The end-Permian extinction is resolved to about sixty thousand years
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.
Historical — it happened, and the record is settled.
Subjects
- Meishan GSSP, Changxing, Zhejiang · site · China
- Radiometric dating · process · not located
- Zircon as a geochronometer · material class · not located
- Siberian Traps large igneous province · geographic_feature · Russia
Evidence
Partly verified — Core facts are sourced; some optional detail is deliberately absent.
High-precision timeline for Earth's most severe extinction
Supports the Permian–Triassic boundary age of 251.902 ± 0.024 Ma from Meishan zircons and the constraint of the main extinction pulse to roughly sixty thousand years. V55 verification basis: this session had no network access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked and the WebSearch budget was exhausted — so the cited work was not retrieved and its pagination was not re-checked. Volume and page range are quoted from standing knowledge and were not re-checked.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2014 · Partly verified
Burgess, S. D., Bowring, S. and Shen, S.-z., PNAS, vol. 111 (2014), pp. 3316–3321
Recorded on Meishan GSSP, Changxing, Zhejiang
- Sulfur mass-independent fractionation is proposed as an atmospheric oxygen proxy
- The K–Pg boundary is dated to 66.043 ± 0.043 Ma
- The end-Permian extinction is resolved to about sixty thousand years
Related
Related because they share a subject in the Atlas — never because the text looks similar.