Known as the “Great Dying,” hardly any species survived the Great Permian Mass Extinction event. And now, scientists have made a scientific breakthrough about what actually triggered this event.
This apocalyptic and ancient incident wiped out more than 95 percent of marine life and 70 percent of land animals. Catastrophic environmental changes also resulted from the mass extinction and scientists now know that Siberian volcanoes set the whole thing into motion.
Scientists at New York University (NYU) have discovered new evidence to show that the Great Permian Mass Extinction was caused by massive volcanic eruptions. By analyzing rocks, researchers have discovered evidence for a global spike in the element nickel at the time of the extinction. Using an Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometer, which measures the abundance of rare elements at their atomic level, the scientists documented anomalous peaks of nickel in regions ranging from the Arctic to India at the time of the Great Permian Extinction. They say this is most likely to have come from huge volcanic eruptions, as rocks formed from cooling lava contain some of the biggest nickel deposits on the planet.
NYU geologist Michael Rampino explained that exploding volcanoes in Siberia likely caused intense global warming, which was recorded in the oceans and on land during the extinction. The eruptions would have also released huge amounts of greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide, and methane leading to the extinction 252 million years ago.
Sedelia Rodriguez, an Environmental Science lecturer at Barnard College, hopes the research will help scientists determine whether another mass extinction of this kind could happen again. “We hope to learn more about how these events trigger massive extinctions that affect both land and marine animals,” said Rodriquez. “Additionally, we hope this research will contribute to determining whether an event of this magnitude is possible in the future.”
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BEAM ME UP SCOTTY………
Siberia. Hmmm… IT WAS PUTIN’S FAULT! I knew it…
Sure his happened scientists can’t even tell ya if its gonna rain tomorrow much less know what happened that far back crock o ?
really? my weather app tells me right to the damned hour when it will rain, and almost exact on temp and wind speed direction…..who’s weather “scientist” are YOU using?
“caused intense global warming, which was recorded in the oceans and on land during the extinction. The eruptions would have also released huge amounts of greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide, and methane leading to the extinction 252 million years ago.
…an Environmental Science lecturer at Barnard College, hopes the research will help scientists determine whether another mass extinction of this kind could happen again…”
———————YEAH, I KNOW!! This guy wrote this great paper about this very subject– for his (thesis?) when graduating from college…all my notes are up north or would copy title so you all could see it! Great paper- however, he said it was due to calthrates (?)under the ocean melting.
There are these humungous, frozen ice calthrates on the ocean floor, which contain methane. When the earth warmed (probably from volcanoes), these underground ice things melted, which released tons of methane (25X worse than CO2 as a green house gas) and resulted in this super mass extinction event.
Anyhow, this guy was saying how this COULD re-occur… due to fossil fuel burnings in the present which is releasing tons of CO2, which is warming the planet. Basically, what he said is if these underground mammoth ice things melt again, it will release methane again and we will have another mass extinction event.
Turning the world into Venezuela will do for mass extinctions. No need to wait for volcanoes. Heck, they are even eating zoo animals in that socialist workers’ paradise now.
well, at least in venezuela, cannibalism has been reduced to a misdemeanor!
Scientists only have theories which have no proof. Like the big bang theory. These are the real conspiracy theorists. Some event that happens in recent history that people have lived through are denigrated as conspiracy theories. Go figure.
… Translation, the study reinforces the Siberian Trap and release of CO12 through ocean temperature rise 1-2 punch.
If memory serves, CO12 is frozen Carbon Dioxide in the ocean depths requiring stagnated ocean floor regions for extended periods of time. Released, it causes marine life to choke out at an alarming rate, and Carbon Dioxide clouds creates injuries similar to extreme burning and suffocation similar to a Pyroclastic flow. Such a cloud is also known to occur in Lake Overturn observed in Africa where 2-3 villages were wiped out overnight. Survivors in the region had described what had sounded as a volcanic eruption, and the injuries were similar to pyroclastic flows like that at Krakatoa.
The theory goes first CO12 was released by ocean temperature rise, and it made landfall as the Siberian Traps delivered the second blow for the knockout.
At the same time, there is now ample evidence that an enormous, 9 kilometer asteroid hit the ocean. According to NASA, geologists studying rocks from the Permian period have discovered a well-known fingerprint left by objects that originate from space: “soccer ball-shaped molecules called “fullerenes” (or “buckyballs”) with traces of helium and argon gas trapped inside.”
Deadly climate change
So you’ve got massive volcanic eruptions, spewing tons of sulfur and greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. Billowing clouds cut plants off from life-giving light, and acid rain pours from the skies. The ozone layer is shredded. Then you’ve got this major asteroid impact, whose heat is so intense that it ignites forests. The burning trees release carbon dioxide and other toxins. The end result? A long-term transformation in the Earth’s climate, similar to what environmentalists predict in a worst-case scenario for our near future if we continue to burn fossil fuels and release other toxins. Carbon dioxide levels rise, oxygen levels fall, and animals and plants die off by the millions.
Good book to read on the subject is “Climate Wars” by Gwynne Dyer… one of my favorite books!!
Catastrophic methane release
Catastrophic methane release has been suggested as a possible cause of mass extinction. Methane clathrate is an ice-like substance formed from water and methane in the sea bed, arctic lakes and permafrost. It forms where the temperature is at freezing or a little above and where the pressure of overlying water and sediment creates the right conditions. A temperature rise causes the methane in the clathrate to be released as gas. Global warming results and causes further clathrate heating and methane release. The resultant soaring temperature causes such stress to plant and animal life that mass extinction follows.
The latest, from a blog called Arctic News, warns that by 2026 – that’s just nine years from now – warming above the Arctic Circle could be so extreme that a massively disrupted and weakened jet stream could lead to global temperature rises so severe that a massive extinction event, including humans, could result.
This latest blog post, written by Arctic News editor Sam Carana, draws on research by a number of scientists (linked in his article), who report on various feedback loops that will result from a dramatically warmer north polar region. But the critical concern, he says, is methane already starting to be released in huge quantities from the shallow sea floor of the continental shelves north of Siberia and North America. That methane, produced by bacteria acting on biological material that sinks to the sea floor, for the most part, is currently lying frozen in a form of ice that is naturally created over millions of years by a mixing of methane and water, called a methane hydrate. Methane hydrate is a type of molecular structure called a clathrate. Clathrates are a kind of cage, in this case made of water ice, which traps another chemical, in this case methane. At normal temperatures, above the freezing temperature of water, these clathrates can only form under high pressures, such as a 50 meters or more under the ocean, and indeed such clathrates can be found under the sea floor even in places like the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, where the temperature is 8-10 degrees above freezing. But in colder waters, they can exist and remain stable at much shallower levels, such as a in a few hundred feet of water off the coast of Alaska or Siberia.
The concern is that if the Arctic Ocean waters, particularly nearer to shore, were to warm even slightly, as they will do as the ice cap vanishes in summer and becomes much thinner in winter, at some point the clathrates there will suddenly dissolve releasing tens of thousands of gigatons of methane in huge bursts. Already, scientists are reporting that portions of the ocean, as well as shallow lakes in the far north, look as though they are boiling, as released methane bubbles to the surface, sometimes in such concentrations that they can be lit on fire with a match as they surface.
That is scary enough, as a sufficient burst of methane, a global warming gas 86 times more powerful than CO2, could lead to a rapid rise in global temperatures by 3 degrees Celsius or more, enough to actually reverse the carbon cycle, so that plants would end up releasing more carbon into the atmosphere rather than absorbing it.
Is this scenario or a giant methane “burp” from the Arctic sea floor just a scare story?
Not according to many scientists who study the earth’s long history of global warming periods and of evolution and periodic mass extinction events.
As Harold Wanless, a Professor of Geology and a specialist in sea level rise at the University of Miami explains, prior warming periods have often proceeded in dramatic pulses, not smoothly over drawn-out periods.
“We don’t know how this period of warming is going to develop,” he said. “That’s the problem. The warming Arctic Ocean is just ice melting, but the melting permafrost in Siberia, and the methane hydrates under the shallow waters of the continental shelf can happen suddenly. Every model gets the trend, but they don’t give you the rate that it happens or when something sudden happens.”
Wanless, who has for some time been predicting ice melting rates and resulting sea level rises that are far in excess of what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been predicting – as much as 10 feet by 2050 and 15 or 20 feet by the end of this century, vs. just three feet for the IPCC – says, “Scientists tend to be pretty conservative. We don’t like to scare people, and we don’t like to step out of our little predictable boxes. But I suspect the situation is going to spin out of hand pretty quickly.” He says, “If you look at the history of warming periods, things can move pretty fast, and when that happens that’s when you get extinction events.”
He adds, “I would not discount the possibility that it could happen in the next ten years.”
Making matters worse, Wanless adds, is the fact that a large enough methane eruption in the
Making matters worse, Wanless adds, is the fact that a large enough methane eruption in the arctic, besides contributing to accelerated global warming, could also lead to a significant reduction of the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere (currently about 21%). This is because methane in the atmosphere breaks down fairly quickly, over the course of a decade or so, into water vapor and CO2, but in doing do, it requires oxygen atoms, which it would pull out of the atmosphere. That reduction in oxygen would lead to reduced viability and growth rates of plants and animals, as well as to a significant reduction in crop productivity. This dire trend would be enhanced by a second threat to atmospheric oxygen, which is the oxygen-producing plankton in the ocean. If sea temperatures rise much, and increased acidification of the ocean continues apace as the oceans absorb more CO2, plankton, the earth’s main producers of new oxygen, could shut down that source of new free oxygen.
So there you have it my fellow humans: it’s at least possible that we could be looking at an epic extinction event which could include our own species, or at least what we call “civilization,” in as little as nine years.
What is particularly galling, in thinking about this, is the prospect that eight of those last years might find us living in a country led by Donald Trump, a climate change denier who seems hell bent on promoting measures, like extracting more oil from the Canadian tar sands, the North Dakota Bakkan shale fields and the Arctic sea floor, as well as re-opening coal mines, that will just make such a dystopian future even more likely than it already is.
The only “bright side” to this picture is that it may not matter that much what Trump does, because we’ve already, during the last eight Obama years and the last eight Bush years before that, dithered away so much time that the carbon already in the atmosphere – about 405 ppm – has long since passed the 380 ppm level at which, during the last warming period of the earth, sea levels were 100 feet higher than they are today.
That is to say, we’re already past the point of no return and it’s just the lag being caused by the time it takes for ice sheets to melt and for the huge ocean heat sinks to warm in response to the higher carbon levels in the atmosphere that is saving us from facing this disaster right now.
It is at this stage of the game either too late to stop, or we should be embarking on a global crash program to reduce carbon emissions the likes of which humanity has never known or contemplated.
Hard to imagine that happening though, particularly here in a country where half the people don’t even think climate change is happening, or if they do notice things getting warmer, think that’s just a peachy thing that will reduce their heating bills.
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Anonymous says,
Gee, it appears you don’t have much of an opinion on the subject. You may want to take a look at some of the global cooling work done by John Casey. He’s written a number of books about the coming mini ice-age. Also Robert Felix has some great books on the subject. A different viewpoint than the common “global warming” propaganda you read nowadays. Just my 2 cents.
If I look at climate graphic chart over the past several thousands years, I see massive climate cooling underway.
The cooling beakpoint happened about 2000 years ago and we are now due for a sudden and deep planetary cooling.
What I agree with anon is that the culprit will most likely be an asteroid falling and triggering a volcanic eruption(s).
The mass extinction may/will not be sudden.
I see NO global warming!
I wouldnt mind some snow here during the winter, could really use the freeze too, would make my fruit trees produce better
The last 2 summers have been the coolest I can ever remember. Sure a hotspell but short lived and back to cool as can be. Lot’s of rain too (so much it pisses me off) every god damm day! The climate is shifting for sure but no uptick in average heat whatsoever. That is just my neck of the woods yours may be something else. I don’t mind the cool I just get pissed at the rain and lightning EVERY afternoon (it has stopped now a few weeks ago). A 3 month monsoon? Before that it was wind from HELL for 3 months.
Yeah, scientifically all pretty interesting. Not one damned thing man could do about it. As for catastrophic methane releases…… sounds like the aftermath of a good ol’ Texas chili cook-off. That or switching feed @ the livestock pens in Kansas where I grew up. Like I said – this article is very interesting on the science level; but, we’ve enough ‘could happens’, ‘might happens’, ‘should (but most likely won’t) happens right now contemporaneously to worry about. Starting with the current size of Kim Karashian’s butt. Is it getting bigger or just that I need new glasses?
Life is short and unpredictable. Try to enjoy as much of your time as possible
Thats the best post ive seen all day,
People are just hostile and lame on the net these days,,
God controls this planet. We will live on or die some distant day.
I wish these volcanos would erupt now!
Ya me too, hit the reset already…
Again…really?