Tag: ENSO

Climate changes and the mass extinction at Permian-Triassic boundary

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The greatest mass extinction in Earth’s history at around 252 Ma ago snuffed out 81% of marine animal species, 70% of vertebrates and many invertebrates that lived on land. It is not known how many land plants were removed, but the complete absence of coals from the first 10 Ma of the Early Triassic suggests that luxuriant forests that characterised low-lying humid area in the Permian disappeared. A clear sign of the sudden dearth of plant life is that Early Triassic river sediments were no longer deposited by meandering rivers but by braided channels. Meanders of large river channels typify land surfaces with abundant vegetation whose root systems bind alluvium. Where vegetation cover is sparse, there is little to constrain river flow and alluvial erosion, and wide braided river courses develop (see: End-Permian devastation of land plants; September 2000. You can follow 21st century developments regarding the P-Tr extinction using the Palaeobiology index).

The most likely culprit was the Siberian Trap flood basalts effusion whose lavas emitted huge amounts of CO2 and even more through underground burning of older coal deposits (see: Coal and the end-Permian mass extinction; March 2011) which triggered severe global warming. That, however, is a broad-brush approach to what was undoubtedly a very complex event. Of about 20 volcanism-driven global warming events during the Phanerozoic only a few coincide with mass extinctions. Of those none comes close the devastation of ‘The Great Dying’, which begs the question, ‘Were there other factors at play 252 Ma ago?’ That there must have been is highlighted by the terrestrial extinctions having begun significantly earlier than did those in marine ecosystems, and they preceded direct evidence for climatic warming. Also temperature records – obtained from shifts in oxygen isotopes held in fossils – for that episode are widely spaced in time and tell palaeoclimatologists next to nothing about the details of the variation of air- and sea-surface temperature (SST) variations.

Modelled sea-surface temperatures in the tropics in the early stages of Siberian Trap eruptions with atmospheric CO¬2 at 857 ppm – twice today’s level. (Credit: Sun et al., Fig. 1A)

Earth at the end of the Permian was very different from its current wide dispersal of continents and multiple oceans and seas. Then it was dominated by Pangaea, a single supercontinent that stretched almost from pole to pole, and a surrounding vast ocean known as Panthalassa. Geoscientists from China, Germany, Britain and Austria used this simple palaeogeography and the available Early Triassic greenhouse-gas and  palaeo-temperature data as input to a climate prediction model (HadCM3BL) (Yadong Sun and 7 others 2024. Mega El Niño instigated the end-Permian mass extinction. Science 385, p. 1189–1195; DOI: 10.1126/science.ado2030  – contact yadong.sun@cug.edu.cn for PDF).. The computer model was developed by the Hadley Centre of the UK Met Office to assess possible global outcomes of modern anthropogenic global warming. It assesses heat transport by atmospheric flow and ocean currents and their interactions. The researchers ran it for various levels of atmospheric CO2 concentrations over the estimate 100 ka duration of the P-Tr mass extinction.

The pole-to-pole continental configuration of Pangaea lends itself to equatorial El Niño and El Niña type climatic events that occur today along the Pacific coast of the Americas, known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. In the first, warm surface water builds-up in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. It then then drifts westwards to allow cold surface water to flow northwards along the Pacific shore of South America to result in El Niña. Today, this climatic ‘teleconnection’ not only affects the Americas but also winds, temperature and precipitation across the whole planet. The simpler topography at the end of the Permian seems likely to have made such global cycles even more dominant.

Sun et al’s simulations used stepwise increases in the atmospheric concentration of CO2 from an estimated  412 parts per million (ppm) before the eruption of the Siberian Traps (similar to those today) to a maximum of 4000 ppm during the late-stage magmatism that set buried coals ablaze. As levels reached 857 ppm SSTs peaked at 2 °C above the mean level during El Niño events and the cycles doubled in length. Further increase in emissions led to greater anomalies that lasted longer, rising to 4°C above the mean at 4000 ppm. The El Niña cooler parts of the cycle steadily became equally anomalous and long lasting. This amplification of the 252 Ma equivalent of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation would have added to the environmental stress of an ever increasing global mean surface temperature.  The severity is clear from an animation of mean surface temperature change during a Triassic ENSO event.

Animation of monthly average surface temperatures across the Earth during an ENSO event at the height of the P-Tr mass extinction. (Credit: Alex Farnsworth, University of Bristol, UK)

The results from the modelling suggest increasing weather chaos across the Triassic Earth, with the interior of Pangaea locked in permanent drought. Its high latitude parts would undergo extreme heating and then cooling from 40°C to -40°C during the El Niño- El Niña cycles. The authors suggest that conditions on the continents became inimical for terrestrial life, which would be unable to survive even if they migrated long distances. That can explain why terrestrial extinctions at the P-Tr boundary preceded those in the global ocean. The marine biota probably succumbed to anoxia (See: Chemical conditions for the end-Permian mass extinction; November 2008)

There is a timely warning here. The El Niño-Southern Oscillation is becoming stronger, although each El Niño is a mere 2 years long at most, compared with up to 8 years at the height of the P-Tr extinction event. But it lay behind the record 2023-2024 summer temperatures in both northern and southern hemispheres, the North American heatwave of June 2024 being 15°C higher than normal. Many areas are now experiencing unprecedentedly severe annual wildfires. There also finds a parallel with conditions on the fringes of Early Triassic Pangaea. During the early part of the warming charcoal is common in the relics of the coastal swamps of tropical Pangaea, suggesting extensive and repeated wildfires. Then charcoal suddenly vanishes from the sedimentary record: all that could burn had burnt to leave the supercontinent deforested.

See also: Voosen, P. 2024. Strong El Niños primed Earth for mass extinction. Science 385, p. 1151; DOI: 10.1126/science.z04mx5b; Buehler, J. 2024. Mega El Niños kicked off the world’s worst mass extinction. ScienceNews, 12 September 2024.

Very persistent cycles

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Carboniferous shale
Carboniferous shale (Photo credit: tehsma)

The last of five written papers in my 1967 final-year exams was, as always, set by the ‘Prof’.  One question was ‘Rock and rhythm: discuss’ – it was the 60s. Cyclicity has been central to observational geology, especially to stratigraphy, the difference from that era being that rhythms have been quantified and the rock sequences they repeat have been linked to processes, in many cases global ones. The most familiar cyclicity to geologists brought up in Carboniferous coalfields, or indeed any area that preserves Carboniferous marine and terrestrial rocks, is the cyclothem of, roughly, seat-earth – coal – marine shale – fluviatile sandstone – seat-earth and so on. Matched to the duration of Carboniferous to Permian glaciations of the then southern hemisphere, and with the relatively  new realisation that global sea level goes down  and up as ice caps wax and wane, the likeliest explanation is eustatic regression and transgression of marine conditions in coastal areas in response to global climate change. Statistical analysis of cyclothemic sequences unearths frequency patterns that match well those of astronomical climate forcing proved for Pleistocene glacial-interglacial cycles.

The Milankovich signals of the Carboniferous are now part of the geological canon, but rocks of that age more finely layered than sediments of the tropical continental margins do occur. Among them are rhythmic sequences interpreted as lake deposits from high latitudes, akin to varves formed in such environments nowadays. Those from south-western Brazil present spectacular evidence of climate change in the Late Carboniferous and Early Permian (Franco, D.R. et al. 2012. Millennial-scale climate cycles in Permian-Carboniferous rhythmites: Permanent feature throughout geological time. Geology, v. 40, p. 19-22). They comprise couplets of fine-grained grey quartz sandstones from 1-10 cm thick interleaved with black mudstones on a scale of millimetres, which together build up around 45 m of sediment. Their remanent magnetism and magnetic susceptibility vary systematically with the two components. Frequency analysis of plots of both against depth in the sequence show clear signs of regular repetitions. Low-frequency peaks reveal the now well-known influence of astronomical forcing of Upper Palaeozoic climate, but it is in the lower amplitude, higher frequency part of the magnetic spectrum that surprises emerge from a variety of peaks. They are reminiscent of the Dansgaard-Oeschger events of the last Pleistocene glacial, marked by sudden warming and slow cooling while world climate cooled towards the last glacial maximum (~1.5 ka cyclicity) and Heinrich events, the ‘iceberg armadas’ that occurred on a less regular 3 to 8 ka basis. There are also signs of the 2.4 ka solar cycle. The relatively brief cycles would have been due to events in a very different continental configuration from today’s – that of the supercontinent Pangaea – and their very presence suggests a more general global influence over short-term climate shifts that has been around for 300 Ma or more.

OSTM/Jason-2's predecessor TOPEX/Poseidon caug...
El Niño effect on sea -surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific Ocean. Image via Wikipedia

Closer to us in time, and on a much finer time scale are almost 100 m of finely laminated shales from the marine Late Cretaceous of California’s Great Valley (Davies, A. et al. 2012. El Niño-Southern Oscillation variability from the late Cretaceous Marca Shale of California. Geology, v. 40, p. 15-18). The laminations contain fossil diatoms: organisms that are highly sensitive to environmental conditions and whose species are easily distinguished from each other. It emerges from studies of the diatoms in each lamination set that they record an annual cycle of seasonal change related to marine upwellings and their varying strengths, with repeated evidence for influx of fine sediment derived from land above sea level and for varying degrees of bioturbation that suggests periods of oxygenation. Spectral analysis of the intensity of bioturbation, which assumes the lamina are annual, and other fluctuating features reveals peaks that are remarkably close to those of the ENSO cyclicity that operates at present, at 2.1-2.8 and 4.1-6.3 a, as well as repetitions with a decadal frequency.

The annual cycles bear similar hallmarks to those imposed by the monsoonal conditions familiar from modern California, which fluctuated in the Late Cretaceous in much the same way as it does now – roughly speaking, alternating El Niño and La Niña conditions. That is not so surprising, as the relationship between California and the Pacific Ocean in the Cretaceous would not have been dissimilar from that now. The real importance of the study is that it concerns a period in Earth’s climate history characterised by greenhouse conditions, that some predict would create a permanent El Niño – an abnormal warming of surface ocean waters in the eastern tropical Pacific that prevents the cold Humboldt Current along the Andean coast of South America from supplying nutrient to tropical waters. The very cyclicity recorded by the Marca Shale strongly suggests that the ENSO is a stable feature of the western Americas. Recent clear implications of ENSO having teleconnections that affect global climate, on this evidence, may not break down with anthropogenic global warming. This confirms similar studies from the Palaeogene and Neogene Periods.