How burning of coal contributed to End Permian Mass Extinction?

End Permian Mass Extinction

Source: Science News

An international team of geologists has found the first direct evidence that volcanic eruptions in the southern part of Siberian Traps region 252 million years ago burned a large volume of coal and vegetation.

Image Credit: Astrobiology Magazine

The end-Permian extinction, also known as the Permian-Triassic extinction event and the Great Dying, is the Earth’s most severe mass extinction that peaked about 252.3 million years ago. The catastrophe killed off nearly 96% of all marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species on the planet over the course of thousands of years. 

Calculations of seawater temperature indicate that at the peak of the extinction, the Earth underwent hot global warming, in which equatorial ocean temperatures exceeded 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit). 

Among the possible causes of this event, and one of the longest hypothesized is that massive burning coal led to catastrophic global warming, which in turn was devastating to live.....Read more.

The Missing Billion Years!!

The Missing Billion Years!!

By Harrison Tasoff 

Source: The Current (UC Santa Barbara)

A billion years is missing from the geologic record; one UC Santa Barbara scientist believes he knows where it may have gone. 

An exposed outcrop showing The Great Unconformity (Photo Credit: Rebecca Flowers)

The geologic record is exactly that: a record. The strata of rock tell scientists about past environments, much like pages in an encyclopedia. Except this reference book has more pages missing than it has remaining. So geologists are tasked not only with understanding what is there, but also with figuring out what’s not, and where it went. 

One omission, in particular, has puzzled scientists for well over a century. First noticed by John Wesley Powell in 1869 in the layers of the Grand Canyon, the Great Unconformity, as it’s known, accounts for more than one billion years of missing rock in certain places. 

Scientists have developed several hypotheses to explain how, and when, this staggering amount of material may have been eroded. Now, UC Santa Barbara geologist Francis Macdonald and his colleagues at the University of Colorado, Boulder and at Colorado College believe they may have ruled out one of the more popular of these. Their study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“There are unconformities all through the rock record,” explained Macdonald, a professor in the Department of Earth Science. “Unconformities are just gaps in time within the rock record. This one’s called the Great Unconformity because it was thought to be a particularly large gap, maybe a global gap.” Read more.