Sunday, April 06, 2014

Alarming New Study Makes Today’s Climate Change More Comparable to Earth’s Worst Mass Extinction

How oceans get overwhelmed by rapid large CO2 emissions from Large Igneous Province (LIP) eruptions and human emissions. CCD = Carbonate Compensation Depth, CO32- = carbonate. (Credit: Text in Zeebe, Annual Reviews 2012) Click to enlarge.
The Permian Mass Extinction 251.9 million years ago, otherwise known as “The Great Dying,” was the closest this planet has come to extinguishing all complex life on Earth.  Around 90% of all species died out in this single event, a worse toll even than the Cretaceous extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs.

Until recently the scale of the Permian Mass Extinction was seen as just too massive, its duration far too long, and dating too imprecise, for a sensible comparison to be made with today’s climate change.  No longer.


In High-precision timeline for Earth’s most severe extinction, published in PNAS on February 10, authors Seth Burgess, Samuel Bowring, and Shu-zhong Shen employed new dating techniques on Permian-Triassic rocks in China, bringing unprecedented precision to our understanding of the event.  They have dramatically shortened the timeframe for the initial carbon emissions that triggered the mass extinction from roughly 150,000 years to between 2,100 and 18,800 years.  This new timeframe is crucial because it brings the timescale of the Permian Extinction event’s carbon emissions shorter by two orders of magnitude, into the ballpark of human emission rates for the first time.

How does this relate to today’s global warming?

Alarming New Study Makes Today’s Climate Change More Comparable to Earth’s Worst Mass Extinction

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