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Geologists offer new clues to cause of world's greatest extinction
A study by a researcher in the Syracuse University College of Arts and Sciences offers new clues to what may have triggered the world's most catastrophic extinction, nearly 252 million years ago.
James Muirhead, a research associate in the Department of Earth Sciences, is the co-author of an article in Nature Communications (Macmillan Publishers Limited, 2017) titled "Initial Pulse of Siberian Traps Sills as the Trigger of the End-Permian Mass Extinction."
His research involves Seth Burgess, the article's lead author and a geologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, and Samuel Bowring, the Robert R. Shock Professor of Geology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Their findings suggest that the formation of intrusive igneous rock, known as sills, sparked a chain of events that brought the Permian geological period to a close. In the process, more than 95 percent of marine species and 70 percent of land species vanished.
