Geologists found in Russia “responsible for” the largest extinction in Earth’s history
MOSCOW, 31 Jul — RIA Novosti. American geologists have found the river Tunguska deposits of volcanic rocks, whose landfall launched the Great Permian extinction of animals, which destroyed almost all living beings 252 million years ago, according to a paper published in the journal Nature Communications.
“The heat that stood out during these lavas on land, has led to the fact that neighboring sedimentary rocks dumped huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The volume of these gases was enough to cause mass extinction. This event has become a key point in the history of the evolution of life on Earth,” says James Muirhead (James Muirhead) from the University of Syracuse (USA).
Fiery abyss
Scholars in the history of life on Earth, five major mass extinctions of species. The most significant is considered to be “great” Permian extinction, when they disappeared more than 95% of all living creatures inhabiting the planet, including fancy zoroastro, close relatives of the ancestors of mammals, and a number of marine animals.
There is evidence that at this time in the atmosphere and oceans were emitted large quantities of carbon dioxide and methane, which dramatically changed the climate and made the Earth very hot and dry.
As show researches of the Russian geologists, these emissions reached the planet’s surface in Eastern Siberia, in the vicinity of the Putoran plateau and Norilsk, where approximately 252 million years ago, there was a strong outpouring of magma.
It tells Muirhead, most scientists today are confident that the effusion of lava has been implicated in the extinction of animals, however, the specific mechanism of their action on climate and Earth’s ecosystems remained a mystery. The reason for this was simple — geologists simply do not have accurate data on the age of these rocks and didn’t know if this effusion before the mass extinction, with him or after him.