Hmmm. This sounds a bit like a sales pitch against “dirty coal” in support of the recent EPA Mercury ruling instead of regular geological research. I question this research claim because they only have evidence that there were spikes of Mercury during those events, not that they caused or accelerated the extinctions. The PR states: “they have discovered a new culprit likely involved in the annihilation…” but that’s an assumption on their part. Further, no one has a good handle (though they claim volcanoes set coal beds on fire) on what actually caused the PT extinction event. A number of theories on what caused the PT event abound, and the science is not settled.
From the University of Calgary
Earth’s massive extinction: The story gets worse
New finding on mercury-volcanic link could re-write history on past annihilations
Scientists have uncovered a lot about the Earth’s greatest extinction event that took place 250 million years ago when rapid climate change wiped out nearly all marine species and a majority of those on land. Now, they have discovered a new culprit likely involved in the annihilation: an influx of mercury into the eco-system.
“No one had ever looked to see if mercury was a potential culprit. This was a time of the greatest volcanic activity in Earth’s history and we know today that the largest source of mercury comes from volcanic eruptions,” says Dr. Steve Grasby, co-author of a paper published this month in the journal Geology. “We estimate that the mercury released then could have been up to 30 times greater than today’s volcanic activity, making the event truly catastrophic.”
Grasby is a research scientist at Natural Resources Canada and an adjunct professor at the University of Calgary.
Dr. Benoit Beauchamp, professor of geology at the University of Calgary, says this study is significant because it’s the first time mercury has been linked to the cause of the massive extinction that took place during the end of the Permian.
“Geologists, including myself should be taking notes and taking another look at the other five big extinction events,” says Beauchamp, also a co-author.
During the late Permian, the natural buffering system in the ocean became overloaded with mercury contributing to the loss of 95 per cent of life in the sea.
“Typically, algae acts like a scavenger and buries the mercury in the sediment, mitigating the effect in the oceans,” says lead-author Dr. Hamed Sanei, research scientist at Natural Resources Canada and adjunct professor at the University of Calgary. “But in this case, the load was just so huge that it could not stop the damage.”
About 250 million years ago, a time long before dinosaurs ruled and when all land formed one big continent, the majority of life in the ocean and on land was wiped out. The generally accepted idea is that volcanic eruptions burned though coal beds, releasing CO2 and other deadly toxins. Direct proof of this theory was outlined in a paper that was published by these same authors last January in Nature Geoscience.
The mercury deposition rates could have been significantly higher in the late Permian when compared with today’s human-caused emissions. In some cases, levels of mercury in the late Permian ocean was similar to what is found near highly contaminated ponds near smelters, where the aquatic system is severely damaged, say researchers.
“We are adding to the levels through industrial emissions. This is a warning for us here on Earth today,” adds Beauchamp. Canada has taken a lead role in reducing emissions internationally. In North America, at least, there has been a steady decline through regulations controlling mercury.
No matter what happens, this study shows life’s tenacity. “The story is one of recovery as well. After the system was overloaded and most of life was destroyed, the oceans were still able to self clean and we were able to move on to the next phase of life,” says Sanei.
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Mercury for gods sake , have these people no sense. Some thing rather large and unfortunate happened to our little blue ball and they blame mercury. Our sun that little constant heat lamp in the sky may have hiccuped, one of a trillion or so lumps of rather large proportions may have intruded on our air space, or kimakazed into the sun causing a zsunami that would ultimately cause the earth pain. It is like blaming the particulates in the atmosphere for the fire that caused them.
Cause and affect must be an alien concept to some people.
“Never heard of anybody even getting sick.”
In sufficient quantities, Mercury is a nasty neurotoxin. However, it is plain that this whole thing was ginned up to pave the way for some sort of legislation or crusade. Using speculative “science” as a way to draw attention to a perceived environmental issue and then support some sort of prohibitive legislation has become a pretty recognizable pattern at this point. Our governments must think we’re idiots.
Wasn’t Rasby somehow connected to the Charles Monnett “drowning polar bears” scam?
Sponsor,collaborator,peer-reviewer?
Since annihilation is a naturally recurring event, preemptive finger-pointing seems logical to the misanthrope. An “I told you so” in advance needs no basis in fact.
For example, someone said that unnamed misanthropes might have been heard to have allegedly said, “I blame
Al GoreGeorge Bush for the upcoming, inevitable eruption of Yellowstone and the end of civilization.”Never mind that the total mercury emissions from human activity are insignificant in comparison to the mercury emitted directly into the oceans by submarine volcanic activity, notably at the spreading centers on the ocean floor…
“Scientists have uncovered a lot about the Earth’s greatest extinction event that took place 250 million years ago when rapid climate change wiped out nearly all marine species and a majority of those on land.”
Who proved this? Doesn’t this make thier research moot seeing how they already know it was rapid climate change? Was it mercury, or rapid climate change? Does the author of the article realize this contradicts what the article is about? Is a statement blaiming climate change a prerequisite to publishing a science article? Do they think we are really that stupid?
They base their worldwide mercury inspired extinction on the sedimentary record limited to the Canadian High Arctic!
Pangea had not yet broken apart at the time of the Siberian Traps and the sediment sample used by this study was relatively code to the Traps. Much of the world’s land mass at this time was south of the equator so one would think a sample from the southern hemisphere would be more representative when making a claim that involved global extinction of terrestrial and marine life.
We should expect mercury from the traps to have be emitted along with bromine speeding Hg oxidation and reducing atmospheric travel time. The ash should have led to rapid burial in the sediments. I’m just not sure how all this mercury made it to the southern hemisphere in quantities sufficient to have caused the worldwide mass extinction.
Shouldn’t one be able to cross section dinosaur bones of that era and find mercury in the outer layers if this is true? (And not mercury from bones NOT from that era?)
SSam says: January 6, 2012 at 12:44 am
@ur momisugly George E. Smith
” …in any case my teeth are full of fillings of fulminate of Mercury or some such..”
I hope that’s a mistake. That’s what is in Primer Caps. For bullets.
I think that was also the compound used in the rolls of ‘caps’ we used to put in our toy guns. That was back when we were living in caves and thought a metaphoric display of testosterone was a more appropriate way to release that energy than acting out the real thing. A discernment of play vs. reality. Somehow, I doubt the rate of murder has diminished by suppressing the play of soldiering or good vs. bad guys.
George E. Smith; says: January 5, 2012 at 5:28 pm
George, I too played with mercury. Had a small glass bottle with some in it. Dropped a silver dime in it and was fascinated how the silver was mercury ‘philic’, and would eventually dissolve the finer features on the dime.
As the inventor of “lights in shoes” I can tell you of personal experience with the Environazis back in the early 90’s. Yes, they were called toxic tennies by the media. The original design used a miniature (and I mean miniature!) mercury switch to operate my system. The entire system was encased in a block of epoxy resin. Some wanker Environazi in Minnesota, I believe, proclaimed that the burning of one pair (as he maintained trash was all burned in that state) would contaminate half a 40 acre lake (Why not one 20 acre lake?) with the mercury contained in those switches. Of course, this defies logic, not only on the face of it but, because trash turned out to be buried instead. The story seemed to disappear when I wrote to him and asked what they did with fluorescent tubes that burned out from the millions of offices in his state.
Nevertheless, the switch was changed, depriving future generations of mercury sources in garbage dumps. 😉
Note that the catastrophic events associated with global vulcanism resulted in mercury contents rising from around 0.2 ppm to 0.6ppm! in the sediments – definitely this is a load of crap. What about the most likely cause – the vulcanism itself and horrendous earthquakes associated with continental collisions that buckeled up mountain chains – possibly also the beginnings of break-up of Pangea super continent. You think we have big earthquakes! These must have been 20 on the Richter Scale (not merely 7.5 that killed 25,000 people in Iran a few years ago) and the Tsunamis! I’d guess (this is the new science) hundreds of metres high waves. With ocean’s squeezing shut and disappearing and the conflagration of volcanic activity, earthquakes, many of the 60% extinction never got much of a whiff of this puny amount of Hg. Shameful work. Geologists held firm against all this CAGW bull until the past year or two when they began to get into the act.
http://bing.search.sympatico.ca/?q=Break%20up%20of%20Pangea&mkt=en-ca&setLang=en-CA
“The Cimmerian plate was still travelling across the shrinking Paleo-Tethys, until the Middle Jurassic time. The Paleo-Tethys had closed from west to east, creating the Cimmerian Orogeny (mountain building event). Pangaea looked like a C, with an ocean inside the C, the new Tethys Ocean. Pangaea had rifted (began to break up) by the Middle Jurassic, and its deformation is explained below.”
Take Mercury out of our air. Bring it straight into our homes in light bulbs, instead.
~More Soylent Green!
“The story is one of recovery as well. After the system was overloaded and most of life was destroyed, the oceans were still able to self clean and we were able to move on to the next phase of life,” says Sanei.
So the conclusion is that without this happening we would not be here. Go Mercury.
Don K says:
January 6, 2012 at 12:53 am
“Yes, Mercury and many Mercury compounds are toxic… The amount of airborne Mercury from all the tons of US coal burned every year is high enough to be a concern — and to cause “them” to recommend that Great Lakes fish be consumed only once a week. ”
As I understand it the mercury that gets into fish is stored in the fatty parts. So if you only eat the meat you get little to no mercury. Also the tests for the mercury grind up the entire fish to do the test rather than on specific parts so the tests are not representative of what you actually eat.
I live in Michigan and eat fish (whitefish) whenever possible. Smelt when they come to season.
A most excellent point. That’s precisely what a Scientist should say, yet it does not seem to appear in the story anywhere.
So we have another possible mixup of cause and effect. Or maybe chicken and egg. How about CO2 and temperature and the 800 year lag. True Scientists would not pick one up front and then embark on a biased data hunt to get their funding and adoration at the exclusion of other logical hypothesis.
Just out of curiosity, a mass extinction of 90% or more of everything dead would leave a huge and complete layer of their chemical constituents. After 250 million years and lots of weight and pressure suggests to me this would be the start of Peak Oil production. I wonder if anyone can comment on the P/T boundary relationship to petroleum deposits. Just wondering.
I strongly suspect that should the Yellowstone super volcano have a major eruption or there were worldwide eruptions for whatever reason, that mercury poisoning would be the least of our worries. Everything and everyone who was going to die would be dead long before the mercury from coal fires or merury from the eruptions could have any effect.
For those interested in fatal mercury poisoning: “We report four cases of fatal mercury vapor inhalation, a rare occurrence. The mercury vapor was released at a private home, where one of the occupants was smelting silver from dental amalgam containing an unknown amount of mercury.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1987914
One dental amalgam filling contains about 1 gram of mercury. If you vaporize all of this and mix it with 100 cubic meters of air that should get you 10,000 micrograms of mercury per cubic meter (ug/m2). That’s 400 times the WHO occupational exposure limit of 25 ug/m2.
So this a high concentration of a highly toxic form of mercury. Distrubuting mercury globally is obviously a different matter. I have a hard time imagining that you could get exposures that would threaten entire populations of dinosaurs.
I know a Benoit and Steve. (Steve not as well).
Benoit in particular is a well respected scientist with respect to his arctic research into the geological history of the arctic. I have read several of his papers, and heard him speak on numerous occasions. My distinct impression is that he is NOT supportive of the IPCC agenda. He may be a midget (he is), but he is far from small intellectually. Discovering an interesting anomoly begs to have some accompanying proposed mechanisms (and research directions to test hypothesis). Instead of slamming someone for having a hypothesis, perhaps consider the facts and suggest alternatives. I am a staunch fan of this website, what it does, and what it stands for, but I don’t like the tone which suggests this is in some way underhanded.
Also, even if their hypothesis is correct, it doesn’t mean anything with respect to CO2. They are talking about mercury. A known poison!
I used to TA a course called “The Geological Record of Global Climate Change” about 10 years ago. My impression is that CO2 is essentially a red herring, but toxic poisons, particulates are worth paying attention to.
Calgary is a staunchly scientific oil and gas town (fueled by almost entirely by coal power). It is far enough north that if CO2 did cause rapid global warming, we would certainly welcome the effect around here!
my 2 cents from Calgary.
I wrapped all my CFLs with aluminum foil so the fears inside them won’t get out of my head.
Wait…
Ooops … the late Triassic to present -> the late Cretaceous to present. Sorry about the mistake.
Di methyl mercury killed Dr Karen Wetterhahn of Dartmouth in 1997. This is a particularly nasty organic neurotoxin. I believe it passed through her latex glove. You can Google her name and get the whole story.
“”””” Mark and two Cats says:
January 5, 2012 at 10:16 pm
George E. Smith; said:
January 5, 2012 at 7:46 pm
“Now I remember that that was also when I decided to make myself a collection of ALL of the 92 then known elements…”
————————————-
How much astatine did you collect? 🙂 “””””
Well in those days we couldn’t get a licence from the NZ gummint to import any of the stuff (1950) as we hadn’t imported any Astatine in the base year; which was 1945.
As it turns out in 1959, I actually imported the very first silicon transistor, to be imported into New Zealand; actually I imported six of them from Holland; they were Phillips OA202 ‘s; actually a PNP transistor, which was bloody odd to see in silicon in those days.
I needed a silicon transistor, since the leakage current in Germanium Transistors was too high to work in the charge integrator I was building. It was part of a Masters project to build a Tissue Equivalent Neutron Monitor, to monitor the neutrons, we made in our Cockroft Walton accelerator lab; by firing Deuterons at heavy ice targets frozen onto a rotating copper heat sink. We got neutrons in the 14 MEV range; but they would eventually also end up as thermal neutrons, which are really bad s***, so we needed to monitor the neutron flux in the lab at all energies from thermal to 14 MEV, with a detector that responded in proportion to the expected damage in human tissue.
Well the punch line of this shaggy dog tail, is that the NZ gummint rejected my request for an import licence because I had not imported any OA 202 Phillips silicon PNP transistors in the base year 1945.
But good old Prof Karl Kreielsheimer, solved the impasse, by pointing out to the gummint beurocrat, that the transistor was not invented until 1948 (maybe it was 1947). So I got my license and my transistors.
But we never did get an okay on the Astatine; dammit, I coulda had the best element collection on earth. Even Howard Hughes never had any Astatine.
Well I figured someone would get a bang out of that fulminate of mercury. But I do still chomp on those Mercurial teeth every mealtime, and if my saliva won’t dissolve the stuff, nothing will..
And Johanna, I do take toxic poisoning very seriously. I was once R&D head of the then largest LED company in the world, and we had enough seven nines pure Arsenic in our building to poison everything in the known universe. In the 12 years we were in operation, we never once had ANY employee ever test positive for Arsenic, and every person who worked around it in any way, was tested every month.
But my money is not on the Mercury in the Permian extinction.
So, since it says that volcanoes are responsible for most of the planet mercury emissions, can we get rid of the draconian regulations on coal power plants?
No, no, no, no. You all have it wrong.
What really happened is all the trilobites were forced to quit using their incandescent lights and start using fluorescent bulbs containing mercury. It seems the Trilobite Protection Agency (TPA) forgot how easy it was for the handless trilobites to drop their lights while eating. All the new bulbs broke and by the time everyone realized what was happening, it was too late.
I think there may be some unfair “piling on” here. Let’s not be like the Climategaters.
In fairness, Stephen Grasby wrote a remarkably sensible presentation for Natural Resources Canada entitled “Water Supply for Western Canada’s Oil Sands: Reality Check” that demonstrated the natural cyclical increase and decrease of river flows in Western Canada. I can’t find the url – but I have the presentation pdf.
Anti-oilsands activists have cherry-picked recent declines in Athabasca River flows to claim a crisis in oilsands water supply. Stephen Grasby pointed out that we only had ~50 years of flow data on the Athabasca River, whereas the ~100 year record on the North Saskatchewan River showed the natural cyclical increase and decrease in river flows, that were in-sync with Athabasca River flows.
The Athabasca River is now one of the most measured and protected rivers in the world.
Activists Scary Myth number 3,046,271:
The Athabasca River is being drained to supply the oilsands with process water.
Reality quiz:
The oilsands consume what percentage of annual Athabasca River flow?
Choose:
90%
50%
1%
Answer:
1%
Not so scary, is it?