The evidence for and against astronomical impacts on climate change and mass extinctions: A review

Abstract

Numerous studies over the past 30 years have suggested there is a causal connection between the motion of the Sun through the Galaxy and terrestrial mass extinctions or climate change. Proposed mechanisms include comet impacts (via perturbation of the Oort cloud), cosmic rays and supernovae, the effects of which are modulated by the passage of the Sun through the Galactic midplane or spiral arms. Supposed periodicities in the fossil record, impact cratering dates or climate proxies over the Phanerozoic (past 545 Myr) are frequently cited as evidence in support of these hypotheses. This remains a controversial subject, with many refutations and replies having been published. Here I review both the mechanisms and the evidence for and against the relevance of astronomical phenomena to climate change and evolution. This necessarily includes a critical assessment of time series analysis techniques and hypothesis testing. Some of the studies have suffered from flaws in methodology, in particular drawing incorrect conclusions based on ruling out a null hypothesis. I conclude that there is little evidence for intrinsic periodicities in biodiversity, impact cratering or climate on timescales of tens to hundreds of Myr. Furthermore, Galactic midplane and spiral arm crossings seem to have little or no impact on biological or climate variation above background level. (truncated)

51 pages, 7 figures, 140 references. To appear in the International Journal of Astrobiology. For hyperref version with full resolution figures see http://www.mpia-hd.mpg.de/homes/calj/astimpact_ija.pdf

References in corpus (6)

• A Problem with the Clustering of Recent Measures of the Distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud
• Do extragalactic cosmic rays induce cycles in fossil diversity?
• The kinematics of late type stars in the solar cylinder studied with SDSS data
• Considering the Case for Biodiversity Cycles: Reexamining the Evidence for Periodicity in the Fossil Record
• Solar activity and the mean global temperature
• Impact cratering and the Oort cloud

Cited by in corpus (19)

• Close encounters of the stellar kind
• Risks for life on habitable planets from superflares of their host stars
• Constraints on the location of a putative distant massive body in the Solar System from recent planetary data
• Clouds and the Faint Young Sun Paradox
• Agatha: disentangling periodic signals from correlated noise in a periodogram framework
• `Oumuamua as a messenger from the Local Association
• Bayesian time series analysis of terrestrial impact cratering
• The effect of the Solar motion on the flux of long-period comets
• Oort cloud Ecology II: The chronology of the formation of the Oort cloud
• A Bayesian method for the analysis of deterministic and stochastic time series
• The Quest for the Sun's Siblings: an Exploratory Search in the Hipparcos Catalogue
• Implications of Captured Interstellar Objects for Panspermia and Extraterrestrial Life
• Exploring the role of the Sun's motion in terrestrial comet impacts
• Biological implications of high-energy cosmic ray induced muon flux in the extragalactic shock model
• Role of stellar physics in regulating the critical steps for life
• Climate Modelling of Mass-Extinction Events: A Review
• Stellar encounters with giant molecular clouds
• A history of the gamma-ray burst flux at the Earth from Galactic globular clusters
• A Pacemaker with P=2.48 hour Modulated the Generator of Flares in the X-ray Light Curve of Sgr A* in the year 2012