Permian mass exctinction (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, February 01, 2023, 14:47 (661 days ago) @ David Turell

New evidence:

https://www.sciencealert.com/embers-of-an-ancient-inferno-pinpoint-the-worst-extinction...

"The link between ancient volcanic eruptions and the most severe extinction event the world has ever seen just got even stronger. A new analysis of mercury isotopes has provided evidence that a quarter of a billion years ago, far-flung places in Earth's Southern Hemisphere were blanketed with debris from volcanic eruptions in Siberia.

"The so-called Great Dying, also called the Permian-Triassic mass extinction event, ensued, where most of life was wiped out under ash-filled skies.

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"Through piecing together chemical traces trapped in rocks and ocean sediments, geoscientists are fairly confident that a series of volcanic eruptions unleashed a cascade of dramatic changes in Earth's atmosphere and oceans that eventually suffocated animals.

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"paleoclimatologist Jun Shen of China University of Geosciences and colleagues set about detecting mercury isotopes in rock deposits in two Southern Hemisphere locations: the Karoo Basin in south-central Africa and Sydney Basin on Australia's east coast.

"At the time of the Great Dying, the basins were united in one supercontinent called Pangaea, but are now separated by roughly 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles) and the Indian ocean. In them, the researchers found near-identical patterns: mercury isotopes peaked around the end of the Permian.

"This evidence – from what are to date the most distant terrestrial sites from the Siberian Traps, the gigantic lava flows formed by the epoch-ending volcanoes in question – suggests mercury was blasted out of volcanoes in the Northern Hemisphere and swept around the globe, the researchers say.

"'It turns out that volcanic emissions of mercury have a very specific isotopic composition of the mercury that accumulated at the extinction horizon," explains study author and University of Connecticut geologist Tracy Frank.

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"Their work aligns with signals from sulfur isotopes coinciding with the Great Dying, and also builds on past research which suggests mass extinctions started occurring on land up to 600,000 years before marine life sucked in its last few breaths.

"'That suggests that the event itself wasn't just one big whammy that happened instantaneously," explains Christopher Fielding, another geologist at the University of Connecticut.

"'It wasn't just one very bad day on Earth, so to speak, it took some time to build and this feeds in well into the new results because it suggests the volcanism was the root cause."

"The researchers acknowledge that nailing down the direct cause of the Great Dying is not easily done. Plumes of ash from volcanic eruptions in southern China have also been implicated in the carnage, in addition to the Siberian Traps."

Comment: I'm going to stick with my theory that these events were natural, not under God's control, and He was powerful enough to work around them. Remember He knew they were coming.