The Earth has a catastrophic pulse that kills life on it…

The bad news is that life on our planet, by definition, is not infinite and is doomed to die en masse approximately every 27.5 million years. This is due to a phenomenon that scientists have dubbed the "pulse of the Earth" - a set of catastrophic geological events that occur at regular intervals. But there is good news: nothing threatens us personally, until the next “impulse” is still about 20 million years away.

The hypothesis of a certain pulsation of the planet originated in the 1920s, when scientists began to identify characteristic patterns in the statistical analysis of geological events. In this case, we are interested in large and destructive events, such as a sharp change in the level of the ocean, an increase in the speed of movement of tectonic plates, the formation of oxygen-free zones in the ocean, etc. It has been established that they often occur in the form of impulses, when several phenomena are grouped in a short period of time on a planetary scale.

The initial estimate of the periodicity of such a pulsation was 30 million years, but the latest study by American scientists from New York University made it possible to refine this figure. They studied 89 major geological events over 260 million years and deduced a new value for the pulse period: 27.5 million years. These data are consistent with the assessment of the planet's pulsation through the study of the carbon cycle and through the assessment of plate tectonics.

There must be a serious reason for such a periodic large-scale phenomenon, but scientists do not yet know it. There are two promising directions of search: the first implies the presence of unknown geophysical processes within the planet itself, and in this case the expression "Earth's pulse" is most appropriate. The second sends us into near space, where unknown astronomical cycles may operate.