The Day the Gymnosperms Died Out

By Brent Hardy

            One day, without any warning, all the gymnosperms on the planet Earth died out.  There was no warning, and no way to find out how it happened.  It could have been plague, atmospheric abnormalities, or some other factor that we don't even know about.  All we know is that they all died.  The oxygen in the air started to deplete, causing many people, especially the elderly and young children to die from not getting enough oxygen to the brain.  The ozone layer started thinning rapidly, increasing ultraviolet radiation hitting Earth.  This served to dramatically increase cases of skin cancer, but gave everybody a nice tan.  The thinning of the ozone layer also served to increase global warming, which caused the polar ice caps to melt and flood coastal cities.  This change in the sea level covered New York City, most of Florida, Italy, and other peninsulas, and the pressure caused California to sink into the ocean.  When California sank, it set off a global chain reaction causing most of the volcanoes to erupt simultaneously, and caused huge earthquakes on every fault line.  This devastated most of the population, which was overcrowded due to the loss of living space caused by the flooding.  Also, since most of the world was having to live close together, plagues began to spread rapidly.  This was heightened by the loss of medical plants such as Gingko biloba.  Eventually, this resulted in the almost total extinction of most species of animals (there was a dramatic reduction in available food), and even depopulated most major human population centers.  The moving together of people into the more elevated land masses (mountain ranges) in South America, North America, Eastern Africa, and Central Asia increased the chance of a rise in Fascism, where a charismatic leader convinced the people to unite in order to overcome the great loss to the planet.

            On another line of thought, with the loss of soil stability, erosion increased and most of the land became desert.  This caused massive cases of extinction, as producers in the food chain were eliminated, leaving the primary consumers without food, and the decomposers with an abundance of starved corpses.  All in all, without gymnosperms, life as we knew it ceased to exist.