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The end-Permian extinction is resolved to about sixty thousand years

2014 · Recorded · culture

The source states this happened, and its date is not in the future. The word the source used for it is historical.

Burgess, Bowring and Shen published uranium–lead ages on zircons from ash beds through the boundary interval at Meishan, using chemical-abrasion isotope-dilution mass spectrometry to place the Permian–Triassic boundary at 251.902 ± 0.024 million years and to constrain the main marine extinction pulse to roughly sixty thousand years, with an uncertainty of comparable size. The scientific content of this result is not the date but the duration. A biotic collapse spread over millions of years can be explained by ordinary environmental change; one compressed into tens of thousands of years requires a forcing fast enough to outrun the ocean and the carbon cycle, and it is that constraint which makes the Siberian Traps degassing hypothesis compelling rather than merely coincidental.

Source

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · Burgess, S. D., Bowring, S. and Shen, S.-z., PNAS, vol. 111 (2014), pp. 3316–3321

Standing

This record: partially verified · publisher: partially verified

How it arrived

Editorial — A dated record from the Richseen Atlas editorial corpus, written and cited by a curator. Not captured from anywhere, and not live.

Where

At a canonical Atlas object, placed and checked by a curator.

Subject

Meishan GSSP, Changxing, Zhejiang · METHOD_RADIOMETRIC_DATING · CONCEPT_ZIRCON_GEOCHRONOMETER · Siberian Traps large igneous province