The famous Permian Massive Extinction, which occurred about a quarter of a billion years ago, was not the only such event of that time period, paleontologists in Switzerland say, who have found evidence of a massive plant extinction one million years after the Permian. Material on a previously unknown extinction appeared in Scientific Reports.
“The reasons that led to this catastrophe are still beyond our knowledge. However, some indirect factors point to volcanic activity, which could be one of the dominant factors of extinction. The most powerful eruptions in the territories now called Siberia, which occurred at the beginning of the Triassic period, could probably have caused something similar,”says Hugo Bucher, a researcher at the University of Zurich.
Scientists have uncovered evidence of unknown plant extinction by studying sedimentary rocks in Greenland. The Permian extinction, as well as a similar process, traces of which were revealed by Swiss scientists in Greenland, make it possible to call the first epochs of the Triassic period a kind of “era of extinctions”.
Kolesnikov Andrey