KU Connection

History Channel features KU researchers

An energy burst that blankets Earth in chemical smog, collapses food chains and leads to death by starvation for six billion humans was the focus of a recent History Channel production featuring the work of a KU paleontologist.

A recent episode of “Mega Disasters” explored gamma-ray bursts—powerful energy explosions from space that last only seconds. Potentially caused by massive stars collapsing into black holes or by the merger of two neutron stars, their effects can be seen billions of light years away.

Bruce Lieberman, curator of invertebrate paleontology at the KU Natural History Museum, theorizes that such a burst could have caused the second-largest mass extinction known in the fossil record. The extinction in the Ordovician Period 450 million years ago eliminated more than 100 families of marine life.

“Mass extinctions are big puzzles,” said Lieberman, who works with physics and astronomy researchers at KU to explore the gamma-ray bursts. “One of our theories is that a star thousands of light years away exploded and caused such a mass extinction. A strong gamma-ray burst like that could profoundly affect the atmosphere, killing life on the planet.”

Lieberman and Adrian Melott, KU professor of physics and astronomy, also have been researching the possibility that mass extinctions happen cyclically, roughly every 62 million years. If that is correct, the next such “pulse” of extinction will occur in 10 million years. The “Mega Disasters” program also featured Brian Thomas, who earned his doctorate in physics at KU in 2005 and studied with Melott.