299 – 252.2 MILLION: PERMIAN

• • • 96% of species lost
    • Pangea supercontinent combines all major landmasses
    • Panthalassa combines all oceans except Tethys
    • Climate swings widely between hot and cold extremes
    • Huge deserts – Carboniferous swamp forests dry up;
    • Egg-laying reptiles (Sauropsids) and mammal-like reptiles (Synapsids) wildly proliferate over the land;
    • Paleozoic Era ends with Permian Mass Extinction – worst in earth’s history with 95% of all life destroyed.

Name	Diameter (km)	Age (megayears)	Dating method	Morphological type	Notes
Clearwater West, Quebec	32	290 ± 20	K-Ar melt rocks	CONFIRMED Peak ring	Maskelynite
Des Plaines, Illinois	8	<280	Geological dating	CONFIRMED Complex
Douglas, Wyoming	~0.08	~280	Sedimentological boundary	PROPOSED Simple	Multiple Strewn Field
Decaturville Structure, Missouri	5.5	260-323	Geological dating	CONFIRMED Complex

252.28 Ma – PERMIAN-TRIASSIC EXTINCTION

Permian–Triassic (P–Tr or P–T) – 251.88 (+/- 0.031) million years ago:

Coincidental with the P-Tr extinction, about 2.6 million km² of 4 km thick basaltic lava covered Siberia in a flood basalt event. The original volume of lava is estimated to range from 1 to 4 million km³ (Wikipedia).
It is unclear whether this magmatism was the main culprit, or simply an accessory to the P-Tr mass extinction.

96% of species lost — Tabulate coral, 5 CM

Known as “the great dying”, this was by far the worst extinction event ever seen; it nearly ended life on Earth. The tabulate corals were lost in this period – today’s corals are an entirely different group. What caused it? A perfect storm of natural catastrophes. A cataclysmic eruption near Siberia blasted CO2 into the atmosphere. Methanogenic bacteria responded by belching out methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Global temperatures surged while oceans acidified and stagnated, belching poisonous hydrogen sulfide.  “It set life back 300 million years,” says Schmidt. Rocks after this period record no coral reefs or coal deposits.

 

The Permian–Triassic (P–Tr) extinction event, informally known as the Great Dying, was an extinction event that occurred 252.28 Ma (million years) ago, forming the boundary between the Permian and Triassic geologic periods, as well as the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras. It is the Earth’s most severe known extinction event, with up to 96% of all marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species becoming extinct. It is the only known mass extinction of insects. Some 57% of all families and 83% of all genera became extinct. Because so much biodiversity was lost, the recovery of life on Earth took significantly longer than after any other extinction event, possibly up to 10 million years (Wikipedia).

Evidence for Impact: Reported evidence for an impact event from the P–Tr boundary level includes rare grains of shocked quartz in Australia and Antarctica; fullerenes trapping extraterrestrial noble gases; meteorite fragments in Antarctica; and grains rich in iron, nickel and silicon, which may have been created by an impact. However, the accuracy of most of these claims has been challenged. Quartz from Graphite Peak in Antarctica, for example, once considered “shocked”, has been re-examined by optical and transmission electron microscopy. The observed features were concluded to be not due to shock, but rather to plastic deformation, consistent with formation in a tectonic environment such as volcanism. An impact crater on the seafloor would be a possible cause of the P–Tr extinction, and such a crater would by now have disappeared. As 70% of the Earth’s surface is sea, an asteroid or comet fragment is more than twice as likely to hit ocean as it is to hit land. However, Earth has no ocean-floor crust more than 200 million years old, because the “conveyor belt” process of seafloor spreading and subduction destroys it within that time. Craters produced by very large impacts may be masked by extensive flood basalting from below after the crust is punctured or weakened. Subduction should not, however, be entirely accepted as an explanation of why no firm evidence can be found: as with the K-T event, an ejecta blanket stratum rich in siderophilic elements (e.g., iridium) would be expected to be seen in formations from the time. One attraction of large impact theories is that theoretically they could trigger other cause-considered extinction-paralleling phenomena, such as the Siberian Traps eruptions as being either an impact site or the antipode of an impact site. The abruptness of an impact also explains why more species did not rapidly evolve to survive, as would be expected if the Permian-Triassic event had been slower and less global than a meteorite impact (Wikipedia).