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.'"

Comments

3 Most destructive events in a planet's history

[gurps_npc]

1) Super Volcano

2) Asteroid

3) Intelligent life evolves.

Re:3 Most destructive events in a planet's history

[PRMan]

You forgot "Global Flood".

Re:3 Most destructive events in a planet's history

[deathcloset]

OK, very funny, though a bit tired of an observation. Humans are a disease, humans are a plague, yes yes, we've heard it before and we've seen the terrible things we have been doing, and yet I have to point something out here.

Intelligent life, while admittedly is a potential cause of, is actually the first possible defense that this planet's ecosystem has evolved against an extinction level event.

Stopping a super volcano might still be a bit of a stretch at this current time (give it time though), but the whole asteroid thing - intelligent life actually might have a chance, even right now, of stopping another big whack to the planet.

Think about how the shell evolved: might intelligent life be some kind of earth shell? some kind of life shield?

To be clear, I don't ascribe to some magical teleological aspect of the universe, nor some gaia hypotesis: I'm not saying this is WHY we are here or WHY we were made - but hey, shells evolve big and small - why couldn't we, humanity, become life and earths greatest ally?

Sure, we mightn't, but why we shouldn't nor couldn't?

Re:3 Most destructive events in a planet's history

[stoploss]

I considered it, but not all stars go supernova.

In the end, I decided that star death is not part of a 'planet's history', rather it is part of the star's history.

I also ignored Gamma Ray bursts, blackholes, etc.

No, Sol will never supernova, but the risk being referenced is that of a Near-Earth supernova. If a star like IK Pegasi B touched off, 150 light years away, it would have significant effects on us here.

If you want to throw out consideration of nearby supernovas as "not part of the planet's history" then I contend you need to throw out consideration of asteroid impacts as well. Both are proven significant, exogenous, cosmological influences on our planet.

Aren't we already?

[Tmann72]

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.

Re:Aren't we already?

[MightyMartian]

It's funny how you can spend all your time worried about environmentalists, when it's the scientists you ought to be paying attention to. But I guess it's easier just to create strawmen and red herrings.

Has anyone noticed...

[Hognoxious]

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.

Here's a Good Summary

[TeachingMachines]

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...

Re:Here's a Good Summary

[scamper_22]

How do you come to the conclusion that a 4-10C rise will wipe out nearly everyone and everything?

I just never understood this mentality that rising temperatures will have an existential threat to humanity.

I'm not down playing it by any stretch. I'm sure mass areas will need to be evacuated. Farmland will be lost. Extreme weather will become more common. Flooding will take over entire cities. Some areas will become totally uninhabitable...

But I just don't see that being an existential threat to humanity. We're not blindly ruled by nature. We have irrigation systems. We can build better shelters. We can relocate to cooler parts of the planet that would become more habitable. We can control the climate we live in via AC and heating...

It will simply take a lot to truly wipe us out... and I'm just not convinced a 4-10C will be death of humanity.

Re:Here's a Good Summary

[ColdWetDog]

Here is the issue: At present, with only mild resource constraints on the major economies, those political entities are within a couple of hair's breadths away from going after each others throats. Fast forward to a time when climate changes disrupt most of those economies. Arable lands may change (not necessarily increase or decrease). If that happens, the losing country may get mighty upset. Fisheries may change provoking resource pressures on countries. Millions of people will be under pressure to leave areas that are negatively effected. Millions of other people just might not welcome those refuges with open arms and open wallets.

Couple with the fact that the human population is scheduled to double in the next generation or two and you have the perfect storm for some serious resource competition.

All wars are resource wars.

Re:Here's a Good Summary

[stjobe]

At the end of the Permian era, 250m years ago, the global temperature rose by six degrees. That wiped out 95% of all life on earth.

That's why people come to that conclusion; it has happened before.

That, and the fact that just a few degrees may well kill off just about all marine life, raise sea levels, create deserts where there's currently farmland, melt the permafrost (releasing massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere, further accelerating global warming), melt the polar ice caps and the glaciers, deforest the rain forests, and basically make the world a hell-hole.

Sure, humanity could possibly survive; but at what cost and what kind of life would it be? We can't build AC and heating for the whole ecosystem...

Here's an interesting doomsday summary, degree by degree, from one to six degrees: http://globalwarming.berrens.nl/globalwarming.htm

Re:Here's a Good Summary

[Kjella]

It's something about the sheer scale of it, at +10C India is the new Sahara. Is anyone going to build AC and irrigation for a billion people there? No, about 99% of them have to move - meaning, they have to invade someone - and they're hardly the only ones. You can have massive crop failures and if there's food for six billion people on a seven billion people planet, I think a lot more than one billion is going to die. Very quickly we could have a cascading failure because the war stops the tractors, destroys farmlands and crops. Maybe they even start employing scorched earth tactics to avoid it falling into enemy hands.

Going back to living off the land might be hopeless because the fish is dying, the game is dying, the plants are dying because they can't adapt quick enough. We probably don't stand a chance to feed the current population without modern agriculture anyway, the wildlife would soon be spent.You're right, I don't think humans as a race will go extinct, the climate changes alone aren't that bad. The climate changes and WWIII though? That could get rather nasty....

Re:Here's a Good Summary

[Frobnicator]

No, it is not millions of people.

BILLIONS of people will be displaced if the water level rises even a moderate amount. Here is a fun toy It only covers part of the world, but the hyperlinked areas are illuminating.

Notice how even a small increase will shut down some of the most populated regions of the world as the cities are right on the coast. China will likely see a billion displaced. India might have a a half billion displaced.

The US might see only around 40 million displaced, but having New York, San Francisco, LA, Houston, Miami, and a bunch of others at least partially underwater or seasonally flooded will be difficult enough. That means rebuilding the infrastructure for millions of people in the United States alone. When Hurricane Katrina type flooding becomes an annual event due to higher sea levels, continuously rebuilding the cities will not be an option. People will be displaced and the annually-flooded buildings looted and condemned.

Wars are very likely. Look at India losing about half of its useful land and displacing so many people; suddenly all the land to the North looks mighty inviting, even with their arsenals. The Nile Delta flooding could displace seven million; there isn't much nearby green on the map for them to move to within the country. Netherlands probably won't survive as we know it, so what about erasing the line between them and Germany? That one at least has a chance of being somewhat civil.

When you combine the stress of losing a lot of land, some countries having their land vanish almost completely, and billions of displaced individuals, tensions are going to skyrocket very quickly.

Long-term real estate investors and the filthy rich have been picking up tracts of land in places that are elevated, cool, and have fresh water sources. Most people haven't really noticed.

Re:Here's a Good Summary

[dargaud]

Over the course of centuries let us recall

No, because it's going to happen in bursts, Katrina style. Nobody will do anything preventively, then you'll have one or two ruined city with 10M people to move overnight. Then 5 years later rinse and repeat somewhere else. If all those people planned to move on their own free will, it would already be problematic to absorb in a healthy country with healthy economics. But when the shit hit the fans there's gonna be slums all over for a very long time.

Re:Funny how fast things have went to panic mode

[MightyMartian]

I don't think a lot of scientists say the end of the world is nigh. You seem to be confusing scientists with activists. I ignore the latter, but pay a great deal of attention to the former.

What these researchers are trying to say is that there are consequences to large amounts of CO2 entering the atmosphere. Now I can't say that human activity will produce as radical an increase as massive volcanism on the scale described in this article, but still, it ought to make you pause to think that maybe, just maybe, puling out millions of years of sequestered carbon into the atmosphere in the space of three centuries is probably not a great idea, and while the consequences likely won't be that 90% of life dies out, it will have some serious consequences for us and many of those critters we happen to inhabit this planet with.

But hey, I guess it's probably more comforting to make nasty accusations against scientists. That way, you don't have to do a thing and you can feel all clever and righteous. Those stupid scientists, how dare they remind us that we don't live in a vacuum. They must be crooked grant seekers.

Re:I should be?

[TeachingMachines]

I'll bite. The video describes the problem of a 4C increase in temperature that then causes methane trapped as ice in the permafrost and oceans to melt and go into the atmosphere. It's a positive feedback loop that results in at least a 10C increase (methane being a much more efficient greenhouse gas than CO2). The first step is warming by CO2, which then results in warming by methane. Several scientists are predicting a 20C increase by 2050 if the methane is allowed to escape into the atmosphere, which is essentially a planetary extinction event. The only thing that seems likely to prevent this scenario is total economic collapse, immediately. More details available in the second link. Hope that helps.

Re:Comparable?

[sexconker]

Why is it so very hard for people to accept that increases in CO2 in the atmosphere, whatever their source, is not a good thing for a lot of species?

Higher CO2 concentrations and higher temperatures were the staple of the greatest periods of growth in biomass and biodiversity our planet has ever seen. I'm actively working to pump more CO2 into the atmosphere to accelerate this process. Existing species are boring. Lets get some new ones. Don't you liberals like evolution? Why would you actively work against it?

Re:Funny how fast things have went to panic mode

[MightyMartian]

Perhaps that's because you don't have the faintest idea what the scientists are talking about. Have you even read the IPCC reports or any of the primary literature?

How are you any different than a Creationist at this point? Simply declaring "Those scientists are just spouting a religion" any different than what the kooks at Answers in Genesis say about biology?

Grow the fuck up. The universe doesn't give one single fuck about your ideology or pseudo-skepticism. Be a fucking adult and accept the reality that barfing massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere is not some neutral practice.

Fucking hell, people like you piss me off. So fucking lazy that you just latch on to the kooky green activists and make believe in your pathetic fact free minds that Al Gore somehow represents the climatology community.

Not even close

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:Funny how fast things have went to panic mode

[MightyMartian]

Al Gore has little or nothing to do with actual research, and if grant money is your accusation, well then pretty much all publicly-funded science can be thrown out the door; everything from archaeology to high energy physics research. Are you that determined to reject climatology that most of the science that goes on in the world is disposable?

Re:Funny how fast things have went to panic mode

[L. J. Beauregard]

Grant money

Because the NSF has so much more money to spend than ExxonMobil.

Al Gore

DRINK!

Re:Comparable?

[ColdWetDog]

Don't you liberals like evolution? Why would you actively work against it?

Depends on whether or not you're one of the survivors. Hard to know which side of the fence you will fall on when the shit hits the fan. Evolution changes the biosphere, evolution doesn't care whether your DNA and the rest of your corporal assets happen to get passed along.

There are lots of losers in evolution. You just might be one of them.

Re:Comparable?

[MightyMartian]

So you reject out of hand the Permian report, you know, an actual geological example, because of some vague notion that higher-than-now CO2 was great for dragonflies?

Re:The asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs..

[ballpoint]

Actually, it took 32768 years. Then its short int turned negative and killed the dinosaurs.

Re:Funny how fast things have went to panic mode

[geekoid]

I've read both. As well as the literature.
The uncertainties are not whether or not its happening, it's about the margin of error in the time line. As it is turning out, they(scientist who are an expert in this field) have been mostly too conservative in that.

Do you even understand the basic science of this?

Since you can't seem to look at science, that's look at the real world political practicalities. well, 1 of them.

China has the most to lose with global warming. Yet they agree its also man made. Do you think China is part of some environmentalist conspiracy?

Re:Funny how fast things have went to panic mode

[geekoid]

".. And it seems to be based on an unfalsifiable hypothesis, .."
What. The. Fuck?
You really have no clue, do you? I mean .. none. You have no idea what the science is, do you?
That would be fine, but then you base your argument on your willful ignorance. Sickening.

Let me break it down.
1) Visible light hits the Earth. Testable and falsifiable. Check
2) CO2 is transparent to visible light. Testable and falsifiable. Check
3) When visible light strikes something, IR is generated. Testable and falsifiable. Check
4) CO2 absorbs IR energy. Testable and falsifiable. Check
5) More CO2 is put into then atmosphere that can be absorbed. Testable and falsifiable. Check

SO genius, explain to me where the energy is going if it isn't warming the atmosphere? Why are the scientific prediction actually happening?

If shit hits the fan, People like you should be the first against the wall.