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What a 250-million-year-old volcanic explosion tells us about climate change


August 04, 2015

What can a volcanic explosion 250 million years ago tells us about climate change? According to planetary scientist Lindy Elkins-Tanton, director of Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, with some detective work it can tell us quite a bit.

Elkins-Tanton and her colleagues visited central Siberia five times to investigate the apparent coincidence between the Earth’s largest volcanic event on land, popularly known as the Siberian flood basalts, and the Earth’s largest extinction, the end-Permian, 252 million years ago, when more than 70 percent of terrestrial species and more than 90 percent of ocean species went extinct.

A volcanic eruption can certainly chemically change the atmosphere, but many experts were skeptical about whether flood basalts could do that because they aren’t explosive eruptions – their runny lavas flood out of fissures – and they did not seem to carry the kinds of climate-changing gases and the explosive ability to launch those gases into the stratosphere that are needed to change global climate.

Elkins-Tanton writes in a Future Tense article in Slate magazine that she and her research team weren’t convinced that the Siberian flood basalts had nothing to do with the extinction so they set out to investigate.

What they found was startling: These normally quiet flood basalt lavas carried and released a world of trouble into the end-Permian atmosphere. The Siberian flood basalts released staggering amounts of halocarbons, the same family of chemicals now banned by international treaties because they were destroying our ozone layer. The halocarbons would have destroyed as much as 70 percent of the Earth’s ozone, worldwide. And the sulfur compounds would have made rain in the northern hemisphere as acidic as lemon juice.

Future Tense is a collaboration among ASU, the New America Foundation and Slate magazine that explores how emerging technologies affect policy and society. 

Article source: Future Tense

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