Ancient Mass Extinction shows how the Earth turned into a supergrønhus

Following a sharp increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, 252 million years ago, the death led to a long -term shift in the Earth’s climate, with the greenhouse lasting for millions of years.

Researchers working to understand this event, which caused the greatest mass extinction in the history of the earth, warn that a similar story can unfold if we continued to emit greenhouse gases.

The permian-triassic extermination event is believed to have been triggered by massive volcanic activity in the region, which is now Siberia, which raised CO2 levels in the atmosphere.

The surface temperature of the planet increased by up to 10 ° C, and in equator regions, the average surface temperature increased to 34 ° C (93 ° F) – 8 ° C higher than average today.

These conditions continued for about 5 million years, resulting in the extinction of more than 80 per year. A hundred marine species and 70 per Hundreds of Terresrial vertebrate families, according to some estimates.

While some researchers have recently claimed that these mass extinction events actually had minimal effects on land ecosystems, Andrew Merdith at the University of Adelaide in Australia is convinced that it started 252 million years ago that life was brought to their knees.

“Pockets in life may survive through a mass output in small enclaves or oases here and there, but you can go to many of the permic-triassic sections of the fossil record and see that the entire ecosystems died out,” says Merdith.

He and his colleagues studied the fossil record to understand why the Super Greenhouse event, running mass crop, lased 5 million years instead of the 100,000 years that the climate models predict it should have.

They found that forests with canopies with canopies, which we up to 50 meters high were replaced with hardy grinding plants, only 5 centimeters to 2 meters in height. Torvmoser, another ecosystem that blinds broad Amer of carbon, was also wiped out in tropical regions.

Using a computer model of the Earth’s climate and geochemistry, the researchers showed that the loss of these ecoosystems meant that CO2 levels remained high for millions of years. This is mainly that vegetation has a major impact on weathering, a process that draws carbon out of the atmosphere and sticks it in rocks and soil over long times.

There are strong parallels with the present, says Merdith, as the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere rise rapidly. If temperatures continue to walk, tropical and subtropical forests may fight to adapt, and cross a threshold where vegetation cannot play its crucial role in balancing the climate.

Merdith says the new work shows you have a “ping-pong effect” while the atmosphere can quickly recover after the equatorial is lost.

“It’s not like you are in an ice house, then you go to a greenhouse a little and then get rid of right back down the house,” he says. “When you start the ball rolling, the earth just finds its new equilibrium point, which is not necessary.

Katrin Meissner at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, who was involved in the study, says the reconstruction of these events is like “putting a puzzle with Mayy missing pieces”, but this team’s argument is “plausible”.

However, there is still a lot of uncertainty about what happened in the world seas at this time, she says. “The seas have much more carbon than the country and the atmosphere combined, and we really have no idea what happened to marine biology, chemistry and physical circulation during this event,” says Meissner.