From the National Science Foundation:
Global Extinction: Gradual Doom as Bad as Abrupt
In “The Great Dying” 250 million years ago, the end came slowly
The deadliest mass extinction of all took a long time to kill 90 percent of Earth’s marine life–and it killed in stages–according to a newly published report.
It shows that mass extinctions need not be sudden events.
Thomas Algeo, a geologist at the University of Cincinnati, and 13 colleagues have produced a high-resolution look at the geology of a Permian-Triassic boundary section on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic.
Their analysis, published today in the Geological Society of America Bulletin, provides strong evidence that Earth’s biggest mass extinction phased in over hundreds of thousands of years.
About 252 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, Earth almost became a lifeless planet.
Around 90 percent of all living species disappeared then, in what scientists have called “The Great Dying.”
Algeo and colleagues have spent much of the past decade investigating the chemical evidence buried in rocks formed during this major extinction.
The world revealed by their research is a devastated landscape, barren of vegetation and scarred by erosion from showers of acid rain, huge “dead zones” in the oceans, and runaway greenhouse warming leading to sizzling temperatures.
The evidence that Algeo and his colleagues are looking at points to massive volcanism in Siberia as a factor.
“The scientists relate this extinction to Siberian Traps volcanic eruptions, which likely first affected boreal life through toxic gas and ashes,” said H. Richard Lane, program director in the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the research.
The Siberian Traps form a large region of volcanic rock in Siberia. The massive eruptive event which formed the traps, one of the largest known volcanic events of the last 500 million years of Earth’s geologic history, continued for a million years and spanned the Permian-Triassic boundary.
The term “traps” is derived from the Swedish word for stairs–trappa, or trapp–referring to the step-like hills that form the landscape of the region.
A large portion of western Siberia reveals volcanic deposits up to five kilometers (three miles) thick, covering an area equivalent to the continental United States. The lava flowed where life was most endangered, through a large coal deposit.
“The eruption released lots of methane when it burned through the coal,” Algeo said. “Methane is 30 times more effective as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
“We’re not sure how long the greenhouse effect lasted, but it seems to have been tens or hundreds of thousands of years.”
Much of the evidence was washed into the ocean, and Algeo and his colleagues look for it among fossilized marine deposits.
Previous investigations have focused on deposits created by a now vanished ocean known as Tethys, a precursor to the Indian Ocean. Those deposits, in South China particularly, record a sudden extinction at the end of the Permian.
“In shallow marine deposits, the latest Permian mass extinction was generally abrupt,” Algeo said. “Based on such observations, it has been widely inferred that the extinction was a globally synchronous event.”
Recent studies are starting to challenge that view.
Algeo and co-authors focused on rock layers at West Blind Fiord on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic.
That location, at the end of the Permian, would have been much closer to the Siberian volcanoes than sites in South China.
The Canadian sedimentary rock layers are 24 meters (almost 80 feet) thick and cross the Permian-Triassic boundary, including the latest Permian mass extinction horizon.
The investigators looked at how the type of rock changed from the bottom to the top. They looked at the chemistry of the rocks and at the fossils contained in the rocks.
They discovered a total die-off of siliceous sponges about 100,000 years earlier than the marine mass extinction event recorded at Tethyan sites.
What appears to have happened, according to Algeo and his colleagues, is that the effects of early Siberian volcanic activity, such as toxic gases and ash, were confined to the northern latitudes.
Only after the eruptions were in full swing did the effects reach the tropical latitudes of the Tethys Ocean.
The research was also supported by the Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Exobiology Program.
In addition to Algeo, co-authors of the paper are: Charles Henderson, University of Calgary; Brooks Ellwood, Louisiana State University; Harry Rowe, University of Texas at Arlington; Erika Elswick, Indiana University, Bloomington; Steven Bates and Timothy Lyons, University of California, Riverside; James Hower, University of Kentucky; Christina Smith and Barry Maynard, University of Cincinnati; Lindsay Hays and Roger Summons, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; James Fulton, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; and Katherine Freeman, Pennsylvania State University.
-NSF-
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I have never accepted the idea that the Siberian traps caused:
The world to warm (Volcanoes = SOx which means cooling)
Were solely responsible for the mass extinction event.
The theory that I favor is a major impact event which either caused or greatly enhanced the volcanic activity in Siberia via an antipodal effect
http://www.newgeology.us/presentation35.html
So where is the crater? Your guess is as good as mine. Theories include that it was long ago subducted via plate tectonics, or it may be off the coast of Australia or under the antarctic ice (Wilkes Land Crater).
For anticlimatctic – the Carboniferous was just like today in climate and sea level. The dinosaurs came later and it was much warmer when the dinosaurs and big creatures generally were about. Here is a good diagram showing it. http://omniclimate.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/28392301.jpg
Most rocks are sedimentary, that is, formed by the action of water on a massive scale. When you examine sedimentary rock, you find ‘fossil graveyards’ on a massive scale. Ages attributed to these catastrophic layers are not (can not be) directly measured, they are assumed. The initial assumptions (in the 1800’s) were based on ‘non-catastrophic’ accumulations of sediment. If you examine the evidence in the light of today’s technology, the rocks scream ‘catastrophe’. Coal, by the way, is also a sedimentary deposit and can contain marine fossils. Sedimentary rock is found on the tops of the highest mountains. There are major problems in current understandings of geology because of dogmatic theories that geologists cling to, exactly the same as the AGW proponents do. For example, we find coal seams with vertical ‘coalified’ tree trunks extending through supposedly thousands of years of deposits, and yet neither the ‘bark’, nor the cellular structure shows any sign of decomposition. According to current theories, the laws of physics have been suspended for a few thousand years for the sole purpose of preserving the theories of the scientists. Dogma trumps Truth every time.
Ian
H.R. says:
“Yeah, but the upside is you can still vote in Chicago elections. The downside is you won’t know who you voted for.”
You can rest assured that it will be a Democrat.
Bill and “Heck”- is – like – Newark:
As you point out, the eruption(s) took place over a period of time; in general, the terminal extinction event took place very rapidly, AND, as Anthony has previously posted (unable to supply reference), the last 5 – 10 million years of the Permian already had a significant extinction underway. The ‘extended’ extinction (counted as the number of species going extinct) was greater than the Chixculub event.
If the Siberian LIP did anything, it was likely to cause global cooling, and not warming, due to the sulfurous aerosols.
Mods: if you are able to find Anthony’s chart, perhaps you can append it, or add it as a comment. It is an interesting chart.
Thanks,
Mark H.
Everyone seems to have missed the point, COAL. Where did the COAL come from? at 500 million years there was not enough life around (or time) to create ‘Fossil Fuel’, COAL.
Maybe Thomas Gold was right, at the least someone should ask the question; where did the COAL came from.
FYI: Peat does not become coal.
I saw a presentation years ago on this theory, including video of a researcher visiting the artic exposure where “the evidence” is viewed. What I took away from the presentation was that the speaker absolutely hated the current prevailing theories extant at that time and that she was convinced she had found proof, (before analyzing) that the other current theories were wrong. Her evidence was interesting, but a long way from convincing in that she seemed more concerned with proving them wrong and not proving her theory right.
Analysis of a theory based on one location that has been interpreted and anthropomorphised (CO2-methane speculations) bothers me. Stick with the science!
What also bothers me is that I rockhound for interesting minerals and fossils. Now, I’ve not been to the site where they’re digging, but every place where I’ve dug fossils and encountered the PT boundary, the layers following the PT boundary are completely void of visible fossils. When someone claims the global extinction took a very long time, I’d like to know why many of the fossil records show an abrupt transition. I’m in the states, so blaming the Siberian traps for sudden regional extinctions (I’ve encountered the PT boundary both in Eastern and Western USA) but a gradual one in the artic seems convoluted in assuming that was a global effect. What was it about the artic circle site that protected that seafloor?
Some other research and a nice documentary was done on this as well:
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/day-earth-nearly-died/
Note, on my previous post, it looks like an asteroid video but the conclusion goes straight to the trapps. The really interesting part is the timeline how how long it took to get to the die off point. One thing I would ask of people, as I’ve posted this on RealClimate. The issues that always gets pushed bask is the amount of co2 released over what period of time. Nobody makes it clear. I would suspect, if that were somehow made clear, it would give us the perfect proxy as to what amount and at what rate it would take for gas releases to impact the environment. The RealClimate folks didn’t seem interested in figuring that out.
Going back to a graph of temp and CO2 based on GEOCARB III and C.R. Scotese (from )
The great dying occurs at the end of a glacial epoch, the temps do get a few degrees about the non-glacial average, but “sizzling”. Hardly.
Further note, if you want to “cut to the chase” go to the 44 minute mark on the video, they sum it all up from that point on the Traps.
Ak, both links disappeared:
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/PageMill_Images/image277.gif
Err, sorry for all the posts on this. I keep going back and looking at it (it’s been a couple of years and I didn’t remember the order of things).
Let me give a summation and the stunning outcome of the research shown in this documentary. The basic outcome is, due to the Siberian Traps opening up with contents size rifts and floods of lava and gig tons of co2 and sulfur, the earth warmed 5 degrees C which was enough to get the methane hydrates to melt and then warm the earth anther 5 c for a total of 10c warming. Well, this is basically what the AGW folks say is going to happen. Here’s the rub. With that release going on–and I speculate because I can’t find any annual rate estimates as to how much release was done by the traps on a year over year basis– it still took 40,000 years for the Earth to warm 5c. It then took another 35,000 years of methane release to move it up to 10c. This was the area I got attacked on RealClimate about. Nobody could pinpoint the amount of release yearly. There are many reports that say “giga tons” but, again, not over what period. The geological history proves the timeline, 40k for 5c, 75k to go to 10c but the argument keeps coming back to how much was released when.
I truly feel that, if we can get the release rate identified, it will absolutely settle the argument. I could be very, very wrong; but I definitely suspect that the Traps released more gases annually than we will over centuries (meaning it would take us a million years or better to repeat the die off scenario).
If anyone has time to figure out the release rate, we may have an answer.
In November MIT had us all thinking it was a very sudden catastrophe – worse than we thought. http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/mass-extinction-1118.html
it is the mantle plumes we need to worry about
http://www.cornellcollege.edu/geology/courses/…/paleo/mantleplume.pdf
Mark Hladik says:
February 8, 2012 at 11:34 pm
Traps: 251 – 249 million years before present;
Accepted date of Permo-Triassic boundary: 252.3 million years before present
So what you are saying is that it was so bad the critters died out before the trap event happened so they did not have to go through it?;)
Well then shouldn’t we stop $2.5 billion in funding for finding ways to combat climate change and instead fund finding ways to combat volcanoes? It will still flush money down a toilet but at least it will replace the entrenched government funded climate scientists with entrenched government funded geophysicists and the like. Maybe even mechanical engineers will benefit from such a changeover?
From Kevin Angus on February 9, 2012 at 9:30 am:
Rainwater-fed peat as a precursor of coal
R. S. Clymo (1987), published by the Geological Society of London.
Abstract excerpts:
“These peats may be analogous to those which formed the Permian coals of Australia.”
“These tropical forest peats may be analogous to those which formed the Carboniferous coals.”
http://www.colby.edu/~ragastal/Paleobotany/peatncoal.html
“The accumulation of peat, the precursor to coal, occurs in settings where there is a high water-table.”
Etc.
Hell_Is_Like_Newark says:
February 9, 2012 at 7:54 am
“I have never accepted the idea that the Siberian traps caused:
The world to warm (Volcanoes = SOx which means cooling)
Were solely responsible for the mass extinction event.
The theory that I favor is a major impact event which either caused or greatly enhanced the volcanic activity in Siberia via an antipodal effect
http://www.newgeology.us/presentation35.html
So where is the crater? Your guess is as good as mine. Theories include that it was long ago subducted via plate tectonics, or it may be off the coast of Australia or under the antarctic ice (Wilkes Land Crater).”
I thought the crater was Chicxulub crater in the Yucatan. Your link did not work on my system. But I agree that the impact theory seems more probable and certainly more exciting (in retrospect, of course.) The real question of interest here, is of course, what caused the “traps”. Their magnatude is, indeed, impressive. All of the theorizing about what they caused is of little use since it is all guess work at best. One could also theorize that they occured so slowly that they had no impact whatsoever upon the climate at the time.
Ian S says:
February 8, 2012 at 4:29 pm
Agreed with Mike Bromley. Assertions of “runaway global warming” are in contradiction with temperature measurements from ice-cores. They pulled that one straight out of their @…
While I don’t disagree with your basic evaluation, there really are no ice cores that old. The poles ave both been ice free a couple of times since then, and the continents have been through serious mashups as well.
Kevin Angus says:
February 9, 2012 at 9:30 am
Everyone seems to have missed the point, COAL. Where did the COAL come from? at 500 million years there was not enough life around (or time) to create ‘Fossil Fuel’, COAL.
Maybe Thomas Gold was right, at the least someone should ask the question; where did the COAL came from.
FYI: Peat does not become coal.
Kevin,
The Carboniferous Period lasted from about 360 to 299 million years ago. The Permian Extinction (the Great Dying in the title] followed it. There is an enormous amount of fossil evidence for lots and lots of plants and animals from the Carboniferous, which was named that because of the abundant beds of coal, which in turn were becomingly increasingly important in European industry. Many of the really great examples of Paleozoic (ended by the Permian extinction) plants come from coal beds. BTW, peat does become coal. It just takes time, pressure, and a little heat. There are beds of coal of various grades from peat here in California that are too young to have ever met a dinosaur, let alone one of their predecessors.
Jim G: on the impact event, the documentary I posted goes into great detail on that: http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/day-earth-nearly-died/
The die off timeline is at about the 31 minute mark and is based on analysis of the Permian geology visible in Greenland. They make a pretty convincing argument.
My theory is, prior to the extinction, CO2 levels were abnormally low (not as low as now, but low).
This meant that the ability of photosynthesizing organisms to withstand any sort of adverse events – such as a sudden lowering of light levels, or, a sudden cooling – was compromised.
Then, such an event happened, and photosynthesis crashed. The fungus went wild and CO2 levels then spiked way up. In other words, the rise in CO2 came after the intervening event, as a result of the die off.
Just noting there are NO estimates of increased CO2 during or around the event on the order required to cause an extinction event. There is a lower concentration of C13 isotopes (and vegetation and CH4 favor the more common C12 isotope) but that is not direct evidence of higher CO2 or CH4. The vast majority of vegetation dying off could cause the C13 isotope to become less common by itself – vegetation die-off releases much more C12 isotope.
CO2 rose about 15 Mys before the event (from the low points of the Carboniferous) to as much as 2,500 ppm but there are many other periods with CO2 this high or higher that are not associated with extinctions. Pangea at 265 Mya is generally thought to be the hottest period in Earth’s history at close to +10.0C while the extinction happened 13 Mys later when temperatures fell to about today’s level – with no real CO2 change at the event. The CO2 and CH4 proposition is in the imagination of the pro-AGW set only.
Now See here Chaps.
I knew 90% of the life on Earth, we used to hang out at the Pub, Friday lunchtimes.
Now if they just walked to work and cut back on the black pudding and pipe smoke, they’d all still be here.
I said to them, last time I saw them, you can’t be too careful with your health.
Had to repeat it, on account of the hearing lost they all suffered, standing too close to fumeroles.
Lament them not, for they were well informed.
On the bright side, I now have bingo with the Coral’s on wednesdays, although i’m sure the Brain Coral cheats.