Extinction event

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View from a Rhino House: scary (& very, very small) monsters

About 250 million years ago, over 90% of all species on Earth went “bye-byes”.

The prevailing theory is that the mass extinction at the end of the Permian period was triggered by continuous volcanic eruptions over most of what is now Siberia. This led to a dramatic rise in greenhouse gas emissions & smashed both the climate & the atmosphere.

But this gory theory may not quite fit the facts, a team at MIT now says that environmental carbon levels surged much too quickly for geological processes to be responsible.

It seems however, that microbes can generate carbon compounds that fast & when the MIT team analysed the genome of Methanosarcina – which is responsible for most of Earth’s biogenic methane today – they discovered that the microbe gained this ability about 230 million years ago. The date was close to that of the mass extinction, but no coconut.

Methanosarcina needs large amounts of nickel to produce methane quickly & when the scientists went back to their samples, they discovered that nickel levels spiked around 250 million years ago – probably because the Siberian lavas were rich in the metal. So maybe Methanosarcina did trigger the extinction, the team announced to the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco last week.

Shame about the 20 million years, but……..

OK copper, you got me, I confess. That Permian extinction, that was me, & I did JFK, & Hoffa…… hahahahaha!