Life in the Sea Found Its Fate in a Paroxysm of Extinction

[Atheist-Lite]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/scien ... dying.html

Life in the Sea Found Its Fate in a Paroxysm of Extinction

It may never be as well known as the Cretaceous extinction, the one that killed off the dinosaurs. Yet the much earlier Permian extinction — 252 million years ago — was by far the most catastrophic of the planet’s five known paroxysms of species loss.

No wonder it is called the Great Dying: Scientists calculate that about 95 percent of marine species, and an uncountable but probably comparable percentage of land species, went extinct in a geological heartbeat.

The cause or causes of the Permian extinction remain a mystery. Among the hypotheses are a devastating asteroid strike, as in the Cretaceous extinction; a catastrophic volcanic eruption; and a welling-up of oxygen-depleted water from the depths of the oceans.

Now, painstaking analyses of fossils from the period point to a different way to think about the problem. And at the same time, they are providing startling new clues to the behavior of modern marine life and its future.

(continued, game over man, game over)

[mistermack]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/scien ... dying.html

Life in the Sea Found Its Fate in a Paroxysm of Extinction

It may never be as well known as the Cretaceous extinction, the one that killed off the dinosaurs. Yet the much earlier Permian extinction — 252 million years ago — was by far the most catastrophic of the planet’s five known paroxysms of species loss.

No wonder it is called the Great Dying: Scientists calculate that about 95 percent of marine species, and an uncountable but probably comparable percentage of land species, went extinct in a geological heartbeat.

The cause or causes of the Permian extinction remain a mystery. Among the hypotheses are a devastating asteroid strike, as in the Cretaceous extinction; a catastrophic volcanic eruption; and a welling-up of oxygen-depleted water from the depths of the oceans.

Now, painstaking analyses of fossils from the period point to a different way to think about the problem. And at the same time, they are providing startling new clues to the behavior of modern marine life and its future.

(continued, game over man, game over)

What they don't stress much though, is that the proposed raised CO2 levels took 200,000 years to cause a massive extinction.
As I'm not likely to be alive in 200,000 years time, I don't give a toss.

[Blind groper]

I see little new here. The Siberian volcanoes have been considered the likely cause for at least the last 2 decades.

[macdoc]

It's not the carbon injection alone - we are adding it at a rate faster than then .....it's the positive feedbacks we are waving a match around....mainly methane in the taiga tundra and clathrates.....

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/0 ... ermafrost/

It was 20,000 years not 200,000 and we are releasing at the 10 x the rate without taking into account positive feedbacks like methane.

Already we can kiss the world maps we know goodbye within 2,000 years....even if we stopped cold which we won't

Overall, they conclude, “an orbital-permafrost soil carbon mechanism provides a unifying model accounting for the salient features of the hyperthermals that other previously proposed mechanisms fail to explain.” Further, if the analysis is correct and past extreme warm events can be attributed to permafrost loss, it implies that thawing of permafrost in similar environments observed today “will provide a substantial positive feedback to future warming.”

and is..

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I sometimes think the Black Smokers are the only reason we have life on this planet now.

[mistermack]

It was 20,000 years not 200,000 and we are releasing at the 10 x the rate without taking into account positive feedbacks like methane.

Already we can kiss the world maps we know goodbye within 2,000 years....even if we stopped cold which we won't

Maybe it was 20,000 years, but I was quoting the article linked in the OP :

That led to a wholesale change in the ocean’s dominant animals within just 200,000 years, or perhaps much less, Dr. Clapham said.

I would be inclined to trust Dr. Clapham, at least as far as the past is concerned.
The future is a bit more difficult, but he should know his own subject well enough to be a reliable source for what he studied.