Biodiversity at the Triassic beginning

An article on biodiversity after the Permian collapse (summarized at SciTechDaily if you don't have an institutional subscription) describes the possible reasons for a very slow recovery from whatever it was that ended the Permian era so dramatically. Volcanic eruptions through coal beds or massive sulfur releases that turned the oceans anoxic are just a few of the options. There was a largish decrease (4%) in C^13 at the extinction time (the attribute this to dumping ancient carbon into the air), but much larger (10%) and suspiciously linear swings later were associated with increase in biodiversity. The Siberian Traps eruptions starting kicking in about the time of the Permian extinction and kept going for 6 million years.

There's some evidence for serious anoxia in the deep seas that started well before and got worse well past the extinction boundary--with the same sort of thing playing out on a smaller scale in the shallow seas.

Maybe. Figure 1 shows that the record is pretty spotty about that time.

And before I start believing that it took 10 million years to recover biodiversity, may I respectfully request some error bars on the numbers? Numbers for numbers of species, numbers for estimated vulcanism, anoxia rates, etc are all presented as 100% gospel with no effort at error estimates.

But if you can, by all means look at that Figure 1. Even allowing for a great deal of uncertainty, there's a lot of strange and dramatic history laid out there.

Update: You can't--the image at Nature is too small. This is easier to view: but I'm not going to include the captions--I don't think they'll stretch fair use that far.