Volcanoes killed with global warming, 200 million years ago
Volcanoes killed with global warming, 200 million years ago
Mar 23, 2010 09:23 AM in Basic Science
By David Biello
When Pangaea finally broke up, some 200 million years ago, the result was a lot of heat. Specifically, volcanism, as enormous flows of basalt burst to the surface, ultimately covering more than nine million square kilometers. It wasn't just the death of a supercontinent; it was also one of Earth's five major extinction events-and the one that paved the way for the dinosaurs.
Now scientists have linked this great volcanism to catastrophic climate change via an analysis of carbon isotopes in wood and soil preserved in rocks. In short, geologist Jessica Whiteside of Brown University and her colleagues show in a paper published March 22 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the extinction event at the end of the Triassic occurred at the same time as carbon dioxide levels jumped and shell-forming animals in the ocean suddenly had a much harder time forming their homes thanks to an eruption that lasted for more than 500,000 years.
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