Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Massive volcanic eruptions + coal fires = the Great Dying

The late Permian extinction, which kicked off roughly 250 million years ago, has a rather gruesome nickname: the Great Dying. Over 90 percent of the species in the oceans went extinct in the geological blink of an eye, and similar devastation took place on land. It's about as close as we've come to having multicellular life wiped out. The timing of the event coincides with a volcanic outburst that covered an area the size of Western Europe in volcanic rock. That might be enough to trigger a major catastrophe on its own, but new research indicates that the hot magma ignited coal deposits, sending toxic coal ash into the oceans.

The remains of these eruptions, called the Siberian Traps, now cover about 2 million square kilometers of Russia. The rock formation is what's called a flood basalt, thought to be caused by a plume of hot mantle breaking through to the surface. The Siberian Traps may be the largest event of this sort we know about, and the dimensions are staggering: over 1,000 Gt (Gigatonnes) of magma were released during the eruptions that created them, and they are thought to have put material into a plume that rose over 40 kilometers into the atmosphere.

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Larissa Meek Gina Carano Sanaa Lathan Ana Beatriz Barros Maria Menounos

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