Dark Matter blamed for mass extinctions on Earth

With dark matter supposedly making up as much as 99 % o the universe, it is used to explain an increasing number of cosmological phenomena. Now two phsyicists are claiming that it may also have changed the course of life on Earth.

Dark matter is virtually undetectable except by its gravitational infuence on galaxies. Samar and Afsar Abbas of the Institute of Physics at Utkal University in Bhubaneswar, India, suggest that Earth could have encountered dense clumps of dark matter in space, and that this produced large quantities of heat in the planet's interior. Over time, they say, the build-up of heat could have led to catastrophic volcanic eruptions. The subsequent climate changes would in turn have wreaked havoc on living species, possibility causing mas extinctions. Their paper is available at the Los Alamos National Laboratories website http://

In the mid-980s, scientists estimated that, given the uniform distribution of dark matter throughout space, Earth could capture as many as 0^118 particles per second. a and a say this means that Earth would eventually gather so many dark matter particles in its dense core that they would begin to collide with normal matter there, annihilating themselves in the process. These annihilation could create 0 million watts of extra heat in the lower mantle.

But according to some cosmologists, dark matter is not uniformly distributed, but is instead clumped throughout the Universe. The researchers calculate that an encounter with dense clump of dark matter could generate even more heat - enough to cause magma to well up from the lowest regions of the mantle.