Permian-Triassic climate lesson: Don’t even try to adapt to a mass extinction, mitigate – a single plague can kill a planet!

The second part of the new IPCC report, about the impacts of climate change, has been released on Monday. Across the globe dutiful journalists filled the headlines of their newspapers – and as they presume most of their readers are … Continue reading

Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum caused by thawing permafrost?

In a new study reported in Nature, climate scientist Rob DeConto of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and colleagues elsewhere propose a simple new mechanism to explain the source of carbon that fed a series of extreme warming events about 55 million years ago, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), and a sequence of similar, smaller warming events afterward.

Continue reading

Mercury: a new culprit in end-Permian mass extinction event

Volcanic eruptions have already been appointed as the main culprit of the Permian-Triassic mass extinction. Previous research indicated that the resulting rise in atmospheric and oceanic carbon lead to the Great dying. But new findings in the journal Geology point to a … Continue reading

Reefs took 1.5 million years to reappear after Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction

The Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction was the largest in our planet’s history. Enormous disruptions of the carbon cycle led to climate change, ocean acidification and ocean anoxia – and with an estimated 90 percent of all species dying out Earth almost … Continue reading

Permian-Triassic mass extinction: 11,000 Gt CO2 worth of climate change led to microbial plagues that killed the world’s forests

New research shows an example of a missing link between climatic disruptions and biodiversity decline: killer microbes.