Scientists don’t yet know what caused the Triassic mass-extinction event — one of the largest extinction events in the history of our planet — 200 million years ago.
Scientists don’t yet know what caused the Triassic mass-extinction event — one of the largest extinction events in the history of our planet — 200 million years ago. Some scientists point to an asteroid strike; others blame massive volcanic eruptions — each a sudden event; while still others blame a more gradual global climate change and rise in sea levels.
Ben Gill, a geoscientist within the Department of Geosciences in the Virginia Tech College of Science, prefers the volcano scenario. “The volcanic eruptions hypothesis has by far the most support,” he said.
“It’s important to note, however, that those volcanic eruptions would have led to a cascade of environmental changes that would have been bad if you were living on the Earth during that time, such as global warming, deoxygenation of the oceans, and ocean acidification. We still don’t have a good handle on which of these changes played major roles in the extinction event.”
Gill will now use a new, three-year $591,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to — he hopes — solve this riddle. “Evaluating which of these changes were causes of the extinction is part of what we are trying to figure out with this project,” said Gill, an associate professor and an affiliated member of Virginia Tech’s Fralin Life Sciences Institute and Global Change Center.
Continue reading at Virginia Tech.
Image via João Trabucho-Alexandre (Utrecht University).
