Fossil Fuels May Have Caused Mass Extinction

Fossil fuels don’t exactly have a good reputation as it is – they’re incredibly environmentally destructive, and bear the brunt of the blame for our current situation with global warming. Now, experts are saying that “a frenzy of hydrocarbon burning” millions of years ago might have caused the most dramatic, devastating mass extinction the Earth has ever seen.

From the New Scientist:

Around 250 million years ago, the so-called “Great Dying” saw 70 per cent of species wiped out on land and 95 per cent in the oceans. A clue to what may have triggered this disaster lies in solidified magma from this time, which is widespread in an area of Siberia where coal is also abundant.

One suggestion is that the heat of the magma could have baked many billions of tonnes of CO2 out of the coal over a geologically brief period of a few thousand years (New Scientist, 8 December 2007, p 42). The ensuing climate change and ocean acidification would account for the extinctions. Now Norman Sleep and Darcy Ogden, both of Stanford University in California, think the trigger for the Great Dying may have been even swifter and more terrifying.

Rather than causing gentle heating, magma encountering oil- and tar-soaked coal underground would melt it, producing a highly combustible material, they say. Crucially, this molten mixture would be light enough to rise quickly to the surface. There it would burn explosively on contact with oxygen in the air, blasting dust and ash into the stratosphere and releasing huge quantities of CO2.

Basically, this resulted in hell on earth – vast areas of fire fountains and smoke columns over a moonscape littered with coal tar and coal fragments. If Sleep and Ogden’s theory is correct, the evidence is hiding in Siberia’s volcanic deposits – but we will probably never know for sure.

Link [New Scientist]
Photo credit: South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut

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