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Greatest Biological Catastrophe

“No Place to Hide” –A ‘Perfect Storm’ 14 Times Earth’s

Greatest Biological Catastrophe
Posted on Oct 21, 2020 in Biology, Climate Change, Evolution, Geology, Science
 
“So they’re kind of like dark matter,” said paleontologist David Jablonski of the University
of Chicago about the sanctuaries, the “refugia” that have never been found in the fossil
record, but sheltered the shell-shocked and decimated species of Earth’s past mass
extinctions until they were able to repopulate the planet in ensuing eons.

“Where Will the Sanctuaries Be?”

“We think they’re there because we can’t see them,” he told Peter Brannen, author of The
Ends of the World, who asked that if the sixth major mass extinction of the Phanerozoic,
the biological “perfect storm,” is coming, where will the refugia be? “There won’t be
many,” Jablonski said glumly.

“The human footprint is truly pervasive, from McMurdo Station to the north coast of
Greenland. From submarine habitats to the tops of mountains. You have metals
deposited in remote lakes in the Andes, and of course, in the ocean, plastic is
everywhere. So there won’t be any places to hide, really. The groups that are going to do
the best are the ones that can actually coexist with people as opposed to the ones that
can find the last few hidey-holes. But if society collapses, dogs will just go back to being
wolves. The genus canis will be just fine in the long run.
“But things like ocean acidification are really going to matter,” he continued. “That’s the
key, right? Because of course there’s been plenty of warming in the past. But how do
clades deal with warming? They move around. But if you’ve built hotels, and sewage
effluents, and you’re dynamiting reefs, you can’t move around anymore. And of course, if
on top of that you then acidify the ocean, you’ve again removed potential refugia. And so
that’s the real problem: we’re the perfect storm.”

“The Perfect Storm”

“We’re not just warming, we’re not just pollution, we’re not just overexploitation, we’re
piling it all on simultaneously. That’s why it’s really inaccurate to argue that because
there’s been warming in the past that doesn’t count now, because it’s part of the perfect
storm. I think that all mass extinctions work that way. I think it’s going to turn out that
that’s how all the Big Five work—that lots of things go wrong. Say the K-T wouldn’t have
been as bad if you hadn’t had the Deccan Traps erupting, or the Deccan Traps wouldn’t
have done that much damage if you hadn’t dropped a rock out of the sky. But you
combine those. The Permian-Triassic is the same way. The Devonian is the same way.
The End-Ordovician is the same way. The Triassic-Jurassic—it’s these combinatory
things. You’ve got to get away from single-factor explanations. I suspect a lot of the
major events in the history of life involve perfect storms. And we’re one of them.”
In a new landmark study, Hana Jurikova a research fellow at the University of St
Andrews (her research primarily focuses on the co-evolution of climate, environment
and life on Earth during the Phanerozoic Eon), mirrors Jablonski’s concern. The
Phanerozoic is the current eon in the geologic time scale of multicellular life, covering
541 million years to the present.

“Dinosaurs On the Moon” — The Impossible Magnitude-12 Earthquake

That Changed Our World
A Cascading Catastrophe

“We are dealing with a cascading catastrophe in which the rise of CO2 in the
atmosphere set off a chain of events that successively extinguished almost all life in
the seas,” Jurikova  observes, “Ancient volcanic eruptions of this kind are not directly
comparable to anthropogenic carbon emissions, and in fact all modern fossil fuel
reserves are far too insufficient to release as much CO2 over hundreds of years, let
alone thousands of years as was released 252 million years ago. But it is astonishing
that humanity’s CO2 emission rate is currently fourteen times higher than the annual
emission rate at the time that marked the greatest biological catastrophe in Earth’s
history”.
Earth’s history, Jurikova reports, knows catastrophes which are unimaginable for
humans. For example, around 66 million years ago an asteroid impact marked the end of
the dinosaur era. Long before however, 252 million years ago at the boundary between
the Permian and Triassic epochs, Earth witnessed a far more extreme mass extinction
event that extinguished about three-quarters of all species on land and some 95
percent of all species in the ocean. Volcanic activity on an enormous scale in today’s
Siberia has long been debated as a likely trigger of the Permian-Triassic mass
extinction, but the exact sequence of events that led to the extinction remained highly
controversial.
Now, a team of researchers led by Jurikova from GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean
Research Kiel, in collaboration with the Helmholtz Centre Potsdam GFZ German
Research Centre for Geosciences and Italian and Canadian universities, provides for the
first time a conclusive reconstruction of the key events that led to the mega-
catastrophe. Their research also draws bleak lessons for the future.

The international team studied isotopes of the element boron in the calcareous shells
of fossil brachiopods – clam-like organisms – and with it determined the rate of ocean
acidification over the Permian-Triassic boundary. Because the ocean pH and
atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) are closely coupled, the team was able to
reconstruct changes in atmospheric CO2 at the onset of the extinction from boron and
carbon isotopes. They then used an innovative geochemical model to study the impact
of the CO2 injection on the environment.
“Siberian Traps” led to Vast De-oxygenation of the Ocean

Their findings showed that volcanic eruptions, from the then active flood basalt
province “Siberian Traps”, released immense amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. This
large CO2 release lasted several millennia and led to a strong greenhouse effect on the
late Permian world, causing extreme warming and acidification of the ocean. Dramatic
changes in chemical weathering on land altered productivity and nutrient cycling in the
ocean, and ultimately led to vast de-oxygenation of the ocean. The resulting multiple
environmental stressors combined to wipe out a wide variety of animal and plant
groups.

 
 

Long Vanished Oceans Preserved in Fossil Shells

A large part of the work was done by the researcher at GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for
Ocean Research in Kiel, but she later joined the GFZ  in Potsdam, and the “icing on the
cake” for her were the results from a collaboration with the SIMS laboratory led by
Michael Wiedenbeck at the GFZ. Using the state-of-the-art large-geometry secondary
ion mass spectrometer (SIMS), the isotopic composition of the shells could be
measured directly on the specimens at the micrometer-scale. This made it possible to
determine the boron isotopic composition even in the smallest fragments of brachiopod
shells. Depending on the degree of acidification of the seas, the calcareous shells of the
organisms living in them differ ever so slightly in their chemical composition. In this way,
the pH value of long vanished oceans could be determined in the remains of the shells
preserved as fossils in the rock record.
The Daily Galaxy, Andy Johnson, via Brannen, Peter. The Ends of the World (p. 263).
Kindle Edition and GFZ Geoforschungszentrum Potsdam Helmholtz Center

Image credit: Shutterstock License

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