Ninety-six percent of marine and 70% of terrestrial species died in the Permian mass extinction, which began about 252 million years ago and lasted for over 20,000 years. Geochemistry tells us that this extinction coincided with a severe and rapid change in the Earth’s carbon cycle, but this alone could not have been the cause of the extinction. Initially it was thought that carbon dioxide released by Siberian volcanism explained this change in the carbon cycle but the volcanic outgassing was not large enough to have been responsible for this big a disruption. So if not volcanoes, what could have produced so much carbon in the atmosphere?
A new study shows that the speed and exponential growth of carbon had to be of biological origin. The study proposes that the emergence of a new group of microbes, Methanosarcina, was responsible for producing the methane in the atmosphere that led to the extinctions. At around 250 million years ago, these microbes acquired fancy new machinery, or a new metabolic pathway through lateral gene transfer that made them capable of taking advantage of the large amounts of marine carbon produced at the time and converting it to methane. This also required large amounts of nickel that was released by the volcanoes. The new source of nickel, a limiting resource in the ocean, combined with increases in marine carbon created a feeding frenzy of bacteria. Following the production of methane by Methanosarcina, other microbes, anaerobic methanotrophs, turned the methane into carbon dioxide further lowering oxygen levels in the ocean.
Today we see similar short-lived low oxygen events in the ocean, but these are driven by algal blooms. Marine algae (i.e., marine plants) are responsible for most of the photosynthesis that occurs on the planet and the resulting oxygen and marine organic carbon. Just like the plants that grow in your garden, these algae rely on nutrients to grow and reproduce. When there’s a new source of otherwise limiting nutrients, they often grow rapidly and we call this a “bloom.” As the algae use up the nutrient source, they begin to die and microbial decomposition begins. These microbes consume oxygen in the water as they feed on the algae and release hydrogen sulfide gas as they have their own population explosion. Just as scientists have observed in the fossil record for the Permian extinction, we see low oxygen levels in areas of the ocean following algal blooms and increases in microbial digestion. The hydrogen sulfide gases released during decomposition of modern algal blooms often produce mass die-offs of marine animals.