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Scientists Study Permian Mass Extinction Event As Lesson For 21st Century
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "About 252 million years ago, cracks in the Earth's crust in Siberia caused vast amounts of lava to spill out and blanket the region with about 6,000,000 cubic kilometers of molten material—enough to cover the continental U.S. at a one mile depth. It triggered a huge change in climate, causing a mass extinction event that killed roughly 90 percent of life on earth. Now Helen Thompson writes in the Smithsonian that a team at MIT has focused its efforts on this major extinction event, which marks the end of the Permian period and the beginning of the Triassic period. Their results suggest that the die-out happened a lot faster than previously thought — perhaps over a span of only 60,000 years. The shorter time scale means that organisms would have had less time to react and adapt to changes in climate, atmospheric CO2 and ocean acidity. Without the ability to adapt, they died. Other mass extinction events have also been narrowed down to short timeframes. The asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period only took about 32,000 years. A similar study of another mass extinction triggered by volcanic eruptions at the end of the Triassic period suggests it lasted less than 5,000 years. Even though all of these extinction events were caused by different things, the ecosystem collapse happened very quickly. 'Whatever the causes of the extinctions may be, and it looks like there are very different causes for some of them, the biosphere may collapse in very similar ways once it gets beyond a tipping point,' says Doug Erwin. Some scientists see the end of the Permian as a lesson for the 21st century (PDF) and say that understanding the conditions leading up to, within, and after a mass extinction event may help us to avoid human-induced ecosystem collapses in the future. As Erwin puts it, 'you don't want to start a mass extinction, because once a mass extinction begins, the prognosis is pretty grim.'"
Is the lesson "let 90% of all life forms die out so the re-filling of ecological niches leads to greater biodiversity, and the possible re-emergence of the dinosaurs"? Because if so, dinosaurs are indeed pretty badass.
...like a mass-extinction party cause a mass-extinction party lasts between 5,000 and 60,000 years, and is pretty grim.
s/[stupid comments]/[intelligent discourse]/gi
1) Super Volcano
2) Asteroid
3) Intelligent life evolves.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
That's why it's called a "mass extinction".
Aren't we already in a human caused mass extinction? How many life forms have been wiped off the planet in the last 2000 years? Faster than the natural rate I'm sure, and it's ongoing.
These extinctions always seem to take place at the transition from one period to another.
So I'd recommend being extra double careful round those times.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If you aren't concerned about this subject, you should be. It is possible that a 4C increase would lead to a 10C increase, wiping out nearly everyone and everything. A good BBC summary of the Permian mass extinction can be found here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
For a really unsettling update:
http://guymcpherson.com/2013/0...
The Death Penalty: Killing people to show others that killing people is wrong.
With such a massive volcanic eruption, doesn't mass extinction result mainly from dust in the atmosphere, which is blocking sunlight and stopping photosynthesis? And they still find something that can be compared to 21st century?
Self-inflicted extinction event from anthropogenic activities could be seen as natural negative feedback mechanism. The equilibrium is restored.
I understand the future for the humanity and multitude of ecosystems may be grim but the nature will thrive nevertheless.
There are certain boundaries and one is that there's only one Earth. We can affect our future, and it's impossible to escape the consequences.
can only guess why http://www.globalresearch.ca/weather-warfare-beware-the-us-military-s-experiments-with-climatic-warfare/7561 selective extinction phewww
Crump, Michigan misses out again.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
When I first heard about Global Warming back in the 90's, it was "The earth's temperature is rising slowly. We need to take steps to stop pumping so much CO2 into the atmosphere." Okay, reasonable enough.
Today, it's gone to "WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!!!! IF WE DON'T STOP BURNING FOSSIL FUELS ALL OF HUMANITY IS DOOMED!!!! DOOMED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
Funny how fast science can turn into outright doomsday panic when grant money is involved.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
If you aren't concerned about this subject, you should be. It is possible that a 4C increase would lead to a 10C increase, wiping out nearly everyone and everything.
Dude. I have no idea what you just said there and I'm not about to sit through a 49 minute video to hear you out.
Catch my attention, man. What are you trying to say and THEN post the video as your evidence.
Really. I'm the type of guy who'll check cites and read what I can to prove you wrong. - because I have a pathetic little ego - long story.
Yeah, prove you wrong. And IF in my quest I find that you are right, I WILL change my views. The leftists did it. I used to be a Libertarian with a capital 'L' and now, well, ....
State your case. Make me WANT to watch a 49 minute BBC video.
So I'll admit my knowledge of the Cretaceous asteroid impact is the simplified version of public education combined with the History Channel. 32,000 years though? I thought it would have been a matter of decades, because the particulate matter thrown in the atmosphere reduced the incoming sunlight, which essentially reduced plant life substantially and having a cascading effect up the food chain. I would imagine that would take a couple of years to decades, but not millenia; what am I missing?
Seems like we have only about 5000 to 50000 years to work this out. Better get busy then :)
So what was the difference between thevolcanic eruptions at the end of the Permian, and the ones at the end of the Triassic?
I just got the book The Sixth Extinction, and am starting to read it.
Environmentalists certainly want you to believe that. It's funny how a group can hate humanity as much as they do and yet not commit mass suicide.
They are the ultimate hypocrites. They want the REST OF US to starve without GMO crops and transportation of food. But they themselves are far too heroic to die, of course.
Strawman
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
The most destructive event was the evolution of blue-green algae, which killed off almost everything living on the planet at that time because of their poisonous waste product (oxygen).
5,000 years? 32,000 years? 60,000 years?
What about next month? Next year?
In the long run, we'll all be dead. Call me when they figure out how to avoid that, and then we'll talk about thousands of years.
Volcanoes emit CO2, though currently not at a rate even close to what we are emitting. However, with a long trend rising intensity of volcanic eruption, volcanoes can emit enough CO2 to substantially warm the planet.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Screw it. Might as well give up and end it all now, knowing that there may be a mass extinction sometime between 5,000 and 60,000 years from now. What's the point?
...at the end of the Cretaceous period only took about 32,000 years.
Wow, that was one slow-moving asteroid!
Comet impacts lasted 32,000 years and writing /. stories took 50 seconds.
Actually, it took 32768 years. Then its short int turned negative and killed the dinosaurs.
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
When it comes down to it all the environmentalists arguments are about preserving the current crop of ecosystems. If things warm up a bit it's actually better for farming. All that lovely land in northern canada and russia will open up for farming. We could maybe feed another five billion people comfortably. But oh the horror it might damage some ecosystems. Well. Who gives a fuck? What's so special about the current crop of ecosystems. And don't give me the shit about "ecosystem services blah blah" what a bunch of total shit.
People in Saudi aren't wiped out right now. The land in Russia and Northern Canada would become productive for farming. So basically get lost.
A huge co2 pulse by fucking giant volcanoes accompanied by massive ejections of magma and dust into the atmosphere is materially fucking different than a leaching of co2 into the air by billions of gasoline engines fuckwad.
60,000 years? 5,000 years?
In a couple of hundred we'll be dead or gods, either way directly by our own hand. I am unconcerned about sea rises over hundreds of years, much less downstream extinctions over thousands to tens of thousands of years.
And we survived ice ages over those periods of time, with far greater disruptions. Heck, just the difference in technology levels between now and a hundred fifty years ago vastly outweighs these differences, as far as quality and length of life are concerned. Extinction? We're on the brink of species resurrection right now.
I'll take whatever and whatever + 200 years of technological advancement over, say, just 100 years' (over the course of 200 growth-slowed years) worth and a dandy green planet any day. And so should you...if quality and length of life are your concern, which is the professed driver behind most people's politics.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Is someone trying to compare an extinction event that release enough lava to cover the entire earth 12 metres deep to man-made CO2 emissions?
How would you classify mass extinction? Time frame? Are we already in a modern day mass extinction already? How species has been wiped out in the 32,000 years?
Once food supply for an animal or human is disrupted, die offs are painfully quick.
Egypt once had a massive inland lake and streams that eventually dumped into the Nile thousands of years before Christ. Once the climate changed back toward desert, the entire population of humans disappeared in probably decades to a century in that region.
So the range of mass extinction events ranges between 5,000 and 60,000 years and were caused by natural events like volcano and asteroids. I say keep collecting data on climate change for another several hundred years before making any more dire predictions about rapid change and the end of the world.
Indeed! I'm a big fan of the blue footed boobies myself. So cute!
6,000,000 cubic kilometers of molten material - enough to cover the continental U.S. at a one mile depth.
I don't think the submitter understands math. One mile is about 1.6 km, so 6,000,000 km^3 of lava would cover an area of 3,750,000 km^2. Yet when I check Wikipedia (and Princeton, and the other top 5 Google results), they all say the Contiguous United States has an area of just over 8,000,000 km^2. That's an awfully big mistake. I hope the actual Stanford paper is of better quality than the Slashdot summary.
A recursive sig
Can impart wisdom and truth
Call proc signature()
"...6,000,000 cubic kilometers of molten material—enough to cover the continental U.S. at a one mile depth." XXX _______ NO, not enough, nor is it even enough to cover continental US one kilometer deep. US is big.
We are in one, and we won't experience another one.
Wha? You are a fan of Smurfette with silicon implants?
This space unintentionally left blank.
"So why didn't this methane go into the atmosphere when Earth warmed up 10k years ago and generate the 20 C heating effect back then?"
It did.
Man that's slow!
It's a "Mass Extinction", I don't think the prognosis is ever going to be too cheerful.
It's like calling the Ocean "Wet". Technically correct, but a bit of an understatement.
Most the damage (impact, earthquake, acid rain, tsunami, nuclear winter, etc.) happened within a year or so, but there were climate effects that lasted thousands of year.
nuff said
I am sure that the work cited here refines constraints on the timing and duration of the extinction events, and despite any controversy over the root cause, it is the ultimate result which is probably the same. The core idea is not new; these ideas have been discussed in the reviewed literature for a long time and even made it into the trade press as long ago as a decade. The developments have been about the details and the relative importence of intertwined effects. That is the lesson for us, not that the differences between each of the five or so major extinction events in the record makes then unique, for they differ in what percentage of the groups in the record they effected, and which of the recurring effects was most important.
What they have in common is that a disruption of the flow of carbon in the earth's biosphere leads to a collapse of the food chain and that megafauna, animals larger than a cat, generally, are very much more affected than animals who are generalists, can burrow, can scavange, through a food chain collapse. Sudden massive changes in the atmosphere, especially in common greenhouse gasses can have a larger effect that if the combination of effects leads to photosynthesis collapse on land and sea and to global land and sea water warming. When carbonate compensation and methane hydrate stability are upset by ocean warming, the sudden injestion of methane and carbon dioxide can exaggerate greenhhouse effects. The sudden injection of sulfer and nitrates into the atmosphere from any of the posited causes of the ME events has collectively the same result, the disruption of the carbon cycle by acid or aerobic conditions in the sea. These destroy the food chain and the decimation of populations begins an doesn't take more than a few hundred years.
The lesson for us is that the common materials that we think are innocuous can have catastrophic effects when they get out of hand. Even the fear of the effects of all out nuclear war works through the same mechanism, the way a "nuclear Winter" is supposed to work is the way these extinction events work, Effects like putting lots of dust into the atmosphere, adding nitrates causing acid rain, and starting massive fires, are the same, Our economic activity is pushing the atmosphere into some of the milder effects that contributed to MEs including the possibility that the oceans might warm up enough so that methane hydrate is released en mass contributing greatly to global warming. Methane is about 40 times more efficient as a green house gas than CO2. So to listen to the oil and gas companies who have solved some of our near-term energy problems by frackking and developing new domestic reserves of natural gas and oil, sounds rosy, until you realize that burning fossil fuels in that way is pretty close to what happened during each one of these mass extinctions, and do you trust the average politician or business man to know when the runaway effects kick in and it is too late? I'm sorry, but I don't.
I don't think we can avoid human induced ecosystem collapse at this point.
#5 the fire next time?
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We had a halon fire extinguisher. It was nice to have a fire extinguisher that kills people.
Mass Extinction! Conservatively speaking, leading to vast Energy surplus!
Sell your energy shares at the top of the market.
Call 911-555-1212 for best terms an conditions. NOW!!
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You didn't think mass extinction involved a black hole, did you?
After over 90% of all life was wiped out, for MILLIONS of years, there was only one dominant form of life. This ugly pig thing... Lystrosaurus. They were, seriously, everywhere. Very low biodiversity .. This is what happens if a single animal in the food chain is left unchecked. Let Lystrosaurus be a warning!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
Which is a bit trite to say, really. Otherwise there wouldn't have been a mass extinction.
The rates of climate change that we're experiencing at the moment are substantially stressing the ability of many organisms to move to adapt to the changes. Where organisms meet immovable barriers (e.g. in trying to get away from spreading continent-centre deserts, they come up against the northern or southern coastline ... and either have to learn to fly, or crawl back into the oceans. Or then then become extinct.
Way to go! Humanity. Your first planet trashed and you've only had mechanised power for barely 3 centuries!
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"