Understanding the worst mass extinction in history could provide insight into what lies ahead – and provide a warning if global action is not taken.
That’s why an international team of researchers looked back 252 million years, during the end of the Permian period, when a serious extinction event called “ The Great Dying, ” wiped out 19 of every 20 species on Earth, the California Academy of Sciences reported.
For the first time, in a study published Wednesday, researchers identified what made “The Great Dying” more serious than other extinctions. The scientists studied this period because of similarities in crises that happened then and are happening now – “ namely, extinction after the massive release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, ” they wrote, adding that this period was also related to global warming and acid rain. and acidification.
But unlike other mass extinctions throughout history, species in the late Permian period struggled to recover, possibly for 10 million years, the California Academy of Sciences reported. To find out why, the scientists created food webs sampled from Northern China spanning the Permian and Triassic periods, showing how a single region responded to ecosystem collapse.
“By studying the fossils and evidence of their teeth, stomach contents and feces, I was able to identify who ate who,” lead author and academy researcher Yuangeng Huang told the California Academy of Sciences. “Building an accurate food web is important if we are to understand these ancient ecosystems.”
By tracking food webs during this time, the scientists saw that when animals died, nothing replaced them, creating an “imbalanced ecosystem,” according to the California Academy of Sciences.
“We found that the end-Permian event was exceptional in two ways,” Professor Mike Benton of the University of Bristol told the California Academy of Sciences. “First, the diversity collapse was much more severe, while in the other two mass extinctions there were low stability ecosystems before the final collapse. And second, it took a long time for ecosystems to recover.”
The new study comes at the same time as two other groundbreaking studies that also draw comparisons between “The Great Dying” and the present day. In one of these studies, scientists developed a record of the ocean’s acidity, allowing them to track how “The Great Dying” took place, CBS reported.
The extinction did not all happen at once, but took place as a series of events, of volcanic activity, the release of carbon gases, global warming, acidifying oceans, fire and erosion, over a million years, says Professor Uwe Brand, a geoscientist from Brock. University in Canada, which was involved in the ocean records research, told CBS News.
“These are not individual and separate causes, but they all happened together, they played together, which is why I call it the perfect storm,” Brand told CBS News. “You got hit on this side by temperature, on this side by acidification and eventually the knockout punch came from deoxygenation.”
While the possibility of avoiding the same ecological collapse may seem elusive, there are discussions about how to respond, even at a global level.
“Human well-being lies in protecting the health of the planet,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said recently, according to UN News, after publishing a report. Making peace with nature, which calls for urgent action to combat environmental crises. “The rewards will be enormous. With a new awareness, we can invest in policies and activities that protect and restore nature.”
Yuangeng Huang and his team’s research on food webs also reveals which species have recovered from “The Great Dying,” providing insight into how modern species can do the same.
“This is an amazing new result,” Professor Zhong-Qiang Chen of China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, told the California Academy of Sciences. “The combination of great new data from long stretches of rock in Northern China with advanced calculation methods allows us to get inside these ancient examples in the same way we can study food webs in the modern world.”