Geological scientists in Nanjing are back in the international headlines, this time for assertions that the Earth’s mass extinctions were likely caused by volcanic activity, rather than asteroid collisions or other events proposed by media or popular culture.
252 million years ago, the End-Permian mass extinctions wiped out more than 80 percent of marine life. A bit more recently, research by scientists at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology has revealed the likely culprit to be a significant lack of oxygen in the atmosphere caused by widespread eruptions of volcanoes.
The peer-reviewed scientific journal with the snappy name, “Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology”, has published a paper on the finding in its April issue.
The scientists travelled to Changxing County, that falls under the administration of Huzhou City in Zhejiang Province, to research sedimentary and layered volcanic rocks that used to be part of the ocean. Joined by fellow researchers from the USA, the scientists can there study half a million years of marine geological history.
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Leader of the team and researcher at the Geology and Palaeontology institute, Zhang Hua, said, ”We think it is likely that geological events such as volcanic eruptions produced a large amount of reductive materials, which used up the oxygen in the seawater”
“Eventually, most marine life died”, Zhang said, reported Xinhua on 26 April.
The finding, if subsequently accepted by the scientific community, will be yet another vindication for the quality of work coming out of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology. In the last few years, their scientists made the landmark discovery of the world’s earliest flower fossil that pushed back the first appearance of flowering plants by 50 million years, a discovery that was joined by their finding of the only Tyrannosaurus Rex (T Rex) fossil footprint in all of Asia.
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For many years, scientists have speculated as to the cause of these End-Permian extinctions, as well as four others, known as the End-Ordovician, Late Devonian, End-Triassic and End-Cretaceous mass extinctions.
Mass extinctions, also known as Extinction Level Events (E.L.E.) have often been put down to the impact of asteroids, acidification of the oceans or the greenhouse effect.
There are also those who believe that we are presently living through a sixth mass extinction, one brought about by human activity.
