Understanding the worst mass extinction event in history could provide information on what’s left ahead and offer a warning if global action is not taken.
That’s why an international team of researchers looked back 252 million years, at the end of the Permian period, when a serious extinction event, coined as “The Great Dying,” wiped out 19 out of 20 species of the Earth, the California Academy of Sciences. reported.
For the first time, in a study published Wednesday, researchers identified what made “The Great Dying” more severe than other periods of extinction. Scientists studied this period because of the similarities of crises that occurred then and are occurring now – “that is, the extinction after the mass release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, ”they wrote, adding that this period also faced global warming, acid rain, and acidification.
But unlike other mass extinctions throughout history, species at the end of the Permian struggled to recover, possibly for 10 million years, the California Academy of Sciences reported. To find out why, scientists recreated food webs, proven from northern China, spanning the Permian and Triassic periods, showing how a single region responded to the collapse of the ecosystem.
“By studying the fossils and evidence of their teeth, stomach contents, and feces, I was able to identify who was eating whom,” Yuangeng Academy lead author and researcher told the California Academy of Sciences. Huang. “It’s important to build an accurate food web if we want to understand these ancient ecosystems.”
Following food webs during this period, scientists saw that when the animals died, nothing replaced them and an “unbalanced ecosystem” was created, according to the California Academy of Sciences.
“We found the Permian final event to be exceptional in two ways,” Professor Mike Benton of the University of Bristol told the California Academy of Sciences. “First, the collapse of diversity was much more severe, while in the other two mass extinctions there had been low-stability ecosystems before the final collapse. And second, the ecosystems took a long time. to recover “.
The new study comes at the same time as two other innovative studies that also make comparisons between “The Great Dying” and the current day. In one of those studies, scientists developed a record of ocean acidity, which allowed them to track how “The Great Dying Man” occurred, CBS reported.
The extinction did not occur at the same time, but occurred as a series of events, from volcanic activity, the release of carbon dioxide, global warming, acidifying oceans, fire and erosion, which spanned a million years, Professor Uwe Brand, a geoscientist at Brock University in Canada, who participated in the study of ocean records, told CBS News.
“They’re not individual and separate causes, but they acted together, they acted in concert, and that’s why I call it the perfect storm,” Brand told CBS News. “It hit you on this side with the temperature, on this side with the acidification, and finally the punch removed comes from the deoxygenation.”
While the possibility of avoiding this same ecological collapse may seem elusive, there are conversations about how to respond, even globally.
“Human well-being lies in protecting the health of the planet,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said recently, according to UN News, after publishing a report: Make peace with nature, which calls for urgent action to combat environmental crises. “The rewards will be immense. With a new awareness, we can direct investment in policies and activities that protect and restore nature.”
Yuangeng Huang and his team’s research on food webs also show which species recovered from “The Great Dying,” providing information on how modern species can do the same.
“This is an amazing new result,” Wuhan told the California Academy of Sciences, Professor Zhong-Qiang Chen of the Chinese University of Geosciences. “The combination of new big data from long sections of rock in northern China with cutting-edge computational methods allows us to introduce these ancient examples in the same way that we can study food webs in the modern world.”