She took a box of porkloin out of the freezer and popped it into the fridge. "Might as well dig it all up," Thom said from the living room. "Yeah, why don't you do it?" she said, louder than she'd intended. The cat had cleaned out her bowl and now stood staring at Kira, tail stiff in expectation. Kira snatched the water dish off the floor, then gingerly ran a centimeter of water into it. "Don't waste it," she told the cat as she sat it down again. In the living room Thom had settled into the armchair, knees apart, eyes blank. "What would be the point?" "What?" He turned to look at her, framed in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, and shrugged. "There's no point." "Whatever," she said, and went to put her boots on. The cat had followed her out of the kitchen. "Come here, girl," she heard Thom say, his voice soft and charming, like it always used to be. Kira shoved her feet into the narrow confines of her boots. "I've left pork chops in the fridge to defrost," she said. "If you have time, you could make dinner." She knew he wouldn't. The cat settled on the windowsill to watch her as she stepped outside and locked the front door. Kira pulled her coat around herself, and then, because she had to, like pulling a plaster off, to get it over with; because she couldn't just ignore it, she looked up at the sky. From horizon to horizon, the sky above their street was filled with aliens. A thick layer of massive silver bodies, like cumulus rolls made of mercury, slid by over the tops of the streetlamps, the roofs, the twisted fingers of bare trees. Sunlight sometimes leaked through their bulk, but not often; the world had been in a state of weak thunderstorm dusk for weeks. The president of the United States had called them the Slow Ones, and the name stuck. Their enormous smooth bodies slipped against one another in a never-ending parade. There were scales and faint markings on each one whose purpose was impossible to discern. Concentric discs in alternating light and dark colors, larger across than a commercial jetliner, were assumed by observers to be eyes. But the gaping maw in front of each one, leading into unfathomable darkness: That one everyone could agree on. It was a mouth. A permanently open mouth. They were sucking up all the water vapor in the atmosphere. That was what the scientists on the proper news channels—BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera—were all saying. But even the so-called experts knew so little about what was going on that people were no worse off reading crackpot theories on the Internet. Those had sprung up like mushrooms in the wake of rain, or perhaps, in the absence of it. They offered up all kinds of explanations as to what was happening: Act of God, benign migration, hostile invasion, collective hallucination. The first few days after the Slow Ones arrived, pouring into the sky above Alaska like reflective pancake batter until they blanketed the Earth, Thom had spent hours scrolling through theory after theory after theory, the most promising of which he served up to Kira over dinner, or texted to her while he was at work. That was when he still had work. The Slow Ones were aliens. This was something almost everyone—the scientist, the conspiracy theorist, the person on the street—agreed on. They were not of this world. The prevailing theory was that these were migratory creatures and they would leave for unknown pastures in good time. And then sunlight and blue skies and rain would return to the world. Wind and weather and water evaporation, all those good things. It was unlikely a theory as anything, but it allowed people to hold on to hope. Kira put her hood up and hurried down the street. If she walked fast enough, she might catch the three-fifteen bus to the city center. She missed the bus. When Kira finally arrived at the city center, the air under the Slow Ones was still. Not a wing stirred in it, not a guttural call rang out. Gulls were a year-round phenomenon in Norwich, sailing from spire to spire and filling public spaces with their noises regardless of the season. But their numbers in the market square had been dwindling since the Slow Ones arrived, and today was the day, it seemed, they passed the point of no return. Kira noted this with an odd trill in her belly. She, like everyone else, had grown numb to the clipped tones of a Dr. Somebody explaining to a presenter, in clinical terms, how the disruption to the Earth's water cycle was killing all the fish in the ocean. But it was another thing entirely to watch all the seabirds vanish before her eyes, relegated to an unknown fate. She hurried through the semi-sparse mid-afternoon crowd. When Thom's agency had moved him here a few years ago, she had been struck by how many retirees she saw on the streets. It felt like a different kind of fabric had been sewn in place compared to London which she had just gotten used to, and Kuala Lumpur where she had grown up. It was a good move for them, Thom being promoted to Norfolk branch manager, but Kira had wondered about all the people here, aging in place. It put in her mind an image of people sinking to the bottom of a lake, like sediment. Of course, at that time tourism was still a booming industry, and Thom had glowing images in his sights, futures full of holiday cottages and ski trips to the Alps. Neither of them knew what lay on the horizon: the shrinkings and the layoffs and the final collapse that awaited them. The arrival of the Slow Ones had only been a final straw. As she walked past the market square Charles, who ran one of the fruit stalls, waved at her. "All right?" he asked. An impulse seized her then, a screaming impulse, one which wanted to ask him how could he be so calm, couldn't he see what was happening? She wanted to grab him and shake him, point him to the sky and the shuttered fish stall next to him and the sad twisted things that were left of his wares, she wanted to do that and ask, Can't you see? Can't you see? She wanted to run at all the white-haired folk shuffling down the street getting on with their business as usual and shout it at them, shout it into their hairy wrinkled ears. She smiled at Charles. "Yeah, I'm alright." By the time she had gone down all the little streets that led her to the Pushcart she was half an hour late for work. As she came through the eatery's glass-paneled wooden door she caught a glimpse of Melanie's splendid silhouette at the till and her heart did that weird flutter it always did when Melanie was around. She shoved that sensation deep inside herself, where it belonged, and put on her shop-girl smile. In the afternoons the Pushcart sold tea and scones and crepes with bacon and maple syrup. Come evenings and the menu switched to alcohol and deep-fried things served in small silver buckets. Today the sign said no tea, they were under rations, bottled drinks only please. The warm brown interior of the cafe held a handful of lethargic patrons in various states of apathy, chewing fitfully or reading the news. Some of them were watching the TV nailed to the far wall, framed by old ship ropes and seashells. They usually kept it off unless there was footy going on, but since the Slow Ones came it had been permanently fixed to BBC News. The prevailing graphic, set to an indistinct voiceover, said WHAT WE KNOW SO FAR. (Nothing. They knew nothing. When governments and scientists sent drones and instruments up to the Slow Ones they stopped working, some kind of electromagnetic interference, they said. NASA was stumped. Everybody was stumped, grasping at straws.) Melanie didn't turn around as Kira stashed her things under the counter. That was an anomaly: For the past six months Kira's work routine had always begun with her warm and buttery smile. She studied her coworker's broad back, hunched over the till, noting the crooked way the apron was fastened around her waist. "You alright?" Melanie straightened up with a speed that suggested she hadn't heard Kira come in. "Hey. How's it going?" She looked tired, a collection of messy lines and dark smudges, as though the weekend had worn her face thin somehow. "You alright?" she repeated. "Yeah, I suppose. The sky hasn't fallen in, has it?" She gave Kira a laugh, and it was the kind that spoke less of mirth than it did of defeat. "How's life at home?" Kira's fingers fumbled with her apron strings. Melanie noticed her struggling and said, "Let me get that." With her back turned Kira said, "Life goes on. Thom's still moping." A firm tug at her waist. "He'll recover. Have faith." "I'm an atheist for a reason." She turned around. "How's Angie?" "Ha. Funny you should ask." Melanie sucked in a breath. "She's gone back to Sheffield." "What, you mean—" "Yeah. Permanently. She spent the weekend packing." Melanie was staring at her knuckles, which she kept lightly punching against the counter. "I'm sorry. What happened?" "Can't quite say, really. Just th— I don't know. She'd been planning it for a while, I think. She got back with her ex without telling me." She looked at Kira suddenly, eyes bright and shining. "Might as well, eh? End of the world and all that." "I'm sorry." She reached out and touched Melanie's forearm for a brief, hot moment. "I'm surprised, honestly." "Are you." "I mean, I—" She wanted to say, I always thought you two had the perfect relationship. "You two seemed so happy." "We did, didn't we?" She laughed again, and one corner of her mouth quirked upwards. In the slant of those lips Kira suddenly saw the cracking of facade and glimpsed familiar shores: the simmering irritations, the long silent nights, the cold stretches of not-arguments that thawed slowly into not-forgiveness. "Come help me with this till," Melanie said. "Something's wrong." They fought with the till. It was an old-fashioned one, just buttons and a drawer that popped out. It was jammed. They figured out the problem—a coin had gotten stuck, down the side of the drawer, and they fished it out with a flat screwdriver. "There you are, you little bastard," Melanie said, shaking the coin like a misbehaving puppy. She put it on top of the till, a tiny victory. At six a man barged into the Pushcart and slammed into the counter as Kira was ringing up an old lady's tea. "Turn your TV on," he rasped. "It's on," Kira said, pointing. The President of the United States, looking like he had aged ten years in as many days, was speaking inaudibly. In one corner a red block declared “LIVE.” The man was youngish, clean-shaven, dressed in clothes that were well looked-after. "Turn it up. Turn it up." Kira looked around, but she had no idea where Melanie was. The woman by the TV stepped up and reached for the volume dial. The voice of the US president, clipped and nasal, rose up and filled the room. "... THAT I AUTHORIZE THE USE OF THERMONUCLEAR WEAPONS AGAINST THE PHENOMENON KNOWN AS THE SLOW ONES..." "He's going to nuke them," the man who'd burst in said. "It's mental." Titters of conversation filled the room. What could that mean? Kira felt like the ground under her was vanishing, but she couldn't tell if it was her or the planet that was evaporating. The US president said: The missiles would be released over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, far from any centers of civilization. The US president said: America could no longer wait for world powers to deliberate on a unified course of action. The US president said: America must take steps necessary to safeguard our future. A young man near the front of house was telling his girlfriend, in loud tones, how the radiation was going to get seeded in the atmosphere and kill them all. He was a physicist, he knew. The hawks running America, drunk on their Hollywood apocalypse dreams, were going to destroy life on the planet as we knew it. "It's war, you know," the old lady at the till said to Kira. "The Russians aren't going to like it. They're going to do something, you'll see." She declared it matter-of-factly, with utter conviction, and Kira saw the young girl she had been, bent over the radio, listening for news from the frontlines. On impulse she said, "It's on the house," and closed the till. "Go on, everything's free today." The man who had run in said, "Could I get—" "No, no, we're closing." Kira walked out from behind the counter, her legs shaky but still functional, and went to the glass-paneled door. The US president was still talking. She refused to look at the sky as she flipped the “OPEN” sign over. "I'm sorry. Please, everyone, could you just leave. We're closed. Everything's on the house." The scattered handfuls looked at her and each other, uncertain. "Go home," Kira said. "Call your mother, hug your children. Go home." She watched them file out onto the dark streets. When it was just her in the Pushcart she abandoned the unwashed, undressed tables and turned the lights out. Craig, the owner, only came in on Thursdays and weekends. She'd sort it out later. She found Melanie behind the storeroom door, chest still slowly heaving in the wake of a long fit of crying. She stood up, looking embarrassed, as Kira came in. "Sorry. I—still a bit of a mess—did something happen?" Kira ghosted towards her, fixed on her red-rimmed eyes, her lips. "The world's going to end." "What?" "The Americans are going to nuke the Slow Ones. They're doing it tomorrow." Melanie exhaled. "Madness." Madness, chaos, centers not holding. Just what was she clinging on to, anyway? Kira reached up and kissed her. Melanie's body reacted with surprise at first, then hunger. She had strong arms that could lift a double carton of coffee beans over her head, and they trembled around Kira's waist. As Kira sublimed into liquid Melanie closed the door behind them, so that nobody would hear. Later, as they sat together on the floor, sticky skin to sticky skin, Melanie asked, "Why?" No modifiers, no clauses. Just ”why.” Kira remained quiet for a while, pinching her toes inside the lingering damp heat of her boots. "Thom once told me about a theory he read. You know how they said the Slow Ones might be like migratory birds?" "I've heard that one. Sounds like tosh. But pretty much everything does these days." "Well, migratory birds come back every year. So why haven't we seen the Slow Ones before? Why has no-one, out of all of human history, ever mentioned them?" "So they're not migratory." Kira could still picture Thom's face as he had grilled her over this theory at the dinner table. How his freckled face had lit up with schoolboy excitement at the prospect of humanity's destruction, something interesting happening at last. "Well, the universe operates on a different scale, doesn't it? Billions and billions. What if the Slow Ones do come back, but so long that they only appear once every geologic age?" Melanie made a grunting noise. Kira settled her soft hip against Melanie's bony one. "It's the extinction events," she said. "What are those?" "Big die-offs." She curled her fingers around one of Melanie's nipples. "Like the dinosaurs. The Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction. That's the one everyone knows, but it wasn't the only one. The fossil record is full of mass extinctions. Late Devonian, Permian-Triassic, Triassic-Jurassic... Once every thirty million years, like clockwork. Scientists don't know why." Melanie turned her head, her attention caught. "The Slow Ones?" "The oceans are already all dead. That's how it usually starts." "So we're going extinct." "Probably. I don't know. It's just a theory, anyway." Melanie blew air through wet lips. "It's not like we can get off this planet, is it?" Kira laid her head against Melanie's shoulder and listened to the sound of her breathing for a while. "You know," she said, "some scientists think extinction events are like planetary do-overs. Evolution speeds up after each extinction event. New forms of life start to flourish." "Like when you get left for a younger woman." Kira snorted. Melanie caught the edge of her hand and caressed the tip of her little finger, gently feeling around the shape of knuckle. How small our bones are, Kira thought, how fragile. What if whoever comes after us never finds them? It would be as if we never existed. A blank in the fossil record. "Are you going to tell Thom?" Melanie asked. Kira thought of what Thom's reaction might be. The things he would say, and the things he wouldn't. The look on his face, both accusatory and triumphant. She felt tired. "No," she said finally. "He's got enough on his mind." She could see him now, in his bathrobe still, standing at the window, watching grass die in their garden as the sky grew darker and darker. In the fridge, untouched, a pair of pork chops slowly defrosted, waiting and waiting and waiting. END     “Curiosity Fruit Machine” is copyright S. Qiouyi Lu, 2017. "The Slow Ones" is copyright JY Yang, 2017. This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library. You can support GlitterShip by checking out our Patreon at patreon.com/keffy, subscribing to our feed, or by leaving reviews on iTunes. Thanks for listening, and I’ll be back on February 28 with a reprint of “for she is the stars, and the sun revolves around her” by Agatha Tan. [Music plays out]

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Permian-Triassic boundary. 250 million years ago, in the Permian period of geological time, the most ferocious predators on earth were the Gorgonopsians. Up to ten feet in length, they had dog-like heads and huge sabre-like teeth. Mammals in appearance, their eyes were set in the side of their heads like reptiles. They looked like a cross between a lion and giant monitor lizard and were so ugly that they are named after the gorgons from Greek mythology – creatures that turned everything that saw them to stone. Fortunately, you'll never meet a gorgonopsian or any of their descendants because they went extinct at the end of the Permian period. And they weren't alone. Up to 95% of all life died with them. It's the greatest mass extinction the world has ever known and it marks what is called the Permian-Triassic boundary. But what caused this catastrophic juncture in life, what evidence do we have for what happened and what do events like this tell us about the pattern and process of evolution itself?With Richard Corfield, Senior Lecturer in Earth Sciences at the Open University; Mike Benton, Professor of Vertebrate Palaeontology in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol; Jane Francis, Professor of Palaeoclimatology at the University of Leeds

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Permian-Triassic boundary. 250 million years ago, in the Permian period of geological time, the most ferocious predators on earth were the Gorgonopsians. Up to ten feet in length, they had dog-like heads and huge sabre-like teeth. Mammals in appearance, their eyes were set in the side of their heads like reptiles. They looked like a cross between a lion and giant monitor lizard and were so ugly that they are named after the gorgons from Greek mythology – creatures that turned everything that saw them to stone. Fortunately, you’ll never meet a gorgonopsian or any of their descendants because they went extinct at the end of the Permian period. And they weren’t alone. Up to 95% of all life died with them. It’s the greatest mass extinction the world has ever known and it marks what is called the Permian-Triassic boundary. But what caused this catastrophic juncture in life, what evidence do we have for what happened and what do events like this tell us about the pattern and process of evolution itself?With Richard Corfield, Senior Lecturer in Earth Sciences at the Open University; Mike Benton, Professor of Vertebrate Palaeontology in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol; Jane Francis, Professor of Palaeoclimatology at the University of Leeds