Worst extinction ever linked to massive CO2 spill

[20score]

Scientists finally know the date — and hence the likely cause — of a massive extinction that wiped out 95 per cent of life in the oceans and 70 per cent of life on land more than 200 million years ago.

The end-Permian mass extinction — the most severe mass extinction ever — peaked 252.28 million years ago, reports a new study published Thursday in Science.

Most affected species met their demise within 20,000 years — a blink of an eye on the geological timescale. In all, the mass extinction lasted less than 200,000 years, wiping out huge forests of conifer trees, tree ferns, big amphibians, large reptiles such as dimetrodons, mammal ancestors called synapsids and a huge diversity of fish and shellfish.


The precise timing coincides with a huge outpouring of carbon dioxide and methane from volcanic lava flows in northwest Asia known as the Siberian traps.

"That led to cascading effect — global warming, aridity in various areas, giant wildfires, acidification of the ocean," said Charles Henderson, a geosciences professor at the University of Calgary who co-authored the paper with a large international team.

"All of these things led to a very inhospitable world."

The study also showed that marine and land animals went extinct at the same time, ending a long-held scientific debate.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2011/11/17/science-mass-extinction.html

[DLnyc]

1. Could be quite relevant.

Unfortunately.

[bhikkhu]

2. Good to know

Most of the books in our library on that hedge their bets, as there have been various arguments and inconclusive evidence.

One of the most striking images I've seen is in core samples from some spots, where there's hundreds of thousands of years of deposits representing lush and diverse forests, then suddenly it all vanishes - and the next thin layer is about 10,000 years of nothing whatsoever but fungus spores - mushrooms.

[GliderGuider]

3. Human beings are releasing CO2 over 10 times faster than the Siberian Traps did.

From an older post: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=129285&mesg_id=129362

We produce 130 times as much CO2 as all the volcanoes now active on Earth. Even if you go back to the Deccan or Siberian traps you may not find an equivalent. According to this page a flood basalt eruption of 2000 km^3 emits as much CO2 as we do from one year's worth of fossil fuels. The Deccan traps were up to 1000 times that big, but the various duration estimates I've seen point to the highest rate of vulcanism happening over at least 10,000 years, out of a total duration of perhaps a million years.

So we are emitting CO2 at least ten times faster than the Deccan traps, an eruption that is implicated in the K/T extinction.

We may have already screwed most of the life on Earth.