As the cycles of life on planet Earth endlessly recycle - (birth - destruction - rebirth) - until reality runs out of time and no longer exists - we search for answers about the end of one period and the beginning of another. The answers take us from science to mythology as if carving the way for a final truth that seems close at hand to those who understand that time is not linear and we exist in the illusion of timelessness perceived by our minds as real.

Here in linear time ... I see the close of each cycle marked by a volcanic event equated to an explosion of consciousness in which reality is rebooted and something new emerges containing remnants of the old as reminders of what is to come. We find this with mythological civilizations such as Atlantis and Lemuria among dozens of others within the grids yet not within our conscious awareness. Always there is the explosion - the Big Bang - the volcanic eruption that starts and ends the process. The eruption of a supervolcano can result in an ice age and/or an ELE - Extinction Level Event.

The Deadliest Volcano Ever   Discovery - April 2, 2013

The damning evidence keeps rolling in with regards to volcanoes and mass extinctions. The latest is in the journal Geology regarding the mother of all extinction events - the end Permian Extinction Event 252 million years ago. The new evidence is from the Salt Range in Pakistan, where fossil plants reveal a huge input of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that yanked the global climate into a new regime.

Sound familiar? Yeah, that's the same thing we are worried about happening under the current global warming event. Back in the Permian it looks like it was the Siberian Traps volcanic eruption that released the carbon dioxide. Now it's humans digging up and burning fossil fuels, releasing into the atmosphere millions of years worth of naturally sequestered carbon.

The Siberian Traps are a gigantic volcanic deposit unlike anything that has been laid down in the time that humans have inhabited Earth. And that's a good thing - the timing - because it's beginning to look like these sort of jumbo lava flows - which can ebb and flow for millions of years before they are finished - are the prime suspects in most of the worst mass extinction cases in our planet's history - even the one that killed the dinosaurs.

In this particular study researchers from Norway, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Pakistan focused on carbon data locked up in land plant cuticles (essentially, the outermost layer of plant skin) and fossil wood fragments. They used the carbon-13 isotope in the plant cuticles as a proxy for atmospheric CO2 across the Permian-Triassic boundary - which is marked by the loss of 96 percent of all marine species, 70 percent of all land vertebrates, and is the only mass extinction known to have seriously perturbed insects (who otherwise tend to ride out hard times rather nicely). The Pakistan cuticle carbon reveals a shift in carbon isotopes that reflects a surge in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Is this proof of the cause of the worst mass extinction? No. But it's pretty damning evidence and hard to come up with any other possible cause of the die off that can be found in the geological record. Does it have any bearing on us today? Only the same lesson all history has to offer: If we don't learn from it, we will be condemned to repeat it.

Volcanoes are generally found where tectonic plates are diverging or converging. A mid-oceanic ridge, for example the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, has examples of volcanoes caused by divergent tectonic plates pulling apart; the Pacific Ring of Fire has examples of volcanoes caused by convergent tectonic plates coming together. By contrast, volcanoes are usually not created where two tectonic plates slide past one another. Volcanoes can also form where there is stretching and thinning of the Earth's crust in the interiors of plates, e.g., in the East African Rift, the Wells Gray-Clearwater volcanic field and the Rio Grande Rift in North America. This type of volcanism falls under the umbrella of "Plate hypothesis" volcanism. Volcanism away from plate boundaries has also been explained as mantle plumes. These so-called "hotspots", for example Hawaii, are postulated to arise from upwelling diapirs with magma from the coreĞmantle boundary, 3,000 km deep in the Earth.

Unmanned Planes Fly Through Poisonous Volcanic Fumes   Live Science - April 2, 2013
Planes designed for urban warfare are helping scientists track poisonous volcanic gas. The Dragon Eye remote-controlled plane weighs in at just under 6 pounds (2.7 kilograms), with a 3.75-foot (1.14 meters) wingspan and two electric motors. Designed for the U.S. Marine Corps, the plane is light enough to carry and launch for reconnaissance. NASA recently acquired three retired Dragon Eye planes and sent them to Costa Rica to monitor Turrialba Volcano. Ongoing sulfur dioxide gas emissions from the volcano create vog, or sulfur dioxide smog, which wreaks havoc on crops and harms people who are sensitive to atmospheric pollutants.

Second Source of Potentially Disruptive Icelandic Volcanoes Found   Science Daily - April 2, 2013
New research by The Open University and Lancaster University discovered another type of Icelandic volcanic eruption that could cause disruption. Published in Geology (February 2013), the team found magma that is twice as 'fizzy' as previously believed, which increases the likelihood of disruptive ash clouds from future eruptions. Many of the largest explosive eruptions in Iceland involve a viscous, high-silica magma called rhyolite, and are driven by volcanic gases (mostly water and carbon dioxide). It is these gases that give a volcanic eruption its fizz. At depth these gases are dissolved within the magma, but as the magma rises towards the surface during an eruption, the gases expand dramatically, causing the magma to froth and accelerate upwards as a foam. The viscous rhyolite foam breaks down into tiny ash fragments which form the ash clouds.