Wednesday, May 30, 2012

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.

2 comments:

Texan99 said...

I haven't read this article, but I have read a couple of books in the last few years about the Permian Extinction, and they made persuasive cases for a very, very slow recovery of biodiversity. That was one heck of an extinction event.

james said...

Yep. That pink column on the left labeled "Vol" is vulcanism. It just kept going and going and going.

I wonder if there was a rise in shell-less creatures. If the ocean was slightly acid from sulfur oxides I'd think it would take more energy to make carbonate shells.