Washington: A new study has revealed the mysterious relationship between Pangea integration and the biggest mass extinction that happened 250 million years ago.
The study that was done by Yin Hongfu and Song Haijun from State Key Laboratory of Geobiology and Environmental Geology , China University of Geosciences (Wuhan), show that Pangea integration resulted in environmental deterioration which further caused that extinction.
The study state that Pangea was integrated at about the beginning of Permian, and reached its acme during Late Permian to Early Triassic.
Formation of the Pangea means that the scattered continents of the world gathered into one integrated continent with an area of nearly 200 million km2.
Increase of CO2 concentration and other green house gases would have led to global warming, oxygen depletion and carbon cycle anomaly; physical and chemical anomalies in ocean (acidification, euxinia, low sulfate concentration, isotopic anomaly of organic nitrogen) and great regression would have caused marine extinction due to unadaptable environments, selective death and hypercapnia; continental aridity, disappearance of monsoon system and wild fire would have devastated the land vegetation, esp. the tropical rain forest.
The great global changes and mass extinction were the results of interaction among earth`s spheres. Deteriorated relations among lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere (including internal factors of organism evolution itself) accumulated until they exceeded the threshold, and exploded at the Permian-Triassic transition time.
The study has been published in journal Science China Earth Sciences.
