Permian Mass Extinction Happened in Geologic Blink of an Eye

The mass extinction event that wiped out the majority of life on Earth at the end of the Permian Era some 252 million years ago happened in the blink of an eye, geologically speaking.

New research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reports that the end-Permian extinction, considered the largest mass extinction in the history of animal life, occurred over 60,000 years.

While the study's margin of error is 48,000 years, it still represents the extinction event occurring over a timescale that researchers say is practically instantaneous from a geological perspective.

Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the research team, led by MIT graduate student Seth Burgess and Sam Browning, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at MIT, reports that more precise dating techniques enabled them to refine the estimates surrounding the mass extinction timeline. The new time line suggests that the end-Permian extinction may have happened 10 times faster than scientists had previously thought.

"It is clear that whatever triggered extinction must have acted very quickly, fast enough to destabilize the biosphere before the majority of plant and animal life had time to adapt in an effort to survive," Burgess said.

One theory Burgess and his colleagues have is that the majority of sea life was killed off by a massive addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, an event that led to widespread ocean acidification and a sea temperature increase of 10 degrees Celsius or more.

"How do you kill 96 percent of everything that lived in the oceans in tens of thousands of years?" Browning asked. "It could be that an exceptional extinction requires an exceptional explanation."

The researchers said that the new timeline adds credence to the theory that the mass extinction was triggered by massive volcanic eruptions from the Siberian Traps, a region of Russia presumably formed by a series of repeated magma eruptions.

For now, the researchers' standing theory is that one hugely catastrophic burst of magmatic activity "triggered an almost instantaneous collapse of all global ecosystems."

The next steps in the research will involve charting a similar timeline for the Siberian Traps eruption cycle and compare that with the new extinction timeline to see when the two events overlap.

"We've refined our approach, and now we have higher accuracy and precision," Bowring said. "You can think of it as slowly spiraling in toward the truth."