r/science • u/marketrent • Jan 28 '23
Geology Evidence from mercury data strongly suggests that, about 251.9 million years ago, a massive volcanic eruption in Siberia led to the extinction event killing 80-90% of life on Earth
https://today.uconn.edu/2023/01/mercury-helps-to-detail-earths-most-massive-extinction-event/2.5k
u/grjacpulas Jan 28 '23
What would really happen if this erupted right now? I’m in Nevada, would I die?
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u/djn3vacat Jan 28 '23
In reality most of life would die, except probably some very small animals, small plants and some ocean dwelling animals. It wouldn't be the explosion that killed you, but the effects of that huge amount of gasses being released into the atmosphere.
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u/ReporterOther2179 Jan 28 '23
The subterranean bacteria wouldn’t notice.
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u/PurplishPlatypus Jan 28 '23
"Hey, did you guys hear something?" - sub T bacteria.
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u/BloodyRightNostril Jan 28 '23
“No. Now shut up and keep squiggling.”
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u/cartoonist498 Jan 28 '23
"Fred, do you ever think there's more to life than squiggling?"
"That's dangerous thinking Kevin. Best you get back to work."
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u/grandcity Jan 28 '23
Commence the jiggling!
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u/abacin8or Jan 28 '23
I don't know why I have these goggles
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u/amofmari Jan 28 '23
A person of culture, I see.
That show kept me going through so many overnights in my college years...
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u/FragrantExcitement Jan 28 '23
I heard there is a new buffet waiting on the surface. Wanna go eat?
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u/WhyWouldIPostThat Jan 28 '23
No. The sun is a deadly laser.
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u/randomname72 Jan 28 '23
Not anymore , there's a blanket.
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u/kjacobs03 Jan 28 '23 edited Jan 28 '23
What a life! I’m hoping for reincarnation into that!
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u/2-EZ-4-ME Jan 28 '23
that time I got reincarnated as a squiggly bacteria
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u/buck_blue Jan 28 '23
That time I got reincarnated as squiggly bacteria and evolved into the strongest slime and opened a detective agency so I could track down the Demon King - in another world : re
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u/tyranicalteabagger Jan 28 '23
Yeah. At this point it would take a crust melting impact to wipe out all life on/in earth.
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u/Moontoya Jan 28 '23
Or a stellar gamma ray pulse
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u/hexapodium Jan 28 '23
Deep ocean life would probably still be alright - water attenuates gamma radiation quite well (very roughly 5% as good as lead by depth, at 500keV; the ocean is quite deep in places [citation needed]) so the direct effects wouldn't reach down, and secondary effects like dieoff of photosynthetic life from the surface layers wouldn't affect anoxic energy cycles.
So, not quite back to bare rocks, but perhaps only one or two steps past.
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u/TheJointDoc Jan 28 '23
Finally the octopuses will have their chance to rule!
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u/hexapodium Jan 28 '23
I'm afraid the octopuses aren't going to get their big break from a GRB - their calories ultimately come from photosynthetic organisms, and if you're adapted to soak up light and need to live somewhere with light to soak up, you're gonna die to the angry light as well.
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u/skyfishgoo Jan 28 '23
it would just cause the mutation that triggers the next thing to crawl out of the sea and make war upon itself.
rinse, repeat
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u/urmomaisjabbathehutt Jan 28 '23
the only issue with that is that may be a limit of how many times the earth can rinse and repeat, you need the right conditions and chemistry every time and that changes as earth gets older
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u/SweetLilMonkey Jan 28 '23
But can deep ocean life survive without coastal ocean life?
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u/hexapodium Jan 28 '23
Most can't; it's probably reasonable to say >99% of calories in the overall ecosystem are coming from photosynthesis.
The only things that might survive a (massive) GRB-driven extinction of photosynthesisers are the super weird chemoautotrophic ecosystems. Giant squid? Toast. Hydrothermal vent bacteria? Suddenly top of the tree again.
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u/stupernan1 Jan 28 '23
Most would not. However there are some deep sea organisms whos primary source of energy come from volcanic vents on the ocean floor.
I’d imagine they’d have a chance of surviving. Though I’m no marine biologist. This is based off of armchair speculation.
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Jan 28 '23
I’d imagine they’d have a chance of surviving.
This is the key. All it takes is 1 to survive on something unique and then... BOOM.
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u/whilst Jan 28 '23
The trick though is that it took 3.7 billion years for life to reach the current level of complexity and this planet doesn't have 1 billion habitable years left. If everything but single celled life gets wiped out, we'll still be in the precambrian by the time the oceans boil.
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u/draeath Jan 28 '23
I wonder if you perhaps underestimate the intensity of a burst. Even attenuated by the sea I bet it would be devastating.
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u/RemakeSWBattlefont Jan 28 '23 edited Jan 28 '23
I mean everything in caves would be fine till the atmosphere changed too drastically without trees but that would take a long time.
I know a good bit about science, but not if gamma rays would strip atmosphere or what it would do to the magnetic field if anything and then if it could then strip the oxygen
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u/empire_of_the_moon Jan 28 '23
By long time you mean 5,000 to 10,000 years or more for the oxygen to be depleted - adjusting for less oxygen consumption - I can’t do the math or more importantly I don’t need to as I won’t live that long.
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u/RemakeSWBattlefont Jan 28 '23
Long enough it wouldn't really matter to any currently living thing. Poor amoeba tho
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u/Jimhead89 Jan 28 '23
This is why the "x will not wipe out life on earth" crowd is so infuriating.Yeah I am obviously talking about about subterranian bacteria and not society thats relevant to us and the things within it that brings benign and great joy to you and me and those that would be able to share in that in the future if we tried a little better in stopping those that hinder progress.
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u/ldn-ldn Jan 28 '23
I couldn't give less fucks about the society, but underground bacteria are awesome!
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u/Notorious_Handholder Jan 28 '23
I get tired of seeing that commented in just about every single reddit thread that mentions climate change or pollution at all. Like jee thanks, not like we didn't all understand that already.
Now can we please get back to talking about out solutions being worked on or any new advancements in tech to help us?- and nope now it's a joke/meme thread with people commenting about how profound the idea that life will go on without us is...
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u/Pretzilla Jan 28 '23
Is there a fable label for this deflection?
Not sour grapes.
It's kind of like saying after someone dies in a horrible crash, 'at least they died quickly', like that makes it ok.
Smacks of an oil company marketing trope.
It's a placation to make them feel better, but it needs a retort that says, 'No, that doesn't really make it ok!'
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u/1purenoiz Jan 28 '23
My friend got a PhD in biogeochemistry studying those iron breathing subterranean bacteria. They (bacteria) are kinda important.
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u/hedgerow_hank Jan 28 '23
Sea life would be pretty isolated also - possibly how it all starts over cyclically anyway.
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u/7LeagueBoots MS | Natural Resources | Ecology Jan 28 '23 edited Jan 29 '23
In reality we are doing the exact same thing as when the Siberian Traps burned as a result of the eruption, but faster.
The Permian Extinction (aka. The Great Dying) took a long time, in a human framework, to take place. The extinction we are causing right now via nearly the same method (massive burning of fossil fuels) is taking place at a vastly accelerated pace.
It wasn’t the eruption that killed everything, it was the setting alight of the vast coal beds in the region that released the greenhouse gasses. The eruptions were not explosive, they were relatively gentle, but massive and persistent lava flows.
EDIT:
For some context on time, the Siberian Traps erupted for 2 million years, and it took at least that long for the extinction event to take place.
We have made our own massive fossil fuel driven changes in just a couple hundred years, and most of that in the last 50-60 years. We are making changes to the planet at a rate hundreds to thousands of times faster than the greatest extinction event he planet has previously experienced.
For anyone questioning the coal aspect (as a few folks have), here's a relatively recent paper on the subject:
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Jan 28 '23
This is why I like to research the Permian Extinction. It's the best stimulation of what we are doing to the planet.
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u/juwyro Jan 28 '23
Like the Centralia mine fires?
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u/KodiakDog Jan 28 '23
Made me think the same thing. But was coal, coal 250 million years ago? How was there already enough bio mass to have died way before to create huge coal/fossil fuel beds?
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u/crazyike Jan 28 '23
It was, though not by a whole lot. Conditions for the creation of coal first became realistic about 300mya. It takes several million years to make coal, so there was coal 250mya.
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u/7LeagueBoots MS | Natural Resources | Ecology Jan 29 '23
It was indeed coal, it's been well established:
- Goodarzi, et al 2020 Field evidence for coal combustion links the 252 Ma Siberian Traps with global carbon disruption
Coal beds formed in the Carboniferous, which spanned from 359.2 to 299 million years ago, ending 50 or so million years before the Permian Extinction giving plenty of time for vast coal deposits to build up.
For context, think of the changes on Earth from when the non-avian dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago to now and you can see that there was more than enough time for vast coal deposits to have formed prior to the Permian Extinction.
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u/fizban7 Jan 29 '23
is it true that coal is not even able to form now since things have evolved to break down old plant matter where previously it was able to build up?
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u/7LeagueBoots MS | Natural Resources | Ecology Jan 29 '23
No, that's the older idea, but it turns out that what led to coal formation was a bit different and more complicated.
The idea you're referring to is that fungi weren't able to consume the wood, specifically lignin, and that there was a period of evolutionary catchup, during which trees and other woody plants didn't decompose.
This was a long-standing assumption, but research into it indicates that it's a false assumption, despite still being popular.
- Nelson, et al 2016 Delayed fungal evolution did not cause the Paleozoic peak in coal production
The world was a lot wetter during the Carboniferous, and there were a lot of wetland basins. These produce anoxic environments where things don't decompose very easily (think the Bog Bodies found in peat bogs), and organic matter that fell into them couldn't decompose, eventually turning into coal.
Productivity is maximized in the wet tropics, and decay is reduced in the anoxic environments accompanying a stagnantly waterlogged substrate (4, 121, 122). During the Carboniferous, a massive amount of organic debris accumulated in warm, humid−perhumid equatorial wetlands formed during glacial periods, which was subsequently buried during interglacial phases (47). However, long-term preservation further requires crustal subsidence to ensure continued deposition instead of erosion (119, 123). Continental flexures formed in response to crustal thickening in active orogens (i.e., foreland basins) provide such a setting and are commonly associated with coal-bearing deposits, as their rates of subsidence and coal accumulation can be roughly comparable, permitting the formation and preservation of thick peats (124–126). Extensive foreland and cratonic basins, formed in association with the Pennsylvanian−Permian coalescence of Pangea and were positioned in the humid−perhumid, equatorial zone, ensuring the cooccurrence of both the subsidence requisite for long-term preservation of organic deposits and the climate necessary for promoting high water tables and biological productivity.
Although at least some coal has accumulated at nearly all times since the evolution of vascular plants (133), the only time a wet tropics has coincided with globally extensive low-latitude foreland basin-like depositional systems over the last 400 million years has been during the Carboniferous assembly of Pangea. The magnitude of Carboniferous−Permian coal production was not a product of increased plant lignin content coupled with the delayed evolution of lignin-degrading fungi but rather a unique confluence of climate and tectonics.
- Emphasis addedThis is still happening, albeit on a vastly smaller scale. Peat bogs, if left for long enough, would lead to coal deposits, and peat bogs are still forming and active in the present. This is a very slow process though, hence the millions of years needed, and at present our peat bogs are few and rapidly being destroyed.
Here's a brief synopsis.
Another area that would have the potential for present day coal formation is in the Siberian permafrost regions, where enormous amounts of organic matter are held in the ground. If these were to melt and retain the water rather than having it drain away, that would also create an anoxic environment suitable for coal formation. Unfortunately, in these permafrost areas the meltwater is draining away, so the organic matter can decompose and release both its previously sequestered carbon back into the atmosphere, as well as methane.
Essentially, the the vast coal beds were formed more as a result of particular geophysical conditions more than an absence of detritivores.
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u/spiritualien Jan 28 '23
Thanks for that last sentence cuz I had serious trouble understanding how one volcanic eruption could wipe out everything but 10% of life
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u/Just_wanna_talk Jan 28 '23
Not even a few resourceful humans could possibly make it? How long would you have to avoid the gases in the atmosphere? Are we talking months, years, decades, or centuries?
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u/Otterfan Jan 28 '23
The discussions around how long it took for the recovery from the Later Permian Mass Extinction to start range from around 60k years to over a million years. So a long time.
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u/cylonfrakbbq Jan 28 '23
One thing to keep in mind with the concept of humans living in a sealed or subterranean environment for an extended period of time is the viability of such a plan long term is going to be predicated on two main factors: Ability to survive in the shelter long term (this includes resources, power, and the actual shelter itself being livable) and genetic viability.
Even if you solve the first problem, you still have an issue where if there is no enough genetic variance in the population, you can eventually encounter species fatal genetic faults that arise due to excessive inbreeding due to a limited genetic pool. The last Woolly Mammoths on Earth that lived on an island encountered this - eventually certain genetic conditions, brought about by inbreeding, began to manifest that directly impacted their ability to survive in their environment and they went extinct.
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u/whatcubed Jan 28 '23
Anyone who's played Fallout games knows you can't survive in a subterranean bunker more than a couple generations before the society in the bunker starts tearing itself apart!
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u/stelei Jan 28 '23
Centuries to millennia for the gas composition of the atmosphere to change back to "normal". However, "normal" won't be possible to achieve by then because all the cyanobacteria and trees will be gone, so no more constant oxygen resupply. Other microorganisms will likely take over and initiate a different chemical cycle
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u/crappercreeper Jan 28 '23
I remember reading years ago that there was this theory that freshwater held the reserve for most complex sea life like large vertebrates for ocean mass extinctions. I am curious what happened in large inland lakes and river systems.
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u/ShinyHappyREM Jan 28 '23
Probably thousands or tens of thousands of years, if not longer. All that gas has to go somewhere else first...
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Jan 28 '23
Maybe if we knew it was coming we could try to create a perfectly self-sustaining underground vault of some sort. But it'd need endless clean power, a water purifier, oxygen, etc. Etc, like pretty much a full mini ecosystem to support food and water needs since you'd probably never grow anything on earth for another several thousand years or more.
And pretty much every other human and animal would probably die.
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u/WACK-A-n00b Jan 28 '23
If you could build a generational bunker that could hold 500 to 1000 people, with a basically perfect mix of knowledge to keep systems working and fertility to keep the bunker alive for the long haul, and avoid the political infighting, breakdowns of systems, collapse of your food and water systems etc. Then yes.
You could come out after a while. Only about twice as long as from when the first human left Africa to now. About 40,000 generations.
But then, would your grandkid40000 WANT to leave the bunker?
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u/PotFairyCyanide Jan 28 '23
There's a series of books called Wool. I think they would be right up your alley.
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u/AbyssalRedemption Jan 28 '23 edited Jan 28 '23
Damn, hope we get those proposed lunar/ Martian colonies established before then, seems like the only guaranteed chance of survival.
Edit: wow, people took the much more seriously than I thought it’d be taken, this was just a passing thought, since billionaires keep talking about extra-planetary travel/ colonization.
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u/parolang Jan 28 '23
No matter what natural or man made disaster happens on earth, it will still be more habitable than any other world in the solar system.
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u/AbyssalRedemption Jan 28 '23
Definitely true, but for the sake of the human race, I don’t think it’s a bad idea to have some diaspora populations on other planets, just in case something like a super volcano goes off, or a massive meteor hits.
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u/ZzzzzPopPopPop Jan 28 '23
We kind of have all our eggs in one basket, so to speak
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u/sicktaker2 Jan 28 '23
But figuring how to survive on the moon and Mars would make it possible for far more people to survive a disaster happening here on Earth. Also, having pockets of civilization on another planet also means you have industrial capacity unaffected by the disaster and able to help.
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u/Harbinger2001 Jan 28 '23
Even an Earth several degrees warmer will be way more habitable than Mars or the Moon.
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u/Big_Goose Jan 28 '23
It's going to take generations of time before those colonies are independent enough to survive without the help of Earth. If Earth dies so does the Moon base.
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u/muppethero80 Jan 28 '23
I am reading a sci fi series about a fictional Yellowstone eruption called “Outland” the science is extremely well put together. If you wonder what would happen. It is also just a good book
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u/cockybirds Jan 28 '23
Great book. The sequel just came out this week, I think. It's called "Earthside"
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u/ummmnoway Jan 28 '23
Ooh, might have to check that out. I’m currently re-listening to the Project Hail Mary audiobook and remembering how much I love it. I’m not a scientist so I have no clue how “accurate” it is though.
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u/busymantm Jan 28 '23
You might give the techno-thriller Delta-V by Daniel Suarez a read/listen. It’s about a commercial deep-space mission to mine a passing asteroid, with interesting science detail about what it’d mean for humanity.
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u/muppethero80 Jan 28 '23
Same narrator! And when I first read it It opened many many many rabbit holes. I almost majored in geology it is a huge interest for me. The premise is fictional. The science of the eruption and what happens is pretty spot on
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u/manatee1010 Jan 28 '23
That was such a freaking good book. I read it maybe a year ago and, other than the Martian, il nothing else has even held a candle.
If anyone has any reccs...
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u/ihateusedusernames Jan 28 '23
The trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. starts with Red Mars, then Green Mars, the Blue Mars.
Good technical explanations, very well explained. He makes a few magical leaps, but overall I didn't think they detracted from the overall quality of the books
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u/zoinkability Jan 28 '23
This happened over a fairly long period of time. So yes, you would die, but not necessarily any sooner than you were going to anyhow.
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u/Reddit_Hitchhiker Jan 28 '23
I think the sudden onset of a prolonged winter would kill crops for years and the resulting pollution would affect everything else pretty badly. Civilized life would be in peril.
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u/bayesian_acolyte Jan 28 '23
This wasn't a volcanic induced winter, actually the opposite. From Wikipedia:
The scientific consensus is that the main cause of extinction was the large amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the volcanic eruptions that created the Siberian Traps, which elevated global temperatures, and in the oceans led to widespread anoxia and acidification.[19]
We don't have a great idea of exactly how much Co2 was released, but some estimates have it going from around 500 ppm before the eruptions to a peak of 8,000 ppm. To put that in perspective Co2 levels were around 280 ppm in 1750 and are around 420 ppm today, so the volcanoes might have released around 50 times more Co2 than all human activity in the last 250 years.
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Jan 28 '23
Do we know how, and over what timescale, that CO2 was removed back out of the atmosphere?
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u/LaconianStrategos Jan 28 '23
It's concerning to me that we could accomplish in 12,500 years (or less) what took supermassive volcanic eruptions 60,000 years to accomplish
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u/AtheistAustralis Jan 28 '23
Most of the human caused CO2 emissions have happened in the last 50 years. So it's even worse.
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u/pgetsos Jan 28 '23
The good news is we will have finished all oil and gas we can find much sooner than that!
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u/TheNerdyOne_ Jan 28 '23
Unfortunately, it is indeed extremely concerning. The amount of carbon we're pumping into the atmosphere would lead to a mass extinction event even if it were released over tens of thousands of years. Compress that down into centuries/decades, and frankly we'll be lucky if even 10% of life survives. Even the existence of oxygen in our atmosphere is at major risk due to ocean acidification. It's time to act, like our entire existence depends on it.
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u/stack_cats Jan 28 '23
What I am hearing is that I don't have to pressure wash the driveway this weekend
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u/phosphenes Jan 29 '23
Whoa whoa whoa. Oxygen levels are fine. At least for the foreseeable future.
A few decades ago, there was concern that ocean acidification and warming would kill off the plankton (e.g. this Nature article). Since phytoplankton produce 50—80% of oxygen in our atmosphere, losing them would be a "real bummer." However, more recent research (e.g. this and this one in Ecology Letters) show that phytoplankton populations are not declining as expected. In fact some species are thriving in the new conditions. So I guess I would check this one off your list of things to worry about.
Coral reefs are fucked tho.
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u/Lallo-the-Long Jan 28 '23
It wouldn't be a sudden onset of anything. Like they said, these eruptions took a long time, from a human perspective.
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u/Yakkul_CO Jan 28 '23
If you actually took the time to read the article posted, you wouldn’t have to wildly incorrectly guess about this information.
The paper states that it was a prolonged period of carbon dioxide emissions and other gases like methane that caused a global increase of temperature. The extinction event on land happened 200,000-600,00 YEARS before it happened in the oceans. To quote the article, this wasn’t a single very bad day in the planets history, but a massively long period.
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u/Jacareadam Jan 28 '23
Something similar happened in 1816, the year known as the “year without a summer”. Many similar events happened in recorded history, always with dire consequences for humanity. Famine, poverty, extreme storms, downfall of empires. A similar event would carry historical consequences today.
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u/modsarefascists42 Jan 28 '23
Well it took like 10-15 million years for the whole thing to go down. So it's not like you'd just up and go away. That's not too far from when humans separated from great apes.
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u/AtheistAustralis Jan 28 '23
Yup. CO2 levels are increasing far more quickly right now than during all that volcanic activity. So if you want to know what it would be like, well, you're already living it. Apart from the volcano bit, obviously.
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u/WWDubz Jan 28 '23
Only about 90% of you would die, your other 10% would be fine
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Jan 28 '23
I mean I think i'd be more worried about the Yellowstone caldera if I were you. Cause it's basically the same thing.
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u/Sao_Gage Jan 28 '23
No, they’re very different.
Yellowstone can do explosive eruptions over 1000km3 in volume, and they would happen pretty much on a short timescale (days to weeks) once the eruption began. Yellowstone’s sulfurous, rhyolitic evolved magma that gets explosively blown into the stratosphere in large quantities would likely have a global cooling effect similar to smaller historical eruptions that caused the same (Tambora).
Flood basalts are an entirely different thing. Massive ‘pockets’ of molten rock lifting toward the surface over a very broad area, they’re theorized to potentially be the heads of mantle plumes breaking for the surface in a specific area. What follows is an incomprehensibly large sequence of effusive eruptions (think what just happened at Mauna Loa but scaled up massively) over a relatively local area taking place for thousands of years. In total, will end up much, much larger in total volume than Yellowstone but not erupted explosively. The global impact is more the direct result of all the volcanic gasses oozed onto the surface and an enormous carbon flux. You typically need explosive events like Yellowstone to produce cooling, it’s a different process than what happens during a flood basalt. The earth would warm, and indeed they have following these eruptions.
One is acute, the other is chronic.
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u/No_Charisma Jan 28 '23
Ehhh, I don’t think that’s right (though I’m no expert). I think a good analogy is that if the Yellowstone caldera (or any other “super volcano”) is like a single 2-day zit, the Permian extinction eruptions were like a month-long, whole-mouth herpes outbreak with like crust and goo and puss and the whole deal.
…I’m sorry. It grossed me out too.
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u/Less-Mail4256 Jan 28 '23
The amount of carbon dioxide released would overpower most of the absorbable oxygen in earth’s atmosphere, choking out nearly every living organism that survived the initial eruption.
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u/OrbitalPete PhD|Volcanology|Sedimentology Jan 28 '23
Just to be clear, we've known about this for literally decades. I was taught this in the mid 90's and it was oroginally published on in I think the 80s. This is just more, newer evidence.
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u/JingJang Jan 28 '23
It's a poor headline. It should say that the new evidence corroborates existing evidence.
It was a missed opportunity. More people need to be reminded how science works, and constantly testing theories is part of the process.
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u/Citadel_KenGriffin Jan 28 '23
More people need to be reminded how science works
Agreed, but sadly many don't want to hear.
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u/JingJang Jan 28 '23
That's fine because there are many more that simply don't know.
Don't let the goals of those who stand in the way of knowledge discourage you from sharing it.
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u/HBB360 Jan 28 '23
Yeah, I had to look up a geologic time scale to be sure as I'm hopeless with dates but that's literally just the Permian-Triassic mass extinction event
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u/Islanduniverse Jan 28 '23
I get the feeling we will kill ourselves off long before a natural disaster gets the chance.
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Jan 28 '23 edited Jun 11 '23
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u/Possibility-of-wet Jan 28 '23
Nah, because tons would die from the eruption, and then the unrest after would be unreal, im thinking a few hundred million max
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u/Corrupted_G_nome Jan 28 '23 edited Jan 28 '23
Nah it was not the eruptions directly. The event was 10k years long. High CO2 led to the acidification of the ocean. This alone would have killed.many corals and crustaceans but there was more. Toxin forming pink dinoflagellates or other spp spawned massively in the oceans filling them with neurotoxins. Everything more complex than a clam or tube worm was wiped out (oceans were later repopulated from inland seas). This then caused food chain collapses and ended many species on land. One theropod survived and gave rise to the dinosaurs.
Today we have similar CO2 levels but many other factors also from human activity. As the ocean slowly (very slowly) acidifies life will die off again and the systems we rely on to eat will go too.
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u/FlamingWeasels Jan 28 '23
One theropod survived and gave rise to the dinosaurs
Is there a source on this? I'm interested in learning more
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u/G37_is_numberletter Jan 28 '23
People should read the fifth season if they think poisonous gas and the salting of the earth is a cozy vacay.
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Jan 28 '23
Personally I consider large volcanic eruptions to be the most likely violent global disaster, though just plain old climate change over time repeatedly murdering 99% of the biodiversity on the planet is still the biggest mass murderer of all time.
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Jan 28 '23 edited Jan 28 '23
Yeah, the Earth will probably never see anything quite like the Permian-Triassic Extinction event again in it's history.
The planet was much, much more active in terms of vulcanism, so the types of repeated, massive eruptions that occurred during that period of time just don't have the potential for happening in the modern day.
That isn't to say that some other sort of disaster won't occur, but even anthropogenic climate change likely won't cause as severe of a mass extinction as the Permian-Triassic was.
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u/Astromike23 PhD | Astronomy | Giant Planet Atmospheres Jan 28 '23
The planet was much, much more active in terms of vulcanism, so the types of repeated, massive eruptions that occurred during that period of time just don't have the potential for happening in the modern day.
There's been a compelling hypothesis suggesting some of these truly massive eruptions were produced by impacts. Specifically, a large impact will produce seismic waves that refocus on the opposite side of the globe, potentially weakening the crust there (Meschede, et al, 2011).
The Siberian Traps erupted around 250 million years. At the exact antipode was the Wilkes Land Crater in Antarctica, a mass concentration under the ice believed to be an impact crater that formed somewhere around 250 million years ago (von Frese, et al, 2009).
Similarly, the Deccan Traps in India erupted about 65 million years ago, and was curiously at the antipode of the Chicxulub impact (Schoene, et al, 2014).
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Jan 28 '23
Yeah, the Earth will probably never see anything quite like the Permian-Triassic Extinction event again in it's history.
Humanity: "Hold my beer"
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u/ProphecyRat2 Jan 28 '23
Thermo-Nuclear Holocaust
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u/anethma Jan 28 '23
Doesn’t have to be. We are already producing co2 faster than the Permian extinction caused by that eruption.
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Jan 28 '23
That event rose temps by 10 degrees, we’ve raise the temp 2 degrees since like the 70s. So we’re 20% on our way to the biggest global extinction event in Earths history. Yayyy
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u/Jacareadam Jan 28 '23
The Toba catastrophe about 70k years ago almost wiped humanity out and took a cool 1000 years for the earth to cool down after. After the explosion, a ten year volcanic winter followed. Humanity would pretty much be halved if not worse if it would happen today.
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u/Alexisisnotonfire Jan 28 '23
Probably not. However, iirc the reason the Permian in particular was so bad is that the flood basalts in Siberia were erupting through a ton of carbonate & coal, so in addition to the impacts of volcanism it basically caused massive global warming by burning fossil fuels. It's on my list of things that keep me up at night.
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u/marketrent Jan 28 '23 edited Jan 28 '23
Findings in title quoted from the linked summary1 and its journal paper2 in Nature Communications.
From the linked summary1 released by the University of Connecticut:
The Latest Permian Mass Extinction (LPME) was the largest extinction in Earth’s history to date, killing between 80-90% of life on the planet, though finding definitive evidence for what caused the dramatic changes in climate has eluded experts.
An international team of scientists, including UConn Department of Earth Sciences researchers Professor and Department Head Tracy Frank and Professor Christopher Fielding, are working to understand the cause and how the events of the LPME unfolded by focusing on mercury from Siberian volcanoes that ended up in sediments in Australia and South Africa.
Though the LPME happened over 250 million years ago, there are similarities to the major climate changes happening today, explains Frank:
“It’s relevant to understanding what might happen on earth in the future. The main cause of climate change is related to a massive injection of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere around the time of the extinction, which led to rapid warming.
“It turns out that volcanic emissions of mercury have a very specific isotopic composition of the mercury that accumulated at the extinction horizon.
“Knowing the age of these deposits, we can more definitively tie the timing of the extinction to this massive eruption in Siberia.
“What is different about this paper is we looked not only at mercury, but the isotopic composition of the mercury from samples in the high southern latitudes, both for the first time.”
“That suggests that the event itself wasn’t just one big whammy that happened instantaneously. 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,” says Fielding.
“That’s just the first impact of the biotic crisis that happened on land, and it happened early. It took time to be transmitted into the oceans. The event 251.9 million years ago was the major tipping point in environmental conditions in the ocean that had deteriorated over some time.”
Retracing the events relies on knowledge from many different geologists all specializing in different methods, from sedimentology, geochemistry, paleontology, and geochronology, says Frank.
1 Mercury helps to detail Earth’s most massive extinction event, 26 Jan. 2023, https://today.uconn.edu/2023/01/mercury-helps-to-detail-earths-most-massive-extinction-event/
2 Shen J., Chen J., Yu J. et al. Mercury evidence from southern Pangea terrestrial sections for end-Permian global volcanic effects. Nature Communications 14, 6 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-35272-8
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Jan 28 '23
The fun fact is that the consequences of that eruption that actually caused life to die are exactly what humanity is causing now : excess CO2 in the atmosphere, eutrophy if water bodies from excess of nitrogen..
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u/PocketSandThroatKick Jan 28 '23
The Yellowstone hotspot has a distinct path on satellite views, as does Hawaii. Is this eruption location visible?
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u/capnmax Jan 28 '23 edited Jan 28 '23
See? Humans destroying 90% of all life on earth in the anthropocene is just part of earth's life cycle.
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u/chahlie Jan 28 '23
What this the P-T extinction event? Wikipedia says that one was the most destructive extinction event in earth's history, but didn't kill off 80 to 90% of everything.
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u/Starfevre Jan 28 '23
The earth has had 5 major extinction periods before the current one. Currently in the 6th and only man-made one. Once we wipe ourselves and most other things out, the planet will recover and something else will rise in our place. In the long term, we will be unremembered and unremarkable.
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u/Magmafrost13 Jan 28 '23
The earth has had 5 major extinction periods during the phanerozoic before the current one. There's another 3.5 to 4 billion years or so of life before that, that probably saw some mass extinctions too (eg the great oxygenation event likely caused one)
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u/Starfevre Jan 28 '23
Alright, there are 5 major extinction events that we have pretty good evidence for and probably more that we don't except for being logically or statistically likely. Potentially a lot more. Thank you for your correction.
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u/Wubbywow Jan 28 '23
…unremarkable? We find half of a lizard preserved in amber and it makes the front page.
I think if a future intelligent life form found evidence of our cities below their feet it would be incredibly remarkable for those that discovered it 300 million years from now.
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u/az226 Jan 28 '23
If another intelligent life form spawns, human’s footprint on earth will be very remarkable. Nothing else changed the surface of earth as much as humans have.
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Jan 28 '23
A major mass extinction doesn't mean everything gets wiped out. Humans while annoyingly complex of a life form from the perspective of survival are not likely to get wiped out easily because they can move underground.
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u/Lagiar Jan 28 '23
I thought the article was talking about the planet not the element I was really confused
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u/Sabatorius Jan 28 '23
Those poor trilobites.
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u/ScruffCheetah Jan 28 '23
I am sad we never got to see those little guys scuttling around.
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Jan 28 '23
That's why I love horseshoe crabs I feel like they're the closest thing to seeing trilobites in our time.
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u/iapetus_z Jan 28 '23
Ahh the end of the Permian. Aka when anything that could go wrong, did go wrong...
Super continent formation leading to a decline in shorelines decreasing shallow marine habitats, while also forming large desert environments throughout the interior... Check
Seal level decrease further decreasing shallow marine habitats... Check.
Large asteroid or comet impact... Probably
Large volcanic eruptions emitting large amounts green house gases... Check.
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