Posted on 01/23/2011 12:15:09 PM PST by decimon
Massive volcanic eruption, burning coal and accelerated greenhouse gas choked out life
About 250 million years about 95 per cent of life was wiped out in the sea and 70 per cent on land. Researchers at the University of Calgary believe they have discovered evidence to support massive volcanic eruptions burnt significant volumes of coal, producing ash clouds that had broad impact on global oceans.
"This could literally be the smoking gun that explains the latest Permian extinction," says Dr. Steve Grasby, adjunct professor in the University of Calgary's Department of Geoscience and research scientist at Natural Resources Canada.
Grasby and colleagues discovered layers of coal ash in rocks from the extinction boundary in Canada's High Arctic that give the first direct proof to support this and have published their findings in Nature Geoscience.
Unlike end of dinosaurs, 65 million years ago, where there is widespread belief that the impact of a meteorite was at least the partial cause, it is unclear what caused the late Permian extinction. Previous researchers have suggested massive volcanic eruptions through coal beds in Siberia would generate significant greenhouse gases causing run away global warming.
"Our research is the first to show direct evidence that massive volcanic eruptions – the largest the world has ever witnessed –caused massive coal combustion thus supporting models for significant generation of greenhouse gases at this time," says Grasby.
At the time of the extinction, the Earth contained one big land mass, a supercontinent known as Pangaea. The environment ranged from desert to lush forest. Four-limbed vertebrates were becoming more diverse and among them were primitive amphibians, early reptiles and synapsids: the group that would, one day, include mammals.
The location of volcanoes, known as the Siberian Traps, are now found in northern Russia, centred around the Siberian city Tura and also encompass Yakutsk, Noril'sk and Irkutsk. They cover an area just under two-million-square kilometers, a size greater than that of Europe. The ash plumes from the volcanoes traveled to regions now in Canada's arctic where coal-ash layers where found.
Grasby studied the formations with Dr. Benoit Beauchamp, a professor in the Department of Geoscience at the University of Calgary. They called upon Dr. Hamed Sanei adjunct professor at the University of Calgary and a researcher at NRCan to look at some of peculiar organic layers they had discovered.
"We saw layers with abundant organic matter and Hamed immediately determined that they were layers of coal-ash, exactly like that produced by modern coal burning power plants," says Beauchamp.
Sanei adds: "Our discovery provides the first direct confirmation for coal ash during this extinction as it may not have been recognized before."
The ash, the authors suggest, may have caused even more trouble for a planet that was already heating up with its oceans starting to suffocate because of decreasing oxygen levels.
"It was a really bad time on Earth. In addition to these volcanoes causing fires through coal, the ash it spewed was highly toxic and was released in the land and water, potentially contributing to the worst extinction event in earth history," says Grasby.
Credit: Credit: Steve Grasby, University of Calgary/NRCan
Usage Restrictions: With credit
Nunavut matters now ping.
The total thickness of the lava layer is one mile thick. Laid down over a period of one million years it was almost too much for life on Earth to survive.
Or that the Bible is true.
Using semantic forensics; Sodpoodle determined that the use of ‘smoking gun’ and references to coal-burning plants emitting ‘greenhouse gases’ is but a prelude to bringing on another doomsday global warming bogey-man.
Read the article very carefully and match the catch phrases.
Shot at 2011-01-23
BUMP that!
Ya, I'd say we are clearly being targeted by and caught in Waxman's nose hairs.
There is NOT one shred of evidence to date this 'find'. Reading between the lines does seem to point to the 5% of 'life' being that hidden 'origins' also described by some as a hot steaming pot of primordial soup.
I do not doubt their find but their dating is what questions their motives.
Bush’s inaction and delay in ordering FEMA to help out clearly exacerbated the problem.
An Adjunct Professor? Same grade as Obama. He knows which side his bread is buttered on. Maybe they’ll offer him a tenure slot now.
So there was a massive extinction event caused by coal 250million years ago - before the dino extinction 65 million years ago.
If coal comes from dinosaurs, where did the coal come from?
Enlightenment is a great help.
I would recommend a road trip to Alberta, specifically to the Royal Tyrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta, to see the largest collection of dinosaur fossils and a wealth of other fossils including those of the Burgess Shale.
The museum is large and a short visit will merely overwhelm with the overabundance of rock solid evidence. Scoffing will hurt your mind in the presence of such scientific wealth.
Chuck Norris ... entire tyrannasaurus mex dinner ... the rest is history.
West Virginia and Pennsylvania mostly.
On a train.....
The neat thing about this picture to me is that the layers visible in the mountains were once flat-lying sedimentary rocks. Our time here has been so close to nothing for all this to have happened.
I’ve drilled sedimentary rocks thousands of feet deep near Ellesmere Island. It is all still unbelievable to me. Whether drilling into the planet at 3,000 or 30,000 and seeing rock never before seen or touched is still a an exceptional event.
That the scale of the earth, as in this picture, is so vast and we are so small pales to the reality that all the Earth is less than a speck of dust, infinitely small even, in God’s heaven.
The dating of this overlaps some of the deepest layers in the Antarctic Ice Sheet overlying the Gamburtsev mountains.
The Gamburtsev's are 2.5 miles deep, are older than the Alps, yet show no signs of wear. They date back to the Carbonoferous Age ~ which is WAY back there.
So, too much CO2 led to what? Did Earth get warm and everything died? We might ask why that ice didn't melt.
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