The Karoo Basin and the end Permian mass extinction
From the GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA
Boulder, Colo., USA – Earth’s biosphere witnessed its greatest ecological catastrophe in the latest Permian, dated to about 251.9 million years ago. The current model for biodiversity collapse states that both marine and terrestrial animals were impacted simultaneously, as a consequence of global climate change.
On land, South African vertebrate fossils, and the stratigraphic record in which they are preserved, are reported to document the extinction and recovery associated with the crisis. The pattern — reported as the end of the Dicynodon biozone and beginning of the Lystrosaurus biozones — has been extrapolated to other continents and hemispheres and used to recognize the boundary event globally. Yet, to date, there has been no age constraint placed near the turnover in vertebrate fossils in this, or any, area. In this new study forGeology, Robert Gastaldo and colleagues present new multidisciplinary data from the Karoo Basin and call into question our current understanding of the terrestrial response to the End Permian Mass Extinction. Paleoecological evidence does not support the reported coincidence of climate aridification, floral collapse, and tetrapod turnover. Similarly, magnetostratigraphic and geochronometric data, when conservatively interpreted, indicate that the turnover between the biozones occurred in the early Changhsingian, more than 1.6 million years beforehand, and was not coeval with the marine mass extinction event.
FEATURED ARTICLE
Is the vertebrate-defined Permian-Triassic boundary in the Karoo Basin, South Africa, the terrestrial expression of the end-Permian marine event?
Robert A. Gastaldo et al., Dept. of Geology, Colby College, Waterville, Maine 04901, USA This article is OPEN-ACCESS online; http://dx.doi.org/10.1130/G37040.1.
BREAKING RESEARCH from Oregon State University:
The big bang, origin of the universe 13.8 billion years ago, was caused by climate change!
yep, and it’s been constantly changing ever since (grin)
Now that is funny!
Or, wait, is there a peer reviewed paper to that effect out now?
Ah, the late Permian. Back when “climate change” meant something…
I saw a program on TV when Earth was completely ice bound. There was no separation of the present day continents. No plants no oxygen. But somehow life must have evolved. It was volcanoes that warmed up the atmosphere, and we got warmer. They think it was our orbit and lack of CO2 in our atmosphere. This is not revolutionary news folks. Atmospheric land, air and water pollution, human made, is our problem. Nothing to do with the human activities changing the climate. If some faced that problem we’d be OK.
I don’t think there to be any question about the P/T mass extinction event being due to climate change. Makes perfect sense to me. Take a vast number of large comets, after having been shaken loose from the Oort Cloud, and have them drop into the inner solar system. Eventually one, or more will impact the surface of the planet, causing tremendous devastation. Voila!, almost instant climate change, causing the greatest species extinction event in the planet’s history.
IT MUST HAVE BEEN OUR FAULT!