AFTER the recent storms and plunging temperatures, our beaches are littered with marine corpses (Echo, March 6).

This shows how quickly our planet can wreak havoc, and ‘Sudden Stratospheric Warming’ is a key phrase.

This phenomena was first studied in 1952, and is as explainable as the Early Arctic Warming enigma (1918-1939), when the waters around Spitzbergen once reached 15 degrees Centigrade. It was rapid cooling that immobilised the creatures and then storms dumped them onto the beaches.

Cooling can be dangerous, aptly described by events 250 million years ago, and we should be careful what we wish for (or engineer).

Among North-East coast fossils are ammonites which survived mass extinctions at the end-Permian, the end-Triassic and died out with the dinosaurs (65 million years ago). The end-Permian extinction was devastating, with some 95 per cent of marine creatures dying out, and 90 per cent of ammonites.

Until recently it was believed that intense climate warming was the cause, but research by the Universities of Geneva and Zurich discounts this (Science Daily, March 6, 2017). The culprit was a sudden, short Ice Age, and the extinction happened 500,000 years before any warming, so we still don’t know if carbon dioxide is a planet-killer.

M Watson, Darlington