In order to better understand how climate change will unfold over the coming decades, some scientists are looking to the remote past and specific climatic catastrophes to help shed light the so-called Anthropocene and its consequences for life on Earth. Recently, researchers at the University of Utah looked into the so-called Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum for clues. Now, a study by the University of Edinburgh highlights evidence that the rapid acidification of oceans 252 million years ago caused the greatest extinction of all time.
Known as the Permian-Triassic Boundary extinction, more than 90 percent of marine life and two thirds of land animals were wiped out as the Earth’s oceans absorbed huge amounts of carbon dioxide from volcanic eruptions known as Siberian Traps.
The Edinburgh study provides some evidence of the missing connection between acidification and mass extinction through analysis of high-resolution seawater pH records across the period when massive amounts of carbon were being pumped into the atmosphere. The researchers used boron isotope data combined with a quantitative modeling approach.
The team analyzed rocks collected in the United Arab Emirates region in the Middle East, which would have been on the ocean floor at the time. The rocks preserve a detailed record of changing oceanic conditions of the period and enabled researchers to develop a climate model to work out what drove the extinction.
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