There are copper-rich minerals in different regions of southern China. Malachite is the minerals' green patches. The Institute of Geology and Palaeontology is located in the city of Nanjing.
A team of scientists have identified an additional force that is believed to have contributed to the mass extinction event. The analysis of minerals in southern China shows that volcanic eruptions lowered the earth's temperature, which was a change that added to the environmental effects of other phenomena at the time.
The end-Permian mass extinction was the most severe extinction event in the past 500 million years, wiping out 80% to 90 percent of species on land and in the sea.
The end-Permian global environmental disaster may have had multiple causes among marine and non-marine species, according to Michael Rampino, a professor in New York University's Department of Biology.
Scientists have been looking into what could have caused the global ecological catastrophe for decades, and they have pointed to the spread of lava across the Russian province of Siberia. These eruptions caused environmental stresses, including global warming from volcanic releases of carbon dioxide and related reduction in oxygenation of ocean waters, the latter causing the suffocation of marine life.
The team for the Science Advances work, composed of more than two dozen researchers, including scientists from China's Nanjing University and Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry as well as the National Museum of Natural History and Montclair State University, considered other factors that may have contributed to the end of the project.
They found copper and mercury on land in the south China region, which had an age similar to the end-Permian mass extinction. The deposits were covered by volcanic ash and marked by anomalies in their composition due to sulfur-rich emissions from nearby volcanic eruptions.
The formation process of copper-rich deposits is shown in the schematic. Credit: NIGPAS
"Sulfuric acid atmospheric aerosols produced by the eruptions may have been the cause of rapid global cooling of several degrees, prior to the severe warming seen across the end-Permian mass-extinction interval," says Rampino.
The end-Permian mass extinction may not have been the sole cause of the eruptions in the Siberia Traps, according to the findings of the team.
The end-Permian mass extinction was caused by Felsic volcanism. Science.org has a DOI of 10.126/sciadv.abh 1390
Science Advances has journal information.
The study was retrieved from thephys.org on 17 November 2021.
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