Anton Petrov
Уровень B2· 605 слов
Hello wonderful person. This is Anton and today we're going to be discussing the history of planet Earth, but specifically the moment or the moments when life on the planet potentially almost ended. In other words, we're going to be discussing extinction events. And normally when we think about
mass extinctions, we usually think of massive asteroids hitting the planet [clears throat] kind of like what happened to dinosaurs. The geological record of the planet tells us that the story of extinctions is way more complex and sometimes involves events that we still don't understand and events that
could be actually quite terrifying. But today, we're going to focus on one of the most well-known and one of the most powerful extinction events, the one that's referred to as the big dying event that happened approximately 250 million years ago, and whose origin and whose cause is still not actually that
well understood. But this recent study by Danielle Farjion from Rome University proposes something intriguing. What if this was a result of gravitational tides from some kind of a dwarf planet passing close to planet Earth? But to understand the evidence behind this and to understand why studying this is
important, let's first discuss what we know about this event and what potentially happened during this time.
And so let's discuss the perian triacic extinction event. And so at the end of perian period, earth seems to have gone through something really extreme and something that dramatically changed who lived on the planet afterwards. And this event from 252 million years ago is very often referred to as the great dying
because it managed to wipe out approximately 90 to 95% of all species in the oceans and at least 70% of animals living on land. As a matter of fact, it was so intense that even insects, which are usually very resilient, seem to have suffered their largest mass extinction to date. And based on decades and decades of
research, there's always been this one potential explanation. The explanation that's kind of visible in this image.
This sterile formation is technically known as a trap. And while this particular geological formation is enormous, these are known as the Siberian traps. and they seem to stretch across a huge part of Russia. With all of this being produced by a massive volcanic eruption over a huge region of
about 7 million square kilm, making this one of the largest known volcanic events in the last 500 million years. And we know that this happened around 251.9 million years ago and very likely lasted for at least 2 million years. But exactly what caused this is still being debated. And so here these eruptions
very likely released huge amounts of carbon dioxide and also sulfur dioxide which dramatically changed the entire climate in just a few thousand years.
First leading to global warming and ocean acidification and eventually leading to anoxia and a lot of additional environmental catastrophes.
