From the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , another “carbon as planet killer” scenario.
MIT researchers find that the end-Permian extinction happened in 60,000 years — much faster than earlier estimates
The largest mass extinction in the history of animal life occurred some 252 million years ago, wiping out more than 96 percent of marine species and 70 percent of life on land — including the largest insects known to have inhabited the Earth. Multiple theories have aimed to explain the cause of what’s now known as the end-Permian extinction, including an asteroid impact, massive volcanic eruptions, or a cataclysmic cascade of environmental events. But pinpointing the cause of the extinction requires better measurements of how long the extinction period lasted.
Now researchers at MIT have determined that the end-Permian extinction occurred over 60,000 years, give or take 48,000 years — practically instantaneous, from a geologic perspective. The new timescale is based on more precise dating techniques, and indicates that the most severe extinction in history may have happened more than 10 times faster than scientists had previously thought.
“We’ve got the extinction nailed in absolute time and duration,” says Sam Bowring, the Robert R. Shrock Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at MIT. “How do you kill 96 percent of everything that lived in the oceans in tens of thousands of years? It could be that an exceptional extinction requires an exceptional explanation.”
In addition to establishing the extinction’s duration, Bowring, graduate student Seth Burgess, and a colleague from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology also found that, 10,000 years before the die-off, the oceans experienced a pulse of light carbon, which likely reflects a massive addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. This dramatic change may have led to widespread ocean acidification and increased sea temperatures by 10 degrees Celsius or more, killing the majority of sea life.
But what originally triggered the spike in carbon dioxide? The leading theory among geologists and paleontologists has to do with widespread, long-lasting volcanic eruptions from the Siberian Traps, a region of Russia whose steplike hills are a result of repeated eruptions of magma. To determine whether eruptions from the Siberian Traps triggered a massive increase in oceanic carbon dioxide, Burgess and Bowring are using similar dating techniques to establish a timescale for the Permian period’s volcanic eruptions that are estimated to have covered over five million cubic kilometers.
“It is clear that whatever triggered extinction must have acted very quickly,” says Burgess, the lead author of a paper that reports the results in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “fast enough to destabilize the biosphere before the majority of plant and animal life had time to adapt in an effort to survive.”
Pinning dates on an extinction
In 2006, Bowring and his students made a trip to Meishan, China, a region whose rock formations bear evidence of the end-Permian extinction; geochronologists and paleontologists have flocked to the area to look for clues in its layers of sedimentary rock. In particular, scientists have focused on a section of rock that is thought to delineate the end of the Permian, and the beginning of the Triassic, based on evidence such as the number of fossils found in surrounding rock layers.
Bowring sampled rocks from this area, as well as from nearby alternating layers of volcanic ash beds and fossil-bearing rocks. After analyzing the rocks in the lab, his team reported in 2011 that the end-Permian likely lasted less than 200,000 years. However, this timeframe still wasn’t precise enough to draw any conclusions about what caused the extinction.
Now, the team has revised its estimates using more accurate dating techniques based on a better understanding of uncertainties in timescale measurements.
With this knowledge, Bowring and his colleagues reanalyzed rock samples collected from five volcanic ash beds at the Permian-Triassic boundary. The researchers pulverized rocks and separated out tiny zircon crystals containing a mix of uranium and lead. They then isolated uranium from lead, and measured the ratios of both isotopes to determine the age of each rock sample.
From their measurements, the researchers determined a much more precise “age model” for the end-Permian extinction, which now appears to have lasted about 60,000 years — with an uncertainty of 48,000 years — and was immediately preceded by a sharp increase in carbon dioxide in the oceans.
‘Spiraling toward the truth’
The new timeline adds weight to the theory that the extinction was triggered by massive volcanic eruptions from the Siberian Traps that released volatile chemicals, including carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere and oceans. With such a short extinction timeline, Bowring says it is possible that a single, catastrophic pulse of magmatic activity triggered an almost instantaneous collapse of all global ecosystems.
To confirm whether the Siberian Traps are indeed the extinction’s smoking gun, Burgess and Bowring plan to determine an equally precise timeline for the Siberian Traps eruptions, and will compare it to the new extinction timeline to see where the two events overlap. The researchers will investigate additional areas in China to see if the duration of the extinction can be even more precisely determined.
“We’ve refined our approach, and now we have higher accuracy and precision,” Bowring says. “You can think of it as slowly spiraling in toward the truth.”
Gilbert:
“From the standpoint of geological time scales, that’s a time of about 1.2 seconds. (assuming 4.5 bn years = 1 day). Is that close enough for instantaneous for you?”
No, not really. Until a human being can live billions of years, geologic time scales are meaningless to human beings. Few living things live as long as a hundred years. How many living generations will have occurred in this “instant?” “Instant” means Instant. It happens and is done. Things happening over the course of tens of thousands of years are not instant by any definition except ones that mountains and stars would measure time by.
Local populations of animals adapt within decades and centuries, let alone a thousand, ten thousand, or a hundred thousand years.. The “extinction event” is really just various populations waxing and waning… earth and life adapting to the current environment.
I am amazed that atmospheric CO2 can reach out from the upper atmosphere and capture extraterrestrial argon and helium, then stick it inside buckminsterfullerenes.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn456-killer-comet.html#.UvqhyPldWb8
http://www.lnu.edu.ua/faculty/geology/phis_geo/fourman/library-Earth/New-library/How%20to%20kill%20(almost)%20all%20life%20the%20end-Permian%20extinction%20event.pdf
CO₂ + H₂O → HCO₃ ²- + 2H+
+++++++++++
No,
CO2 + H2O ↔ H2CO3 ↔ H+ + HCO3-
kcrucible: You missed the point. In human terms 60,000 years is a very long time. However, I was talking about 60,000 years in relation to the total age of the earth. Since geologists routinely talk about “deep time” I pointed out in a post later on that 60,000 years is literally a drop in a bucket. Geologically speaking 60,000 years is nearly instantaneous. The link below summarizes this nicely. I especially like the comment at the very end of the time table. Modern human beings show up in the last 5 seconds of this 24 hour day.
http://www2.nau.edu/~lrm22/lessons/timeline/24_hours.html
DocMartyn says:
February 11, 2014 at 2:20 pm
I am amazed that atmospheric CO2 can reach out from the upper atmosphere and capture extraterrestrial argon and helium, then stick it inside buckminsterfullerenes.
From the article:
However, a lack of impact evidence led many researchers to blame the Permian mass extinction on the massive volcanic eruptions occurring in Siberia at the time.
The point is that the impact evidence was meanwhile found in Antarctica under the ice, as I posted above: Lars P. says: February 11, 2014 at 10:57 am
M Kelly and Gail Combs versus the Pointlessly Picky Pedants:
Kelly — Combs WIN.
The volcano might have been only the result of the impact. It is true that the time is not very precisely measured, but in any case such an impact would have triggered an extinction event.
“GRACE gravity evidence for an impact basin in Wilkes Land, Antarctica”
The existence of the mascon is a strong indicator of the impact, not only the ridge.
” The micrometeorite and fossil evidence suggests that the impact may have occurred at the beginning of the greatest extinction of life on Earth at ~260 Ma when the Siberian Traps were effectively antipodal to it. Antipodal volcanism is common to large impact craters of the Moon and Mars and may also account for the antipodal relationships of essentially half of the Earth’s large igneous provinces and hot spots. ”
http://www.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2009GGG….10.2014V
I hope this link works:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2008GC002149/abstract;jsessionid=B3596F17D7CFCDF5F2A6954F2E7BEDED.f04t01
Come on, we all know it was Nibiru.
Lars P. says:
February 11, 2014 at 3:01 pm
What might be a big but not well dated crater has been found under Wilkes Land ice, but evidence for ET impact, not so much.
Australian-Oregonian paleopedologist (paleosol expert) Dr. Gregory Retallack has IMO pretty conclusively shown that the Wilkes Land feature is not a mass extinction killer from outer space:
http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/26/11/979.abstract
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092181810600141X
And the hypothesis of antipodal hotspot creation remains controversial.
But far be it from me to cite a scientific consensus as conclusive of anything.
Jumping on the CO2 bandwagon may seem profitable and sexy nowadays, but one may wonder how much such pseudoscientific research is going to erode the MIT’s reputation, on the long run.
Gail Combs, 11:01:
“Again, the oceans are BUFFERED.”
Yes, I realize that. I’m sure you realize, the pH of a buffered solution does change when you add acid or base, it just does so much less than if there were no buffer present.
“The water contains calcium ions Ca++, because we initially dissolved calcium hydroxide Ca(OH)2 in the water. The CO2 produced during oxygen burning reacts with the calcium ions to produce solid calcium carbonate CaCO3,”
Well, the CO2 reacts with the hydroxide to make carbonate [(CO3)2-], which then pairs up with the [Ca2+] to make water-insoluble calcium carbonate. A solution of calcium hydroxide, unlike the ocean, is not a buffered solution. So for every calcium ion precipitated as calcium carbonate, two hydroxide ions have been removed from solution, and the hydroxide concentration is most certainly decreasing.
Janice Moore:
“M Kelly and Gail Combs versus the Pointlessly Picky Pedants:
“Kelly — Combs WIN.”
If Combs wins, MKelly (“the addition of CO2 to a solution does not change the alkalinity”) loses.
And yes, I do get picky when someone uses a misunderstanding of freshman chemistry to try to refute a silly argument. It allows proponents of the silly argument to dismiss us all the more readily. I’m sorry you find my objection pointless. Now, what substance did your comment add?
Tectonic movement should be part of this discussion, there is inflated attention to asteroids but little on tectonics which are known to be a major driver of volcanism.
There is another important candidate for cause of volcanic phenomena large and small. It is the same agent that causes climate phenomena and changes. What is this mystery agent? Nothing. Nothing is causing these events. The system itself produces them without outside forcing.
This implies the operation of chaotic nonlinear dynamics. The fractal signature of nonlinear pattern systems had a characteristic log-log form. For example, small volcanoes are common. Volcanoes an order of magnitude bigger are a log order less frequent. Another order bigger eruptions are yet another order less frequent, and so on. Where you see this log-log relationship it is likely that some chaotic nonlinear dynamic underlies the system.
Flood basalts like the Siberian traps are the biggest volcanic events barring the separation of the moon, and also the rarest, there has been the Siberian, the Indian, and I’ll need a geologist to tell me if there are any others.
But with the chaotic-fractal paradigm there is no need to evoke an external cause. The system itself produces phenomena with a log-log scale of magnitude.
“kcrucible: You missed the point. In human terms 60,000 years is a very long time. However, I was talking about 60,000 years in relation to the total age of the earth. ”
I didn’t miss the point, I’m simply saying that it’s meaningless. Whether 60,000 year is a long time in the global or cosmic scheme of things is pretty much irrelevant when we’re discussing the lives of living things, since these living things haven’t even existed during most of it. The time period of the earth is a drop in the bucket compared to the universe too… by that measure, the entire geological record is a flash in the pan. But who cares?? Saying something is “virtually instantaneous” in comparison to the age of the universe means nothing to a species which will begat between 480 to 4320 generations during that “instant” being referred to. It’s about context, and in the context of living things that 12,000 to 108,000 years is a practical eternity.
“Instantaneous” in this context is a misguided rhetorical flourish for geologists. I just resent them hijacking perfectly good language, especially when the purpose is to scare people. This is as non-instantaneous compared to the the human experience as you can get so it’s really inappropriate for the purpose. Nothing has a “geologic perspective.”
“With such a short extinction timeline, Bowring says it is possible that a single, catastrophic pulse of magmatic activity triggered an almost instantaneous collapse of all global ecosystems.”
“Short”… oh yeah, very short… you know, just 100,000 years maybe. A “single pulse” that went on how long? There are a lot of verbs and adjectives trying to get across the feel of an asteroid hit that kills off all life within a year or two from extreme trauma to the climate from a single event. Nothing described here really screams “instantaneous collapse” to me though.
To reframe it for illustrative purposes: It’d be something like me claiming that -5 degrees F is really warm so people should stop complaining about the weather (well, it IS really warm compared to the temperature in deep space, so you know, I’m right!)
I just find it head-shaking, that’s all. If humanity survives another 12,000 years I’ll be amazed, and it won’t have anything to do with CO2 emissions killing off the entire planet over a rapid 60,000 years.
Sheesh. Everybody knows the extinction was caused by a meteor strike near the Falklands, when the southern tip of Africa was nearby. The impact was nearly vertical, causing a shock wave through the mantle that reached the surface as the Siberian traps, so the traps were caused by the impact/shock wave and in turn led to the heating of the oceans, killing off marine life. The vertical impact, like a rock tossed straight up onto a thinly frozen pond, caused several upwellings of magma in South Africa, depositing the concentration of heavy metals found there. It’s all so very, very obvious. 😉
So the climate changed due to natural causes and (most likely) this led to the extinction. The climate change was probably caused by a significant volcanic event. However, every volcanic event we experience leads, at least in the short term, to global cooling due to the large quantities of ash put into the atmosphere. So………was it cooling or warming? Also volcanos put out massive quantities of sulphur in the form of sulphur dioxide so if ocean acidification was to occur why wouldn’t that be due to this instead. I might be wrong, but it really looks like the researchers are starting with the assumption that climate can only change due to Carbon Dioxide and then when they see a potential change in climate, they take it as proof positive of carbon dioxide related greenhouse warming.
Peter Foster on February 11, 2014 at 9:22 am
A very compelling antithesis. The P-T (and other?) extinctions from CO2 starvation, not excess. And the Siberian flood basalt the hero, not villain.
milodonharlani says:
February 11, 2014 at 6:47 am
The idea I recall was the impact occurred on the exact opposite side of the Earth, and the shock waves traveled to the other side in the location of the Siberian Traps. The disruption of the crust would be strong at that location because of wave superposition. Since I didn’t recall any impact site being mentioned, it seemed to me an impact in an ocean would be most likely. However, the link I provided claimed evidence for an impact in what is now Australia. The story says a 150 mi diameter crater was found off the NW coast and large shocked quartz grains were found nearby at the P/T boundary. The text indicates there is no iridium associated with this P/T crater. A similar volcanic event (Deccan Traps) in what is now India occurred simultaneously with the K/T impact at Chicxulub. At the time of the K/T impact, the Indian land mass was roughly opposite what is now Yucatan.
It seems hard to be sure what the Earth really looked like 250 million years ago, but the last two maps together seem to provide a reasonable view of the Siberian Traps relative to land masses we know now and where they were at the P/T boundary. If the hypothesis of an impact followed by crustal fracturing due to shock wave superposition on the opposite side of the world is valid, then it would appear the NW Australian impact crater was in the wrong spot. The real culprit would have been of the coast of what is now Sydney in a location about where NZ would be if it had existed then. (Did that impact initiate the formation of New Zealand?) And accordingly, the NW impact might have been a companion event.
Well that was fun!
Here’s the NW Australia impact link again
http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/969/piecing-together-a-permian-impact
map 65 million years ago
http://forum.celestialmatters.org/viewtopic.php?t=205
map 250 million years ago
http://www.asianscientist.com/in-the-lab/earth-hot-mass-extinction-250-million-years/
Siberian Traps map
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v4/n2/fig_tab/ngeo1069_F1.html
Inre: Planet “Nibiru” background check:
“The idea was first put forward in 1995 by Nancy Lieder,[2][3] founder of the website ZetaTalk. Lieder describes herself as a contactee with the ability to receive messages from extra-terrestrials from the Zeta Reticuli star system through an implant in her brain. She states that she was chosen to warn mankind that the object would sweep through the inner Solar System in May 2003 (though that date was later abandoned) causing Earth to undergo a pole shift that would destroy most of humanity. The prediction has subsequently spread beyond Lieder’s website and has been embraced by numerous Internet doomsday groups, most of which linked the event to the 2012 phenomenon.”
“The idea of the Nibiru encounter originated with Nancy Lieder, a Wisconsin woman who claims that as a girl she was contacted by gray extraterrestrials called Zetas, who implanted a communications device in her brain. In 1995, she founded the website ZetaTalk to disseminate her ideas.[4] Lieder first came to public attention on Internet newsgroups during the build-up to Comet Hale–Bopp’s 1997 perihelion. She stated, claiming to speak as the Zetas, that “The Hale-Bopp comet does not exist. It is a fraud, perpetrated by those who would have the teeming masses quiescent until it is too late. Hale-Bopp is nothing more than a distant star, and will draw no closer.”[5] She claimed that the Hale-Bopp story was manufactured to distract people from the imminent arrival of a large planetary object, “Planet X”, which would soon pass by Earth and destroy civilization.[5] After Hale-Bopp’s perihelion revealed it as one of the brightest and longest-observed comets of the last century,[6] Lieder removed the first two sentences of her initial statement from her site, though they can still be found in Google’s archives.[5] Her claims eventually made the New York Times.[7]”
daddylonglegs says:
February 11, 2014 at 12:38 pm
Bill Illis says:
February 11, 2014 at 12:33 pm
Its hard to describe just how big the Siberian Traps volcanoes were.
Do we have any idea what initiates such flood basalts?
———————————
Some of the newest continental plate reconstructions have 3 plates converging right at the main Siberian Traps region to form the new large plate of EurAsia. Europe/Eastern Russia, East Siberia and SouthEast Asia were separate plates which came together in one big collision right at the time of the eruptions and at the location of the Siberian Traps.
I imagine large sections of the crust got rapidly subducted deep into the mantle where they were melted completely and being of higher water concentrations and lighter material, these sections were then rapidly ejected back out.
Some of the larger flood basalts (including the slightly earlier Emeshian Traps of southeast Asia at 260 million years ago which is likely tied into this very same collision) may be the result of similar large-scale subduction events. It might take several million years for the mantle melting to fully come into effect after the collisions. The process either happens at a very, very large scale in a short time (flood basalt event) or it happens more slowly over time and there is just new volcano created island/subcontinents.
,,,,,which likely reflected a massive addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. This dramatic change may have led to widespread ocean acidification and increased sea temperature by 10 degrees Celsius …..
I would like to point out the lines in my poem AL GORE — AMERICAN BLOVIATOR. i started with —
“Carbon dioxide is filling the air!
And there is no escaping! — its everywhere!”
And a few lines down I said —
“If acid rain scared you THINK ABOUT THIS!
Oceans acidic and warmer than piss!”
Eugene WR Gallun
Let me repeat something I noticed in the paper and commented on upstream. The paper measured light carbon (carbon has several isotopes), which is from organic matter. It did not measure CO2. It made a huge unsubstantiated leap to CO2 based on the pulse of organic matter sourced light carbon measured in the sediment. In essence this was a naked nod to its funding source with the hope that people would do exactly what they did here in this thread, get all worked up over CO2 (remember, any press is good press). What we should be doing is exposing the errors made in this paper and force a retraction.
How can we be anything but doomed!
Right on, B.P., as usual. Volcanoes do not produce “light” Carbon. They produce the entire earth spectrum of Carbon isotopes. Life preferentially absorbs and concentrates 12C=lite. When a lot of things die, the lite beer is released back into the ocean. What they actually found was that the marine extinction began 10,000 years earlier.
It was an extraordinary extinction and it does indeed beg an extraordinary explanation. Unfortunately, we have no clue, and certainly no more so for their work. The Siberian “Traps” ( I hate that word) were just another large igneous province. Like the Deccan province in India generally in the time frame of the Dinosaur extinction, it happened to be on land. Several larger provinces have happened on the ocean floor without huge extinctions.
They are just spiraling out of control.
Whether the extinction occurred as a result of vulcanism changing the ocean and atmospheric chemistry, or if CO2 eventually (after 10,000s of years) caused warming of 10 degrees, the fact is that the study shows that the circumstances are very different from the current situation. It is therefore not an anomaly for AGW, and provides no conclusive evidence of the implications for increasing CO2 in the atmosphere.