if you keep flipping through the pages of the latest Nature Geoscience, you’ll find another paper, led by Sean Newby, that shows how sudden atmospheric changes can trigger mass extinctions.

As a reminder, humans are currently causing sudden atmospheric changes.

Back 252 million years ago, 96 percent of marine species and 70 percent of terrestrial life suddenly went extinct. It appears this extinction event was tied to a 10,000 year period of massive oxygenation that was followed by a steady decline below optimal oxygen levels. According to Newby: For the geological record, that’s practically instantaneous. And then you can of course compare that to modern, human-induced climate change, where we’re having huge, rapid changes in fractions of the time compared to this mass extinction.

The spike in oxygen is thought to maybe be related to a long volcanic eruption that led to atmospheric warming, a massive spike in marine oxygenation, and then a terrible die-off as oxygen levels crashed. We are currently seeing this loss of oxygen in our oceans, and I am reminded of the Sondheim quote: It’s nice to know a lot but a little bit not.

More Information

Florida State University press release

“Transient ocean oxygenation at end-Permian mass extinction onset shown by thallium isotopes,” Sean M. Newby et al., 2021 August 2, Nature Geoscience