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Understanding the worst mass extinction event in history could provide a glimpse of what lies ahead – and offer a warning if global action is not taken.
This is why an international team of researchers looked back 252 million years to the end of the Permian period when a severe extinction event, called “The Great Dying” wiped out 19 out of 20 species on Earth. , the California Academy of Sciences reported .
For the first time, in a study published Wednesday, researchers identified what made “The Great Dying” more severe than other periods of extinction. Scientists have studied this period because of the similarities between the crises that occurred then and that are occurring now – “namely extinction following the massive release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. greenhouse in the atmosphere “, they wrote , adding that this period was also faced with global warming, acid rain and acidification.
But unlike other mass extinctions throughout history, species in the Late Permian struggled to recover, possibly for 10 million years, the California Academy of Sciences reported. To find out why, scientists recreated food webs, taken from northern China, spanning the Permian and Triassic periods, which showed how a single region responded to the ecosystem collapse.
“By studying the fossils and evidence of their teeth, stomach contents and feces, I was able to identify who ate whom,” senior author and Academy researcher Yuangeng Huang told the Academy. of California Sciences. “It is important to build an accurate food web if we are to understand these ancient ecosystems.”
By tracking food webs during this time, scientists found that when animals died, nothing replaced them, creating an “imbalance” according to the California Academy of Sciences.
“We found the Late Permian event to be exceptional in two ways,” said Professor Mike Benton of the University of Bristol at the California Academy of Sciences. “First, the diversity collapse was much more severe, whereas in the other two mass extinctions there had been low-stability ecosystems before the final collapse. And second, it has taken ecosystems a very long time to recover. ”
The new study comes at the same time as two other groundbreaking studies that also draw comparisons between “The Great Dying” and the present day. In one of these studies, scientists developed a record of the acidity of the oceans, which allowed them to track how “The Great Dying” happened, CBS reported .
The extinction did not happen all at once but rather happened as a series of events, from volcanic activity, the release of carbon dioxide, global warming, ocean acidification, fires and erosion, spanning a million years, Professor Uwe Brand, a geoscientist at Brock University in Canada, who has been involved in the study of ocean records, told CBS News. / p>
“They weren’t individual and separate causes, but they all acted together, they acted in concert, and that’s why I call it the perfect storm,” Brand told CBS News. “You were hit on this side by the temperature, on this side by the acidification and finally the punch came from the deoxygenation.”
While the possibility of avoiding this same ecological collapse may seem elusive, conversations about how to respond are happening, even on a global level.
“Human well-being lies in protecting the health of the planet,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said recently, according to UN News , following the publication of a report, Making Peace with Nature , which calls for urgent action to combat environmental crises. “The rewards will be immense. With a new awareness, we can direct investments towards policies and activities that protect and restore nature.”
Yuangeng Huang and his team’s food web research also shows which species recovered from “The Great Dying,” providing insight into how modern species can do the same.
“This is an incredible new result,” said Professor Zhong-Qiang Chen of the Chinese University of Geosciences in Wuhan at the California Academy of Sciences. “Combining excellent new data from long sections of rock in northern China with cutting-edge computational methods allows us to penetrate these ancient examples in the same way we can study food webs in the modern world. ”
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