The ‘Great Dying’ wiped out 90% of life, then came 5 million years of lethal heat. New fossils explain why
The ‘Great Dying’ wiped out 90% of life, then came 5 million years of lethal heat. New fossils explain why
www.cnn.com
The ‘Great Dying’ wiped out 90% of life, then came 5 million years of lethal heat. New fossils explain why | CNN
The ‘Great Dying’ wiped out 90% of life, then came 5 million years of lethal heat. New fossils explain why
Well, they aren't exactly "new" fossils, now are they?
But it is good to see clearer evidence of this, this has been the main hypothesis for a while (it also explains why insects died out much more during this extinction even than others, because there was much less vegetation for them to live in/on), though it was probably some other factors as well, there's rarely ever a simple singular cause and effect when it comes to major changes to the biosphere (at least when it comes to natural extinction events)
It really shows how interconnected the biosphere is, and how little we understand about its dynamics. The fact that we're changing the climate in such dramatic ways without having much of an idea of what the impact will be is surreal.
Yeah, at some point (which might have already happened) it'll cascade out in ways we couldn't really predict. I don't think anything humans could do would be as bad as the Permian-Triassic extinction event though, that was a uniquely one of a kind awful situation for life on earth. If things get bad enough that we destroy ourselves (or even just industrial civilisation) the biosphere will manage to recover, though obviously it would be better to, you know, not needlessly cause the extinction of millions of species of life on this planet.