A Long Rainy Season
...that shaped life on Earth for the dinosaurs.
Once upon a time there was a 2-million-year rainstorm that reshaped Earth, wiped out species and gave rise to dinosaurs. Let's explore how this forgotten event set the stage for dinosaurs.
Back before the age of humans, the volcanic landform spewed fire into the sky. The air burned, the oceans boiled and thus began perhaps the biggest weather event in the history of our planet.
It is called the Carnian Pluvial Event and based on extensive geologic evidence being found worldwide supporting this event, it is believed that it may have rained for as long as 2 million years.
Let's take a trip back to planet Earth
230 million years ago the continents we know of now were all connected in a massive mega-continent called Pangaea. The coast of Pangaea was lush and humid. But the land was so massive that moisture rarely entered the interior. It was a place nearly void of life, with less life than a desert.
In the far west of Pangaea, the Wrangellian Titans—a vast string of ancient volcanoes that are now seen in Western Canada—awoke from their slumber, erupting lava, ash, methane and carbon dioxide into the air for an estimated 1-to-6 million years.
Eventually, that mixture of methane and carbon dioxide, which contained the most powerful greenhouse gases on Earth, warmed the oceans quickly and dramatically. That led to more evaporation from the oceans into the atmosphere, which led to more cloud cover, which led to more rain, which fed back to the oceans, and the water cycle continued until it got so big that clouds actually covered the interior of the massive area of land.
And then, one day, it rained.
And the next week, and then the next month, the next year, the next decade, the next century, the next millennia. Fossil records indicate that the rain lasted 1-to-2 million years. That amount of rain changed everything.
Species that had learned to live in arid deserts were quickly rendered extinct, as were about 35% of the ocean species. But this was not a typical impact-style mass extinction event. The event actually allowed many species to thrive.
The earth became covered in lush vegetation and had a more tropical-type climate. The population of dinosaurs exploded from about 5% of all living animals before the event to 95% of that population afterwards.
Dinosaurs rose to prominence because of the conditions that the Carnian Pluvial Event created. And they ruled the Earth for about 165 million years. Then about 65 million years ago, it wasn't rain, but one massive rock that hit the Earth. That gave an opportunity for the rise of humans, who have been around for only about 2 million years or so.
It was so, says science. Give thanks for the relatively short rain events we have these days and don’t complain about the rains we get.
03/16/25