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The author seems to pinpoint the cause of the great Permian-Triassic extinction to the acquired ability of microorganisms to process lignin, while most of the r
by blacklight 5y ago
The author seems to pinpoint the cause of the great Permian-Triassic extinction to the acquired ability of microorganisms to process lignin, while most of the researchers attribute it to the extensive Siberian Traps eruptions.
Granted, decaying lignin subtracts oxygen from the atmosphere, but had that happened alone the levels of oxygen would have gone down quite slowly. What we see instead is a drop from ~30% to 12% within a few hundreds of thousands of years. It means that a catastrophic event (such as prolonged supervolcanic eruptions) probably played a bigger role.
- kashkhan 5y agoEven if you converted all the atmospheric CO2 to O2, oxygen levels will not increase by more than 1%. So where did the rest come from and go to?
- rsj_hn 5y agoIt came from CO2 and other carbon gasses. IIRC, according to current theory, there were 3 major climates in the earth. In the first climate, the atmosphere was volcanic gasses, many of which were blown off into space, leaving the second climate of carbon gases as a residue, and then this was absorbed into rocks as well as consumed by CO2 breathing lifeforms. https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/earth-s-earliest-climate-24206248/ https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/earth-s-ea...