Understanding the worst mass extinction event in history can provide insight into what lies ahead – and provide a warning if no action is taken.
Therefore, an international team of researchers looked back 252 million years during the Permian period, when a severe extinction event, which occurred as ‘The Great Dying’, wiped out 19 out of every 20 species on earth, the California Academy of Sciences. report.
For the first time, in a study published Wednesday, researchers have identified what makes ‘The Great Dying’ worse than other extinction periods. The scientists studied this period because of the similarities with crises that took place then and are taking place – ‘namely extinction after the massive release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere’, they wrote, adding that this period is also confronted with global warming, acid rain. and acidification.
But unlike other mass extinctions throughout history, species struggled to recover by the end of the Permian period, possibly for ten million years, reports the California Academy of Sciences. To find out why, the scientists recreated food webs, tested from northern China, spanning the Permian and Triassic periods, which showed how a single region responds to the collapse of the ecosystem.
“By studying the fossils and evidence from their teeth, stomach contents, and excrement, I was able to determine who ate who,” Yuangeng Huang, lead author and researcher at the California Academy of Sciences. “It is important to set up an accurate food web if we want to understand these old ecosystems.”
By locating the food webs during this period, scientists have seen that when animals die, nothing replaces them, creating a ‘unbalanced ecosystem’ according to the California Academy of Sciences.
“We found the event at the end of the Permian to be extraordinary in two ways,” Professor Mike Benton of the University of Bristol told the California Academy of Sciences. “Firstly, the collapse in diversity was much worse, while in the other two mass extinctions there were low-stability ecosystems before the final collapse. And secondly, ecosystems took a very long time to recover.”
The new study comes at the same time as two other groundbreaking studies that also draw comparisons between ‘The Great Dying’ and the current day. In one of these studies, scientists developed a record of the acidity of the ocean, which enabled them to track how ‘The Great Dying’ took place, reports CBS.
The extinction did not occur simultaneously, but took place as a series of events, from volcanic activity, the release of carbon gases, global warming, acidifying oceans, fire and erosion, spanning a million years, Professor Uwe Brand, a geoscientist from Brock University of Canada, which was involved in the ocean record study, told CBS News.
“These are not individual and separate causes, but they all performed together, they performed in concert, and that’s why I call it the perfect storm,” Brand told CBS News. “You hit on this side with temperature, on this side with acidification and finally comes the knockout blow of detoxification.”
While the possibility of avoiding this same ecological collapse may seem elusive, there are discussions about how to respond, even at a global level.
“Human well-being lies in protecting the health of the planet,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres was quoted as saying by UN News recently after the release of a report. Make peace with nature, which acts urgently to combat environmental crises. “The rewards will be great. With a new consciousness, we can invest in policies and activities that protect and restore nature.”
Yuangeng Huang and his team’s research on food webs also shows which species have been recovered from ‘The Great Dying’, which provides insight into how modern species can do the same.
“This is an incredible new result,” Professor Zhong-Qiang Chen of China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, told the California Academy of Sciences. “The combination of amazing new data from long rock sections in northern China with the latest calculation methods enables us to enter these ancient examples in the same way that we can study food webs in the modern world.”