Throughout the history of the planet, there have been a number of mass
extinction events. The largest was the “Great Dying,” which occurred at
the border of the Permian and Triassic periods—during this event, over
half of the species on Earth at the time went extinct. Thanks to a recent find
in southwestern China, researchers have been able to nearly pinpoint
the events that appear to have precipitated the Great Dying.
Major volcanic activity is often a leading candidate for causing mass extinctions, but pinpointing a specific eruption or
sequence of eruptions that caused a mass die-off of marine life is difficult.
Typically, indirect geochronological methods must be employed, and they have known timing inaccuracies that complicate the analysis. In the case of the Great Dying, it appears that there may have been several pulses of extinctions.
Click here to read the rest of this article
Originally Syndicated via RSS from Ars Technica
