by About 252 million years ago, life on Earth suffered its most catastrophic blow: a mass outstanding event that is known as “great dying”, which excluded around 90% of life.
What followed has confused long confused scientists. The planet got fatally hot and remained for 5 million years.
A team of international researchers says that they have now found out why the use of a huge fossil fusion – and all about tropical forests.
Their knowledge, which was published in the Nature Communications magazine on Wednesday, can help solve a mystery, but they also formulate a bad warning for the future, since people continue to heat the planet by burning fossil fuels.
The great dying was the worst of the five mass outdoor events that interrupted the history of the earth, and marked the end of the Permian geological period.
It was attributed to a period of volcanic activity in a region called Siberian traps, in which large amounts of carbon and other planetary heating gases were released into the atmosphere and caused intensive global warming. The enormous number of marine and land plants and animals died, ecosystems collapsed and the oceans acidified.
What was less clear, however, is why it got so hot and why “Super Greenhouse” stimulates exist for so long, even after the volcanic activity has been set.
“The extent of the warming is far beyond any other event,” said Zhen XU, study author and Research Fellow at the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds.
Some theories revolve around the ocean and the idea that extreme warmth carbon -absorbing plankton erased or the chemical composition of the ocean changed to make it less effective to store carbon.
However, scientists from the University of Leeds in England and China University of Geoscientific thought that the answer could be at a climate tilting point: the collapse of the tropical forests.
The great outdoor event is unique “because it is the only one in which the plants all die,” said Benjamin Mills, study author and professor of Earth System Evolution at the University of Leeds.
To test the theory, they used an archive with fossil data in China, which was compiled by three generations of Chinese geologists for decades.
A complicated wide leaf seed fern from a pre-finish in South China Regenwald. – Dr. Zhen XU
A post-extrincorative plant called Lycopod Sporophylll. – Dr. Zhen XU
Another lycopod after the expression. – Dr. Zhen XU
They analyzed the fossils and rock formations in order to obtain indications of the climate conditions in the past so that they could reconstruct cards from plants and trees that live before, during and after extinction on every part of the planet. “Nobody has ever made such cards,” Mills told CNN.
The results confirmed their hypothesis and showed that the loss of vegetation during the mass extermination event was significantly reduced by the planet’s ability to store carbon, which means that very high values remained in the atmosphere.
Forests are an important climate buffer if you suck and store on the carbon with planetary heating. They also play a crucial role in “Silicat Witterer”, a chemical process with stones and rainwater – an important way to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Tree and plant roots help this process by breaking rock and having fresh water and air reaching.
As soon as the forests die, “change the carbon cycle”, said Mills and in the way the carbon moved around the earth, between atmosphere, country, oceans and living organisms.
Michael Benton, Professor of Paleontology at the University of Bristol, who was not involved in the study, said that research shows: “The lack of forests really influences the regular oxygen-carbon cycles and suppresses carbon burial and so high CO2 values over extended periods in the atmosphere,” he told CNN.
It shows “a threshold effect”, he added, where the loss of forests on ecological time scales becomes “irreversible”. Global politics is currently about the idea that if carbon dioxide levels can be controlled, damage can be reversed. “But it will be difficult to recover on the threshold,” said Benton.
This is an important snack from the study, said Mills. It shows what could happen if a quick global warming will collapse the rainforests of the planet in the future – a turning point that scientists are very concerned about.
Even if people stop pumping the planet heating pollution overall, the earth cannot cool down. In fact, the warming could accelerate, he said.
There is a piece of hope: the rainforests that currently run the tropics with carpets are possibly more resistant to high temperatures than those that existed before the big dying. This is the question that the scientists tackle next.
This study is still a warning, said Mills. “There is a turning point there. If you warm too much tropical forests, we have a very good recording about what happens. And it’s extremely bad.”
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