South Florida's Gloomy Present, Gloomier Future Part 2 — EATING THE EVERGLADES

          Since past and present are prologue to the future, let’s pause for a moment and take a look at what started in the early 2000s in Palm Beach County and continues as you read this page. Urban growth and associated development are rapidly marching westward from the metropolitan edge of the County toward the 20-Mile Bend area on U.S. Route 98. One reason is that existing home prices in the County soared an incredible 171 percent from 2000 to early 2006 and owners of supposedly under-used and easily developable property (meaning farmers and citrus growers) became desperate to milk that cash cow. A specific and very disturbing sign of what is on the horizon was the proposed development of the Scripps Research Institute in the City of Palm Beach Gardens. What was planned to be a major biotech research center would focus on cutting edge bio-medical research, technology development, and drug design. Trouble is, the Institute was to be located in a remote site known as Mecca Farms, which before 2005 was pasture land, citrus groves, and wetlands carved out of what before that been the pristine Loxahatchee Slough on the western fringe of the Palm Beach County metropolitan area.

          Author’s Note: You Gentle Readers can’t allow yourself to be seduced into making the enormous mistake of thinking that simply because various agricultural uses (including grazing, citrus farms, and vegetable and other field crops) are found on the land today that those areas are no longer wetlands and their conversion to urban uses is either inevitable or an appropriate progression. The powerbrokers and their trained politicians want you to believe that they’re no longer wetlands simply because of the various drainage “improvements” that are in place. Shut down those water management improvements and the lands will be inundated within a few months and will revert to functioning wetlands. That’s a lesson all Florida powerbrokers and gutless politicians are determined that citizens never learn.

          Not surprisingly, to lure Scripps to Florida the State initially ponied up $310 million in financial support and the County tossed in another $200 million. Those State and County government funds were intended to provide the land, infrastructure, buildings, equipment, and other physical assets for a state-of-the-art research laboratory and administrative complex. Scripps would supply the intellectual capital and of course the world-class prestige attached to one of the largest, private, non-profit research organizations in the country. Over a 20-year period, royalties on technology developed at the new Scripps Research lab may generate well over a hundred million dollars that will be used to repay part of the State’s contributions.

          Naturally, the collective goal of the State and the County was straightforward. They wanted to attract a world-class life-science related research concentration of firms that would chew up thousands of additional acres of what had been wetlands, bringing in thousands of well-paid, high-tech workers, and hundreds of support businesses. More money, jobs, urban development, transportation arteries, and more political campaign contributions, of course. It’s starting to sound like Florida.

          Governor Bush was ecstatic over Scripps moving to Palm Beach because his staff projected that, overall, the Research Institute’s economic effect would boost the State’s gross domestic product by more than $3 billion over the next 15 years. No joke. And create 6,500 local jobs directly from spin-offs generated by Scripps Florida. How could any reasonable person turn that down? Hey, we’re only talking about sacrificing a couple thousand acres of lousy wetlands. Nothing to get upset about. Take a good look at the choices. Keep the wetlands or bring in thousands of jobs? High paying, high-tech jobs. Or be happy with what we got, which is a bunch of worthless wading birds and mosquitoes that are as thick as the thieves in Tallahassee? Man, get real and start them ‘dozers.

          The State also projected an additional 44,000 jobs would be created by related biotech firms that would be hot to locate near the Institute. Synergy, man, think of all that dynamite synergy. Talk about wading through pools of drool in the Governor’s mansion. Job creation translated into more campaign contributions, which translated into re-election and maybe, if the planets were aligned just right, even into election at the national level. Whoa, it made perfect political sense. But only if you closed your eyes and pretended those facilities were not being dropped into a sensitive wetland environment that is still a functioning part of the Loxahatchee Slough and the nearby Loxahatchee River. Too bad it’s Florida’s only remaining wild and scenic waterway. But not for long if Scripps and the Gov had their way.

          The 1,900 acre Mecca Farms site in question is now mostly an orange grove but in its recent previous life was a wetland. The property immediately to the east is Vavrus Ranch, now a 4,700 acre cattle ranch that also was part of the same wetland eco-system and still contains numerous lakes and high quality wetland habitats. It shouldn’t come as a shock that the property immediately east of Vavrus Ranch is the Loxahatchee Slough, an existing wetland that is an essential part of the Loxahatchee River drainage system. And the land immediately west of and abutting Mecca Farms is the J. W. Corbett Wildlife Management Area, an existing wetland under the jurisdiction of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. And that’s the area into which the State and the County wanted to drop Scripps and all that related development. Makes perfect urban and environmental planning sense, not to mention being logical in terms of transportation planning, especially when you think about all the new roads (and drainage improvements) that would have to be constructed through wetlands to provide the necessary access.

          To no one's surprise, maybe with the exception of executives at Scripps who were probably not informed by Florida or County officials of the trenchant environmental opposition to their venture, dozens of anti-sprawl and environmental activists rose up and screamed bloody murder at the State’s plan to plunk a major research-business park complex smack in the middle of a wetland in the middle of nowhere. A proposal that would require huge expenditures in new roads and highways, drainage systems, sanitary sewers, and other utilities, much of which would be constructed through and in presently undeveloped environmentally sensitive areas. It was sprawl, baby, sprawl at its ugliest.

          Even developer-friendly Treasure Coast Regional Planning Council complained that the County’s Scripps-Mecca Farms plan didn’t go nearly far enough in protecting wetlands and addressing water quality issues. As an aside, a major road leading to the Scripps Research Institute campus would had to have cut across part of the Loxahatchee Slough Natural Area, through property purchased by means of a $100 million voter initiative to conserve sensitive wetlands in northwest Palm Beach County. Right, and chew up more parks and conservation areas to develop a mega-business park. Another wonderful solution to Florida’s many land development problems. But why is it that most of those “solutions” come at the direct expense of the environment? Here’s another simple answer that hits the bulls eye. Wetlands don’t vote or shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions. Period.

          In mid-2004 the putative developer of next door Vavrus Ranch, Tech Village Partners, a joint venture of national homebuilding giants Lennar Corporation and Centex Homes, had the well-known and respected design firm Looney Ricks Kiss (LRK) draw up plans for the ranch’s northern 2,000 acres. They initially wanted to build two million square feet of laboratory space, several schools, and 7,500 homes arranged around a town center with a hotel, multi-screen movie theater, and retail stores up the wahzoo. In mid-September of 2004, Tech Village added 2,700 more acres to the area planned for development, which constituted the remainder of the Ranch. By the fall of 2004, Tech Village was bedeviling Palm Beach County and other interested groups to get them to work together to plan urban uses for the 6,700-acre swath of ranchlands and orange groves that constituted the combined area of Mecca Farms and Vavrus Ranch, slightly more than ten square miles that had previously been highly functioning wetlands. But remember, once wetlands are converted into orange groves, agricultural fields, or grazing land, they cease being wetlands, at least in the eyes of developers and their pet politicians.

          In late 2004, LRK told various news media that they would design a project that mixes high-tech living with wildlife and pockets of “natural” landscape. As if that dollop of icing made a putrescent cake palatable. As Jeffery Pifer, the firm’s project manager told the Palm Beach Post,[1] “It’s got to be genuine. It’s got to be like it was meant to be here. Like it grew from the ground up.” Right. Buildings that grow in a natural wetland just like the baldcypress. That bullshit scenario perfectly illustrates the dangerous mindset of all too many members of the design and planning community, whose primary function seems to be whoring for the powerbrokers. In that same story, Beach Gardens Councilwoman Annie Delgado was quoted as saying: “It [LRK’s design] will improve the make-up of the environmentally sensitive areas. I see it as a win-win situation for everyone.” Of course, everyone knows that environmentally sensitive areas desperately need human intervention to “improve” their make-up. That makes you wonder whether Delgado is a Corps’ water manager at heart or has crawled into bed with the powerbrokers. Figuratively, that is.

          Also late in 2004, the State and Palm Beach County raised the ante to the Big League level by committing a combined total of $1 billion to Scripps Research Institute and related development in the immediate area. That’s $1 billion, not $1 million. It was full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes, which in that context meant they were going to ignore all the bad press and trenchant criticism from everyone with a functioning brain and integrity.

          In April 2005, lawyers for the Florida Wildlife Federation and the Sierra Club filed suit against Palm Beach County’s biotech venture in federal court, accusing the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers of violating federal law by issuing a partial permit for the planned headquarters of the Scripps Research Institute’s Florida operations. The partial permit, which the County calls a Phase 1A permit, would have allowed ground work on just 535 acres of what was to become the 1,920-acre scientific village at Mecca Farms that included office complexes, residences, and recreational uses. Attorneys for the environmental groups argued that under federal law such partial permits are illegal. That suit was the fifth or sixth filed in State or Federal Court against the proposed bio-tech development. The other shoe dropped in late November 2005 when the federal judge hearing the Sierra Club’s case revoked the Corps’ wetlands permits and ordered construction to stop, an action that finally forced Scripps to look elsewhere in the County.

          In mid-August 2005, the Palm Beach County Commission backtracked and voted to ask the Scripps Board of Directors to consider building the Institute’s headquarters on another site in the County. After taking a beating in the press and being trashed by harsh criticism from concerned urban planners, biologists, environmental groups, and even traffic engineers, the Commission belatedly reached the conclusion that the Mecca Farms site may not have been the best place for intensive urban development. However, that move was almost certainly pure political smoke screen since the Commission also let it be known that if the Scripps Board insisted on going through with the Mecca Farms property they (the Commission) would move forward with that site.

          In February 2006, the Palm Beach County Commission officially abandoned the Mecca Farm site as the new home for Scripps’s Florida headquarters and research labs and selected the Florida Atlantic University’s north campus/Briger tract in Jupiter's Abacoa development, a site that is located in the eastern urbanized area of the County. With that decision the only problem became what the County would do with the land it owns at Mecca Farms. In 2006, the smart money was betting the land would be sold to a developer for one-acre single-family home sites. That way the County would come out smelling like a rose financially and like a skunk environmentally.

          But, as of mid-2011, things have worked out differently. The County still owns Mecca Farms and the costs to taxpayers are mounting. So far, the County has laid out about $150 million for the failed "biotech village." Those costs include:

$5.6 million annual debt service

$287,000 for annual mowing, canal cleaning, and road maintenance

$116,000 annually for the County Sheriff's Office to provide security

$60 million the County paid for the land during South Florida's housing boom, which was $10 million more than the then appraised value

$40 million Palm Beach County spent for planning, permitting, and initial construction

$51 million for a water pipeline the County installed to serve Mecca Farms and surrounding land for planned development that has yet to materialize

           The move to grab land that was formerly part of the Everglades is now in full swing in Miami-Dade. Greed-obsessed developers are buying up thousands of acres of farmlands outside the County’s official Urban Development Boundary (UDB), which had been established as part of a 1975 Dade County comprehensive growth plan to prevent sprawl and to buffer the Everglades National Park from urban residential densities and all the concomitant problems of pollution and habitat destruction. The developers’ goal is simple: acquire relatively cheap farmland and convert it into industrial/business parks and small residential lots and ugly tract houses that extend as far into the Everglades as possible.

          Of course, precedence for such a move abounds; remember, we talking about Florida where trees and wetlands do not vote or shove money into the deep pockets of bend-over politicians. In late May 2002, in an 11-2 vote the Miami-Dade County Commission approved a massive, 436-acre industrial park project called Beacon Lakes on a degraded wetland west of Doral near the Florida Turnpike. That Commission action effectively pushed the western limit for urban development toward the Everglades for the first time in nearly a decade. The developer who had the clout and the muscle to get a successful vote was political heavyweight Armando Codina, who was none other than Jeb Bush’s former business partner. We’re talking major league access.

          In 2002, environmentalists claimed that making an exception for Codina would open Pandora’s Box and cause a flurry of assaults on the UDB. That prediction finally struck pay dirt in 2005 as developers started snatching up rural properties outside the boundary and directing their lobbyists to slither up to key politicians and whisper sweet promises in their always receptive ears [More on Beacon Lakes in the next post].

          But hey, what’s a lousy 6.6 million square feet of warehouse space and 225,000 square feet of office and retail space in the Beacon Lakes office park? Not much, at least not until you realize what’s really at stake. Which is exactly what many developers and home builders have realized and what prompted them to snap up options on thousands of acres outside the UDB or purchase similarly located land outright. They can read the handwriting on the wall even if the average Joe Six-Pack can’t. Or won’t.

          Readers should realize that all that is happening despite Miami-Dade’s own planners maintaining that enough developable land is in the County to last until about 2020 at current and projected rates of growth. What’s more, a 2003 report by the County Department of Planning and Zoning maintained that the UDB line shouldn’t be moved. But surely our society and the greater Miami-Dade area are in desperate need of more tasteless development and less Everglades. Pass the wetlands, please. Burrrrp. The developers need to get fatter and they know the best and easiest way to do it is by eating the Everglades.

          The only thing for certain is that a battle royal looms on the horizon between the environmental organizations and the powerbrokers. But does anyone out there really believe that the grease hasn’t already been applied? And that deals haven’t already been reached in back-rooms across Dade County? Hey, we’re talking Miami and Miamians know the power of grease overcomes all obstacles.

          Maybe this is the time to recall those prescient words of mega-developer Al Hoffman, Chairman of the home builder MCI Communities, Inc., when he said that growth in southwest Florida was . . . “an inevitable tidal wave! There’s no power on earth that can stop it!”[2] Hey! Let’s all get fat by eating Florida! There’s plenty of room at the trough if you move quickly enough, even in these challenging times.

          Even if far less consumptive land development scenarios were selected and implemented due to the financial debacle of 2007-2009, the resulting growth would still eat up thousands of acres in south Florida alone. That means it will take the Loxahatchee Slough and the Everglades-Big Cypress Basin a couple decades longer to dry up and die. Longer is thought to be better by all the fat politicians and fatter businessmen responsible for blowing smoke up our collective skirts since by that time they and their fat children will have made their money and will have been dead or retired for many years. And thus beyond our collective reach.

          Unrestrained population growth equals unrestrained land consumption. That’s the nature of the tidal wave headed directly toward south Florida. When that population wave hits all the politicians in the State will be carried with it. In terms of public outcry it will be an irresistible political force. Can’t you hear the people screaming:

We want more land for homes and

goddammit to hell we’re gonna get it!

          If you, Gentle Readers, are confused by the slogan above, another way to understand what I getting to is to realize that when push comes to shove, people who are demanding land for new homes are effectively saying:

We want houses and we don't care how we get them.

Fuck the environment, including the Everglades.

          And when that happens, won’t the developers swoon with delight at the prospect of getting even fatter? As the natural environments of the Everglades-Big Cypress Basin, the Green Swamp, and other sensitive wetlands shrink towards non-existence. But that’s how Florida has always worked.

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[1] Jennifer Sorentrue, “Vavrus Land Designers Vow Sensitivity to Environment, But Activists Dispute It,” Palm Beach Post, December 20, 2004.

[2] Quoted in Michael Grunwald, “Growing Pains in Southwest Fla. – More Development Pushes Everglades to the Edge,” Washington Post, June 25, 2002.

South Florida's Gloomy Present, Gloomier Future Part 1 — EATING THE EVERGLADES

          Through the normal course of everyday life each species alters the Earth in ways subtle and profound. Typically, it takes well-trained scientists to document and understand the implications of those modifications. But we don’t need a microscope or a well-designed lab experiment to tell us how the human species has changed the face of the planet in our lifetime. From pole to pole, on land and throughout the oceans, the Earth has been irrevocably altered as we have multiplied and prospered through exploitation of material resources. Until not one square mile on the Earth's surface is unaffected by human occupance.

          I'm not interested in preaching, just in recording reality. The Florida of the Calusa is gone forever. No doubt. As are the Floridas of Hamilton Disston, Henry Flagler, Barron Gift Collier Senior, and Ed Ball. The people of the past changed the land then in ways simple and complex, as we continue to do today. Every central and south Florida resident, every tourist, every visitor increases the environmental burden whether they have permanent residences or are only passing through. They all use precious water and mineral resources. And, more importantly, precious land. They all leave behind solid and liquid wastes, hazardous and toxic materials, polluted water and air, damaged environments, and drastically reduced bio-diversity. It's what we humans do. Typically without thought of consequences inevitable. And all too frequently without an iota of concern.

          One of the people who reviewed this post in an early form is a consulting biologist specializing in tropical and sub-tropical botany. Over a number of years we have worked together on several international assignments. She asked me why I seemed so personally upset over what is happening in Florida. Before I could give her an honest answer I had to think about the question and then engage in more than a little introspection. After that I told her it's because I see the tidal wave.

          Although I've worked nearly 40 years as both an urban/regional and environmental planner, the majority of my assignments have been on urban projects. As an urban planner you start by assessing existing conditions. You determine the various strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats; identify a range of appropriate alternatives; and then look ahead, trying as best as you can to see which of those alternatives will provide the most efficacious future. After suitable iterations of the previous steps you select the preferred alternative. Based on those steps, you then prepare what you think is a realistic plan. Sure, there’s a lot of professional judgment involved. No one can predict the future with certainty, no matter what branch of science or magic you practice. Big surprise.

          But unless conditions change drastically for south Florida, the future everyone should see, if they take the time to look, is an enormous wave of human migration. That assessment is not my biased opinion. Numerous reports prepared by objective observers and professional consultants have reached similar conclusions, especially with regard to population growth in southeast Florida.[1]

          Today five plus million people live on Florida’s southeast coast (Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade Counties). But the problem is by 2035 the population is projected to rise to somewhere around seven and a half million.[2] That's an increase of nearly 1.4 million more people who will be living on the southeast coast. In 23 years. Even more are expected by 2050, despite the financial problems of 2008-2009.

          What does that population increase mean in terms of land? Because land is what it boils down to. Not fragile ecosystems, not periphyton mats, not wood storks, not phosphorus measured in parts per billion, but land. Or simply dirt to the powerbrokers. When you consider population growth in a place like southeast Florida, where developable land is spatially constrained, you must never lose sight of the land dimension because it is the single most critical element in the growth equation.

          If 9,000 square feet is used as an estimate for the average household lot in south Florida, that population increase will chew up in the neighborhood of 95,200 acres in residential units alone, or about 150 square miles, not to mention land needed for the accompanying infrastructure, retail, service, industrial, institutional, healthcare, office, distribution/warehouse, parks/open space, public buildings, and myriad other uses.[3] Keep in mind that that acreage calculation is a conservative estimate that could easily be twice as high. Add in land required for the other land uses mentioned above and we’re pushing more than one hundred thousand acres that would be needed by 2035 to accommodate the predicted growth. And remember, that’s based on a conservative population density per acre estimate.

          Another unsettling thought is that the above population growth and development of southeast Florida could not take place without the type of restoration proposed in the CERP. Since even the Corps of Engineers admits that existing southeast Florida conditions are non-sustainable, without the CERP in place the region would rapidly slide into a state approaching chaos, causing the entire economy to teeter and perhaps to collapse. Therefore, the CERP, or something like it, is an absolutely necessary measure guaranteeing that orderly land development and profit taking continue. Which is the only reason the powerbrokers pushed State and federal politicians so hard to adopt the CERP. It is that projected interaction of the environment with the economy that underlies the vision of the coming tidal wave. In other words, if present population trends continue, the Everglades will be destroyed by the coming tidal wave with or without the CERP or even with a substitute restoration plan that is more environmentally sustainable. So, unless things change in terms of population growth or density controls the Everglades and the Big Cypress are toast no matter what based on anticipated population growth and land demand. A truly sobering idea.

          Okay, but what if the present growth trends don't continue? What about Florida's vaunted Growth Management controls? The ones Jeb Bush was so proud of? Surely they addressed this very problem. Well, here’s a little background. As required by Florida's 1985 Comprehensive Plan and Omnibus Growth Management Act, comprehensive plans adopted by local political jurisdictions are supposed to be reliable blueprints that constitute regulatory guidance as to where and how communities will grow. The sad truth is city and county commissions so routinely amend those supposedly "comprehensive" plans that the State's Comprehensive Plan and Omnibus Growth Management Act has become a joke.

          In a critical way, passage of the Growth Management Act in itself was tacit acknowledgement of the past absolute inability and unwillingness of local Florida governments to control unsustainable growth. In other words, local officials routinely pandered to developers and turned their backs on the well-being of their constituents. Another unexpected shock. As a check and balance to poorly regulated local growth and development, the Act created a State oversight role and assigned it to the Department of Community Affairs (DCA). Supposedly, DCA review and input was meant to ensure that developers, not just taxpayers, would foot some of the infrastructure costs associated with growth, including wider roads, new utilities, municipal services (fire, police, EMS), new schools, and additional parks and recreation areas. But don't forget, we’re talking about a law that would require State government bureaucrats to control developers who are best buds with their bosses, Florida legislators. Fat chance of that happening, even on an accidental basis. Author's Note: Only innocents will be surprised to learn that the Growth Management Act was gutted in June 2011 by Republicans in Florida's Legislature to ensure less regulation of land developers and less State oversight of local planning.

          The kicker is comprehensive plans will not work as designed if they can be changed easily. But, maybe they can’t, Readers might ask. Okay, here's a real world example. In 2003 Palm Beach County recorded 1,364 amendments to its Comprehensive Plan, which is a rate of 114 amendments per month or fifty-seven every other week (usually planning commissions meet twice a month). And that’s exactly the problem we’re talking about. Comprehensive plans, which supposedly reflect the will of the people when they are passed, are being changed willy-nilly by votes of city councils or county commissions to accommodate development that may have been inadvisable under other, more rational circumstances, including being under the spotlight of citizen review.

          Let's be specific about what has happened in the real world of local Florida politics since passage of the Growth Management Act in 1985. As a result of a decade and a half of administration of the Act, Florida leads the nation with more than 470 local governments, each with an approved and generally worthless comprehensive plan. Author's Note: And why do I as a professional urban planner think that those plans are worthless? Because even developer-friendly Audubon of Florida acknowledges the problem when it states that "approximately 90 million housing units are already vested in current comprehensive plans approved by some 460 city and county jurisdictions"[4] throughout the State.

          Okay, multiply those 90 million housing units that would be allowed under approved comprehensive plans times 2.46 people, which is the year 2000 State average household density, and you would get a Florida population of 221.4 million. Think about that number and then consider that in 2011 the entire U.S. population is about 300 million. We’re talking about an estimated 221.4 million people living on 58.6 thousand square miles (which would effectively raise the existing state-wide density of 285 persons per square mile to 3,780 persons per square mile). And that was the State’s Growth Management solution. That's not a vicious joke or a purposeful exaggeration, that’s political reality in the Sunshine State.

          In October 21, 1999, even Steve Seibert, the then Secretary of the Department of Community Affairs (DCA), characterized Florida's State Comprehensive Plan and the Omnibus Growth Management Act as “pabulum that means all things to all people.” According to Seibert, neither the product nor the process worked, and that’s from as slick a government “servant” as has drawn breath. And James Robinson, DCA Assistant Secretary, who had to deal with the Act’s shortcomings on a daily basis stated: “It isn’t the language of the law itself, it is simply that it has been ignored or it has been misinterpreted, or that it has just been applied in such a way that it hasn’t really achieved the legislative intent to begin with.” The result is that growth control in Florida is a myth, a lie, or a very sick joke. Pick any of the above choices and you’ll be right on the money.

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[1] Two examples: South Florida Ecosystem Restoration Task Force, An Integrated Plan For South Florida Ecosystem Restoration and Sustainability, Success in the Making; April, 1998. And Allan Wallis and FAU/FIU Joint Center for Environmental and Urban Problems, Imaging the Region Report – South Florida via Indicators and Public Opinion, p. 107; 2001.

[2] Estimate prepared by the South Florida Regional Planning Council. Available online at: http://www.sfrestore.org/documents/success/01.htm and at: http://www.sfrestore.org/documents/success/04.htm

[3] Allan D. Wallis et al., 2001. Imaging the Region Report — South Florida via Indicators and Public Opinion, FAU/FIU Joint Center for Environmental and Urban Problems, p. 107. Author’s Note: that acreage calculation in the text above is predicated on each household consisting of 3.00 persons living on an average lot of 9,000 sq. ft. and does not include streets or rights-of-way, which would add 10-15 percent more land to the end result. According to the Report cited in this footnote, in 1995 there were about 2.4 households per acre in south Florida, averaging 18,150 sq. ft. per household unit. So, the 9,000 sq. ft. estimate used above is intentionally very conservative.

[4] Online source: http://www.audubonofflorida.org/action/2004actionagenda/growth.htm

Triassic-Jurassic and Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinctions

Triassic-Jurassic Extinction

          The fifth great extinction happened about 200 mya in the late Triassic-early Jurassic and killed more than half the species on Earth; mammal-like reptiles and true mammals, which evolved during the Triassic Period, were hit particularly hard. Those effects were especially severe in the marine realm with massive destruction of bivalve and gastropod species and the loss of 20 percent of the non-dinosaurian archosaurs and therapsids and the extinct of the last large amphibians. With the sudden abandonment of so many ecological niches dinosaurs assumed dominant roles in the Jurassic. Surprisingly, dinosaurs did not show  lineage losses at that transition, which some paleontologists have recently inferred was a direct consequence of their ability to survive in an oxygen-depleted atmosphere.

          Recently, Peter Ward published research that demonstrated that low oxygen levels could have triggered two giant extinctions, the first 250 mya at the Permian-Triassic boundary between periods, and the second about 200 mya, at the Triassic-Jurassic boundary. According to Ward, since dinosaurs first appeared during a long period of low oxygen they developed highly efficient breathing mechanisms that allowed them to thrive while many other species became extinct because oxygen levels were so low, comparable to levels found now at altitudes of 12,600 feet and higher. Those low oxygen levels may have resulted either from massive outpouring of lava in flood basalts or from the impact of a large bolide. Ward and many other scientists believe that the huge amounts of carbon dioxide and sulfur aerosols (especially hydrogen sulfide) that were released into the air from flood basalts could have been responsible for triggering a devastating atmospheric effect that warmed the Earth and depleted oxygen from the atmosphere, causing environmental deterioration, and finally global species collapse. Other studies have found that the warming also interrupted and even stopped the ocean’s global circulation, making a major part of the water column above the sea-floor devoid of oxygen, crippling the oceans’ ability to replenish their oxygen supply, destroying marine life on a global scale and allowing anaerobic bacteria (which do not require oxygen) to release poisonous hydrogen sulfide gas into the air.

          Although the several explanations for that event have been suggested, all have difficulties that have not been resolved. Gradual climate change or sea-level change (regressions and transgressions) during the late Triassic cannot explain the suddenness of the marine extinctions. Bolide impact is possible but no impact structures have been found that coincide with the Triassic-Jurassic boundary. Massive volcanic eruptions, specifically the flood basalts of the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province, certainly released enormous quantities of carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide, which would have caused either intense global warming (from the former) or cooling (from the latter). However, isotopic analyses of fossil soils of late Triassic and early Jurassic have demonstrated no evidence of changes of the atmosphere’s CO₂ composition. More recently however, some evidence has been collected from near the Triassic-Jurassic boundary suggesting a rise in atmospheric CO₂. Several researchers have suggested that the cause of that rise, and of the mass extinction itself, could have been a combination of volcanic CO₂ outgassing and catastrophic dissociation of gas hydrates (clathrates).

          The most plausible source of the vulcanic CO₂ occurred at the boundary of the Triassic/Jurassic as a major rifting event unfolded, certainly one of the Earth’s largest, which began in Pangaea as the massive continent began breaking apart. At the same time, the 3,600-mile diameter Central Atlantic Magmatic Province was erupting huge amounts of basaltic lava (volumes of at least 480,000 cubic miles) that stretched from Pangaea’s east to west coasts through what is now known as northwest Africa, eastern America (both North and South), and parts of Europe. The vulcanism would have erupted massive floods of basaltic lavas and caused the release of large amounts of gas. It is now believed that the warming effects of the CO₂ release may have triggered the dissociation of massive amounts of methane hydrates and thereby greatly exacerbated the warming trend. In 2004, a large consortium of Italian, French, U.S., Moroccan, and Swiss scientists addressed the sedimentary and igneous record around the Triassic-Jurassic boundary in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains. They investigated one of the few uneroded continental flood basalt sequences of the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province (most preserved CAMP magmas are sills and dikes in eroded offshore basins) whose base deformed the underlying sediments, suggesting that eruption materials collected on top of unlithified sediments shortly after deposition. Both age and geochemistry of the flows released by massive vulcanism are remarkably similar to those of flood basalts from the other side of the Atlantic. Magmatic duration, like that in other large igneous provinces, was short, no more than several million years. Their conclusion was that the mass extinction event may have been related to flood basalt vulcanism and the gases released in the CAMP eruptions.

          In 2010, two separate studies (Whiteside, et al., 2010. Compound-specific carbon isotopes from Earth's largest flood basalt eruptions directly linked to the end-Triassic mass extinction. PNAS 107(15): 6721-6725 and Deenen et al., 2010. A new chronology for the end-Triassic mass extinction. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 291(1-4), 113-125) independently reached the conclusion that contemporaneous CAMP eruptions, mass extinction, and the carbon isotopic excursions are found in the same locations, strengthening the case for a volcanic cause of mass extinction.

          Thus, as of 2011, additional solid evidence is needed to support or reject any specific theory of extinction causation. We wait for science to do its thing.

 Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) Extinction

          The last and best known extinction, in terms of its widespread popularity with us common folk, that sent the dinosaurs into the deep dirt nap hit around 65 mya at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary [Author’s Note: Tertiary is a historical term for the period of time now covered by the Paleogene and Neogene periods). This mass extinction resulted in the loss of about 85 percent of all life on Earth (you should be thinking dinosaurs, pterosaurs, belemnoids, many species of plants except the ferns and seed-producing plants, ammonoids, marine reptiles, and rudist bivalves as well as 93 percent of nannoplankton in the oceans went extinct) died out during this event, though perhaps it would be better to call it a period since it certainly extended for more than a couple thousand years. The really good news is that our ancestors, including most mammals, birds, turtles, crocodiles, lizards, snakes, and amphibians were primarily unaffected and we are around today as a direct result of their persistence.

          In 1978, while studying sedimentation rates in rocks around Gubbio, Italy, geologist Walter L. Alvarez discovered a centimeter-thick clay layer between limestones deposited between two geologic time intervals, the Cretaceous and Tertiary. Analysis of that clay layer revealed large concentrations of iridium, a dense and rare metal that can be found in the Earth’s core but is rare on the surface, usually occurring in concentrations of 0.3 parts per billion. However, the clay layer at Gubbio had concentrations 30 times higher. Iridium is also found, in much higher levels, in asteroids. A team of scientists including Walter Alvarez, Luis Alvarez (Walter’s father and a Nobel Laureate experimental physicist), and several colleagues at the University of California — Berkeley proposed that the clay was the altered remains of the dust cloud that spread around the world when a huge bolide struck the Earth. They theorized the tremendous impact and the resulting cloud of debris, ash, dust, and acid rain caused the mass extinctions of over 80 percent of all life on Earth. This theory was a bomb shell of its own in the geological community, generating no end of controversy, especially since many geoscientists have no truck with catastrophism and its unsavory historical associations.

          The 1991 discovery of the Chicxulub Crater on the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico lent support to the Alvarez theory. Since then, similar clay KT boundary deposits (in the literature, this mass extinction is usually abbreviated KT) have been found to contain not only iridium but also small spherules of molten glass deposited as close to Yucatán and the Chicxulub Crater, Haiti, and as far away as Colorado and Canada.

A competing school of thought  disputed the Alvarez theory and pointed to large-scale volcanic activity in flood basalts that had continued for millions of years (most particularly the Deccan Traps of India), which spewed seemingly endless flows of lava and filled the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and sulfur aerosols, killing most of the land animals, leaving behind a small number of survivor species, such as cockroaches, crocodiles, and turtles. The gigantic volumes of smoke, ash, and sulfuric gases released could easily have resulted in a type of volcanic-nuclear winter similar to the vulcanic event in Laki, Iceland, in 1783 that killed 75 percent of the livestock and 25 percent of the human population that had inhabited the area. Other scientists have combined both theories to argue for an even greater worldwide catastrophe that spelled the end of most life on Earth. But belief in the meteorite theory kept geoscientists around the globe searching for craters buried beneath centuries of sediments. All told, about 150 have been catalogued since the Chicxulub Crater was discovered in 1991.

          Before that major breakthrough, in 1988 Asish Basu, a geologist-geochemist at the University of Rochester, found deposits of shocked quartz (special crystals split along planes that indicated a powerful impact — see shock metamorphism) immediately beneath the Deccan Traps, suggesting that a giant impact preceded these enormous lava flows.  Also in the late 1980s, paleontologist Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University and geologist Dhiraj Kumar Rudra of the Indian Statistical Institute identified a 360-mile-long crater, mostly submerged in the Arabian Sea off Bombay that they called the Shiva Crater, for the Hindu god of destruction and renewal. In the early 1990s, based on new geological evidence, Chatterjee argued that the Shiva Crater was actually one-half of a larger crater; the other segment was buried undersea near the Seychelle Islands, 1,700 miles southeast of India.
          When pieced together, the original crater (which had been separated by movement of continental plates) would be 360 miles long, 270 miles wide, and seven miles deep, suggesting a considerably larger meteorite than the one that landed in Chicxulub. Chaterjee and Rudra speculated that both craters may have been caused by chunks of the same meteor striking in different locations 12 hours apart as the Earth rotated. Their evidence (it must be added that the Shiva Crater has yet to be studied comprehensively, a process that requires extensive chemical and physical evidence, normally gathered from offshore oil exploration) and that of Basu persuaded many scientists that the impact theory was right on the money. Recently, geologists in Gujarat detected abnormally high levels of iridium, a white metal commonly found in meteorites and the same mineral that was present in the Italian clays investigated by Walter Alvarez and that led to his original bolide theory. Another piece of the puzzle fell into place. Chaterjee and Rudra and many other geoscientists believe the meteor triggered the larger catastrophe in which the extinction of dinosaurs was a result of a very complicated geological event, a catastrophe of the sort all uniformitarians of Hutton’s and Lyell’s day would have roundly rejected. And that’s how you spell scientific progress.

          Nearly twenty-five years of research since the Alvarez announcement has resulted in many geoscientists accepting their hypothesis, especially if the bolide impact effects occurred in conjunction with massive volcanic activity, such as that responsible for the Deccan Traps, an enormous flood basalt lava outflow and one of the world’s largest vulcanic provinces, which may have covered as many as 800,000 square miles and contributed gigundus amounts of vulcanic gases, especially  CO₂, and heat to the atmosphere.

          In June 2004, three geoscientists published results of their research into the fossil record across the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary at a well-known site at El Kef, Tunisia. In their investigation, Simone Galeotti, Henk Brinkhuis, and Matthew Huber  demonstrated that a prolonged cooling phase that was consistent with the oceanographic response to an impact winter (from a large bolide, better be thinking Chicxulub Structure or maybe the Shiva Crater) resulted in the sudden appearance of tiny, cold-loving ocean organisms (dinoflagellates and benthic formanifera) in an ancient sea that had previously been very warm, suggesting that an approximately 2,000-year cooling occurred during the earliest Paleocene (Danian). That discovery establishes the first geophysical evidence of global cooling (caused by the injection of huge quantities of sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere that filtered out a significant amount of the sunlight and cooled the Earths surface for perhaps five years after the impact) that most probably followed the vaporization of the bolide and rocks surrounding the impact site. Their research also is important because it confirms what climate modelers have been saying for years about the global effects of a nuclear/volcanic winter. It must be noted that those exact effects, however, can also be caused by massive volcanic eruptions in flood basalts as was demonstrated in 2005 by Anne-Lise Chenet of the Laboratoire de Paleomagnetisme, Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, in a detailed study of the Deccan Traps.

          However, detractors of the bolide extinction theory point to the fossil record, maintaining that it took a much broader time span for the dinosaurs and other great reptiles to die off. Paleontologist Robert Bakker argued that an enormous bolide impact would have killed frogs as well as dinosaurs; however, evidence demonstrates that frogs survived the extinction event. Gerta Keller of Princeton University argued that recent core samples from Chicxulub show the impact occurred about 300,000 years before the mass extinction, and thus could not have been the causal factor. As of 2011, no final decision has been reached with which most geoscientists would agree, though more research has uncovered (literally) several other large craters that may have resulted from bolides that struck the Earth at the same time as the bolide that caused the Chicxulub Crater. And several researcher teams in France, India, and the U.S. (computer models created by Elizabeth Parfitt at the University of Bufallo) have discovered additional evidence documenting the catastrophic effects of the huge amounts of volcanic materials released in the fissure eruptions of the Deccan Traps. Either way, it’s definitely worth thinking about and investigating.

          Author’s Note: In a March 5, 2010, review article published in the journal Science (Vol. 327. no. 5970, pp. 1214-1218), a team of geoscientists led by Peter Schulte, from the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany, examined global stratigraphic records across the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary to assess the proposed causes of the mass extinction. They found that a single ejecta-rich deposit compositionally linked to the Chicxulub impact is globally distributed at the Cretaceous-Upper Paleogene boundary. According to the research team, the temporal match between the ejecta layer and the onset of the extinctions and the agreement of ecological patterns in the fossil record with modeled environmental perturbations — for example, darkness and cooling — was significantly robust for them to conclude that the Chicxulub impact triggered the mass extinction. In another March 2010 publication in the journal Science, a research team led by Michael Prauss, a paleontologist at Freie Universitaet Berlin, posited that long-term climate fluctuations that continued over several million years and peaked at the Cretaceous-Paleogen boundary were probably the main reason for the extinction of the dinosaurs and other creatures 65 million years ago. According to Prauss, the Chicxulub bolide impact was only one in a chain of catastrophic events that caused substantial environmental perturbations, probably largely controlled by the intermittent activity of the Deccan volcanism near the then-Indian continent.

         Until other, more compelling, evidence is presented, the Chicxulub impact appears to be one of the most likely causes of the KT Extinction but perhaps not the only or most critical cause. The debate continues.