Acidifying oceans helped fuel mass extinction
Great die-off 250 million years ago could trace in part to waters' change in pH
The question of what killed most life on Earth 250 million years ago is a veritable Murder on the Orient Express, with multiple characters all dealing part of the deathblow. Now, scientists have learned how one of the assassins — acid — could have performed its part of the deed.
High levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide would have turned the oceans more than acidic enough to kill off marine critters, a computer simulation indicates.
“This would have been another stressor in the system that might have pushed things toward extinction,” says Alvaro Montenegro, a climate modeler at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. He and his colleagues describe the finding in a paper published online August 2 in Paleoceanography.
At the end of the Permian period of geologic time, more than 90 percent of marine species and three-quarters of terrestrial species vanished. Leading suspects in the die-off include oxygen-starved oceans, a belch of hydrogen sulfide from the deep, a shutdown of great marine nutrient cycles, and massive volcanic eruptions.