Tag: Triassic

Signs of massive hydrocarbon burning at the end of the Triassic

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One of the ‘Big Five’ mass extinctions occurred at the end of the Triassic Period (~201 Ma), whose magnitude matches that of the more famous end-Cretaceous (K-Pg) event. It roughly coincided with the beginning of break-up of the Pangaea supercontinent that was accompanied by a major episode of volcanism preserved in the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province (CAMP). Eastern North America, West Africa and northern South America reveal scattered patches of CAMP flood basalts, swarms of dykes and large intrusive sills. Like all mass extinctions, that at the Triassic-Jurassic boundary left a huge selection of vacant or depleted ecological niches ready for evolution to fill by later adaptive radiation of surviving organisms. Because it coincided with continental break-up and drift, unlike other such events, evolution proceeded in different ways on the various wandering land masses and in newly formed seas (see  an excellent animation of the formation and break-up of Pangaea – move the slider to 3 minutes for the start of break-up). The Jurassic was a period of explosive evolution among all groups of organisms. The most notable changes were among marine cephalopods, to give rise to a bewildering variety of ammonite species, and on land with the appearance and subsequent diversification of dinosaurs.

Pangaea at the end of the Triassic (top) and in Middle Cretaceous times (Credit: screen shots from animation by Christopher Scotese)

Many scientists have ascribed the origin of these events to the CAMP magmatic activity and the release of huge amounts of methane to trigger rapid global warming. In October 2021 one group focused on a special role for the high percentages of magma that never reached the surface and formed huge intrusions that spread laterally in thick sedimentary sequences to ‘crack’ hydrocarbons to their simplest form, CH4 or methane. A sedimentary origin of the methane, rather than its escape from the mantle, is indicated by the carbon-isotope ‘signature’ of sediments deposited shortly after the Tr-J event. The lighter isotope 12C rose significantly relative to 13C, suggesting an organic source – photosynthesis selectively takes up the lighter isotope.

By examining the element mercury (Hg) in deep ocean sediments from a Tr-J sedimentary section now exposed in Japan, scientists from China, the US and Norway have added detail to the methane-release hypothesis (Shen, J et al. 2022. Mercury evidence for combustion of organic-rich sediments during the end-Triassic crisis. Nature Communications, v. 13, article 1307; DOI:10.1038/s41467-022-28891-8). The relative proportions of Hg isotopes strongly suggest that the mercury had been released, as was the methane, from organic-rich sediments rather than from the CAMP magmas (i.e. ultimately from the mantle) through gasification and then burning at the surface.

The hypothesis is enlivened by a separate study (Fox C.P. et al. 2022. Flame out! End-Triassic mass extinction polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons reflect more than just fire. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, v. 584, article 117418; DOI: 10.1016/j.epsl.2022.117418) that sees magmatic heating as being not so important. Calum Fox and colleagues at Curtin University, Western Australia analysed sediments from a Triassic-Jurassic sedimentary sequence near the Severn Bridge in SW England, focusing on polycyclic hydrocarbons in them. Their results show little sign of the kinds of organic chemical remnants of modern wildfires. Instead they suggest a greater contribution from soil erosion by acid rain that increased input of plant debris to a late Triassic marine basin

See also: How a major volcanic eruption paved the way for the rise of the dinosaurs Eureka Alert 23 March 2022;  Soil erosion and wildfire: another nail in coffin for Triassic era. Science Daily, 21 March 2022

Influence of massive igneous intrusions on end-Triassic mass extinction

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About 200 Ma ago, the break-up of the Pangaea supercontinent was imminent. The signs of impending events are spread through the eastern seaboard of North America, West Africa and central and northern South America. Today, they take the form of isolated patches of continental flood basalts, dyke swarms – probably the feeders for much more extensive flood volcanism – and large intrusive sills. Break-up began with the separation of North America from Africa and the start of sea-floor spreading that began to form the Central Atlantic Ocean: hence the name Central Atlantic Magmatic Province (CAMP) for the igneous activity. It all kicked off at the time of the Triassic-Jurassic stratigraphic boundary, and a mass extinction with a similar magnitude to that at the end of the Cretaceous. Disappearances of animals in the oceans and on continents were selective rather than general, as were extinctions of land plants. The mass extinction is estimated to have taken about ten thousand years. It left a great variety of ecological niches ready for re-occupation. On land a small group of reptiles with a substantial destiny entered some of these vacant niches. They evolved explosively to the plethora of later dinosaurs as their descendants became separated as a result of continental drift and adaptive radiation.

Flood basalts of the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province in Morocco (Credit: Andrea Marzoli)

The end-Triassic mass extinction, like three others of the Big Five, was thus closely associated in time with massive continental flood volcanism: indeed one of the largest such events. Within at most 10 ka large theropod dinosaurs entered the early Jurassic scene of eastern North America. The Jurassic was a greenhouse world whose atmosphere had about five times more CO2, a mean global surface temperature between 5 and 10°C higher and deep ocean temperatures 8°C above those at present. Was mantle carbon transported by CAMP magmas the main source (widely assumed until recently) or, as during the end-Permian mass extinction, was buried organic carbon responsible? A multinational group of geoscientists have closely examined samples from a one million cubic kilometre stack of intrusive basaltic sills, dated at 201 Ma, in the Amazon basin of Brazil that amount to about a third of all CAMP magmatism (Capriolo, M. and 11 others 2021. Massive methane fluxing from magma–sediment interaction in the end-Triassic Central Atlantic Magmatic Province. Nature Communications, v. 12, article 5534; DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-25510-w).

The team focussed on fluid inclusions in quartz within the basaltic sills that formed during the late stages of their crystallisation. The tiny inclusions contain methane gas and tiny crystals of halite (NaCl) as well as liquid water. Such was the bulk composition of the intrusive magma that the presence of around 5% of quartz in the basalts would be impossible without their magma having assimilated large volumes of silica-rich sedimentary rocks such as shales. The host rocks for the huge slab of igneous sills are sediments of Palaeozoic age: a ready source for contamination by both organic carbon and salt. The presence of methane in the inclusions suggests that more complex hydrocarbons had been ‘cracked’ by thermal metamorphism. Moreover, it is highly unlikely to have been derived from the mantle, partly because methane has been experimentally shown not to be soluble in basaltic magmas whereas CO2 is. The authors conclude that both quartz and methane entered the sills in hydrothermal fluids generated in adjacent sediments. Thermal metamorphism of the sediments would also have driven such fluids to the surface to inject methane directly to the atmosphere. Methane is 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere, yet it combines with the hydroxyl (OH–) radical to form CO2 and water vapour within about 12 years. Nevertheless during continuous emission methane traps 84 times more heat in the atmosphere than would an equivalent mass of carbon dioxide.

Calculations suggest about seven trillion tonnes of methane were generated by the CAMP intrusions in Brazil. Had the magmas mainly been extruded as flood basalts then perhaps global warming at the close of the Triassic would have been far less. Extinctions and subsequent biological evolution would have taken very different paths; dinosaurs may not have exploded onto the terrestrial scene so dramatically during the remaining 185 Ma of the Mesozoic. So it seems important to attempt an explanation of why CAMP magmas in Brazil did not rise to the surface but stayed buried as such stupendous igneous intrusions. Work on smaller intrusive sills suggests that magmas that are denser than the rocks that they pass through – as in a large, thick sedimentary basin – are forced by gravity to take a lateral ‘line of least resistance’ to intrude along sedimentary bedding. That would be aided by the enormous pressure of steam boiled from wet sedimentary rocks forcing beds apart. In areas where only thin sedimentary cover rests on crystalline, more dense igneous and metamorphic rocks, basaltic magma has a greater likelihood of rising through vertical dyke swarms to reach the surface and form lava floods.

End-Triassic mass extinction: evidence for oxygen depletion on the ocean floor

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For British geologists of my generation the Triassic didn’t raise our spirits to any great extent. There’s quite a lot of it on the British Geological Survey 10-miles-to-the-inch geological map (South Sheet) but it is mainly muds, sandstones or pebble beds, generally red and largely bereft of fossils. For the Triassic’s 50 Ma duration following the end-Permian extinction at 252 Ma Britain was pretty much a desert in the middle of the Pangaea supercontinent. Far beyond our travel grants’ reach, the Triassic is a riot, as in the Dolomites of Northern Italy. Apart from a day trip to look at the Bunter Pebble Beds in a quarry near Birmingham and several weeks testing the load-bearing strength of the Keuper mudstones in the West Midlands (not far off zero) in a soil-mechanics lab, we did glimpse the then evocatively named Tea Green Marl (all these stratigraphic names have vanished). Conveniently they outcrop by the River Severn estuary, below its once-famous suspension bridge and close-by the M5 motorway. Despite the Tea Green Marl containing a bone bed with marine reptiles, time didn’t permit us to fossick, and, anyway, there was a nearby pub … The formation was said to mark a marine transgression leading on to the ‘far more interesting Jurassic’ – the reason we were in the area. We were never given even a hint that the end of the Triassic was marked by one of the ‘Big Five’ mass extinctions: such whopping events were not part of the geoscientific canon in the 1960s.

Pangaea just before the start of Atlantic opening at the end of the Triassic, showing the estimated extend of the CAMP large igneous province. The pink triangles show the sites investigated by He and colleagues.

At 201.3 Ma ago around 34 % of marine genera disappeared, comparable with the effect of the K-Pg extinction that ended the Mesozoic Era. Extinction of Triassic terrestrial animals is less quantifiable. Early dinosaurs made it through to diversify hugely during the succeeding Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods. Probably because nothing famous ceased to be or made its first appearance, the Tr-J mass extinction hasn’t captured public attention in the same way as those with the K-Pg or the P-Tr acronyms.  But it did dramatically alter the course of biological evolution. The extinctions coincided with a major eruption of flood basalts known as the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province (CAMP), whose relics occur on either side of the eponymous ocean, which began to open definitively at about the same time. So, chances are, volcanic emissions are implicated in the extinction event, somehow (see: Is end-Triassic mass extinction linked to CAMP flood basalts? June 2013). Tianchen He  of Leeds University, UK and the China University of Geosciences and British and Italian colleagues have studied three Tr-J marine sections on either side of Pangaea: in Sicily, Northern Ireland and British Columbia (He, T. and 12 others 2020. An enormous sulfur isotope excursion indicates marine anoxia during the end-Triassic mass extinction. Science Advances, v. 6, article eabb6704; DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abb6704). Their objective was to test the hypothesis that CAMP resulted in an episode of oceanic anoxia that caused the many submarine organisms to become extinct. Since eukaryote life depends on oxygen, a deficit would put marine animals of the time under great stress. Such events in the later Mesozoic account for global occurrences of hydrocarbon-rich, black marine shales – petroleum source rocks – in which hypoxia thwarted complete decay of dead organisms over long periods. However there is scant evidence for such rocks having formed ~201 Ma ago. Such as there is dates to about 150 ka younger than the Tr-J boundary in an Italian shallow marine basin. The issue of evidence is compounded by the fact that there are no ocean-floor sediments as old as that, thanks to their complete subduction as Pangaea broke apart in later times and its continental fragments drifted to their present configuration.

But there is an indirect way of detecting deep-ocean anoxia, in the inevitable absence of any Triassic and early Jurassic oceanic crust. It emerges from what happens to the stable isotopes of sulfur when there are abundant bacteria that use the reduction of sulfate (SO42-) to sulfide (S2-) ions. Such microorganisms thrive in anoxic conditions and produce abundant hydrogen sulfide, which in turn leads to the precipitation of dissolved iron as minute grains of pyrite (FeS2). This biogenic process selectively excludes 34S from the precipitated pyrite. As a result, at times of widespread marine reducing conditions seawater as a whole becomes enriched in 34S relative to sulfur’s other isotopes. The enrichment is actually expressed in the unreacted sulfate ions, and they may be precipitated as calcium sulfate or gypsum (CaSO4) in marine sediments deposited anywhere: He et al. focussed on such fractionation. They discovered large ‘spikes’ in the relative enrichment of 34S at the Tr-J boundary in shallow-marine sedimentary sequences exposed at the three sites. Moreover, they were able to estimate that the conditions on the now vanished bed of the Triassic ocean that gave rise to the spikes lasted for about 50 thousand years. The lack of dissolved oxygen resulted in a five-fold increase in pyrite burial in the now subducted ocean-floor sediments of that time. The authors suggest that the oxygen depletion stemmed from extreme global warming, which, in turn, encouraged methane production by other ocean-floor bacteria and, in a roundabout way, other chemical reactions that consumed free dissolved oxygen. Quite a saga of a network of interactions in the whole Earth system that may hold a dreadful warning for the modern Earth and ourselves.

When rain kick-started evolution

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The end of the Palaeozoic Era was marked by the greatest known mass extinction at the Permian-Triassic boundary 252 Ma ago. An estimated 96% of known marine fossil species simply disappeared, as did 70% of vertebrates that lived on land. Many processes seem to have conspired against life on Earth although it seems that one was probably primary: the largest known flood-basalt event, evidence for which lies in the Siberian Traps. It took as long as 50 Ma for ecosystems to return to their former diversity. But, oddly, it was animals at the top of the marine food chain that recovered most quickly, in about 5 million years. There must have been food in the sea, but it was at first somewhat monotonous. The continents were still configured in the Pangaea supercontinent, so much land was far from oceans and thus dry. Oxygen was being drawn down from the atmosphere to combine with iron in Fe2O3 to form vast tracts of redbeds for which the Triassic is famous. From a peak of 30% in the Permian, atmospheric oxygen descended to 16% in the early Triassic, so living even at sea level would have been equivalent to surviving today at 2.7 km elevation today. Potential ecological niches were vastly reduced in fertility and in altitude, and Pangaea still had vast mountain ranges inherited from its formative tectonics as well as being arid, apart from in polar regions. Unsurprisingly, recovery of terrestrial diversity, especially among vertebrates, was slow during the early Triassic.

Triassic grey terrestrial sediments on the Somerset coast of SW England (credit: Margaret W. Carruthers; https://www.flickr.com/photos/64167416@N03/albums/72157659852255255)

Then, about halfway through the Triassic Period, it began to rain across Pangaea. Whether that was continual or seasonal is uncertain, although the presence of large mountains and high plateaus would favour monsoon circulation, akin to the present-day Indian monsoon associated with the Himalaya and Tibetan Plateau. How do geologists know that central Pangaea became wetter? The evidence lies in grey sedimentary strata between the otherwise universal redbeds, which occur in the Carnian Age and span one to two million years around 232 Ma (Marshall, M. 2019. Did a million years of rain jump-start dinosaur evolution? Nature, v. 576, p. 26-28; doi: 10.1038/d41586-019-03699-7). A likely driver for this change in colour is a rise in water tables that would exclude oxygen from sediments deposited recently. The red Iron-3 oxides were reduced, so that soluble iron-2 was leached out. Some marine groups, such as crinoids, underwent a sudden flurry of extinctions, as did plants and amphibians on land. But others received a clear boost from this Carnian Pluvial Event. A few dinosaurs first appear in older Triassic sediments, but during the Carnian they began to diversify from diminutive bipedal species into the main groups so familiar to many: ornithischians that lead to Stegosaurus and Triceratops and the forerunners of the saurischians that included huge long-necked herbivores and the bipedal theropods and birds. Within 4 Ma dinosaurs had truly begun their global hegemony. Offshore in shallow seas, the scleractinian corals, which dominate modern coral reef systems, also exploded during the Carnian from small beginnings in the earlier Triassic. It is even suspected that the Carnian nurtured the predecessor of mammals, although the evidence is only from isolated fossil teeth.

A Carnian shift in carbon isotopes, measured in Triassic limestones of the Italian Dolomites, to lower proportions of the heavier 13C suggests that a huge volume of the lighter 12C had entered the atmosphere. That could have resulted from large-scale volcanism, the 232 Ma old laves of the Wrangell Mountains in Alaska being a likely suspect. Such an input would have had a warming climatic outcome that would have increased tropical evaporation of ocean water and the humidity over continental masses. The once ecologically monotonous core of Pangaea may have greatly diversified into many more niches awaiting occupants, thereby stimulating the terrestrial evolutionary burst. Perhaps ironically, and fortunately, a volcanic near snuffing-out of life on Earth was soon followed by another with the opposite effect. Yet another negative outcome arrived with the flood basalts of the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province at the end of the Triassic (201 Ma), to be followed by further adaptive radiation among those organisms that survived into the Jurassic.