The world today teems with life
Wherever you look, something is alive
Then imagine 95% of all this dying in one go
It's not a fantasy. It did happen 250 million years ago
It was the day, the earth nearly died
The Karroo Basin in South Africa
A region of hunting and inhospitable beauty
This is an area where little grows and man and beast struggle to survive
But it hasn't always been like this
Almost 300 million years ago
during what scientists called the Permian period
it was an oasis
The scene would have been low-lying plains
perhaps with mountains in the distance meandering rivers, lots of plants around the sides of those rivers low plants like ferns and so on
and then in the background some trees of very unusual type
This was a time millions of years before the dinosaurs
when strange and half forgotten creatures walked the earth
They were called thorapsids
half mammal, half reptile
The first creatures ever to fullly conquer life on land
In any one locality you'd find 50 or 60 different species of reptiles living side by side
specialized on different diets, different habitats and so on
This is the skull of dicynodon
It's sitting with the top of the skull just here coming down to the snout
This is a tortoise-like beak that sits under here
Dicynodon was a hippo-sized plant eater
Filled the niche of the cow in a modern day pasture except these would live in herds and roam around the Permian flood plains
Its principle predator was dinogorgon, the king of the Permian jungle
These were real terrors. The first time the world had ever seen such top carnivores as they're called
They had sabre teeth this sort of length
and just like the famous sabre tooth cats of much later
They would leap on the backs of these hippopotamus-sized plant
just piercing through their thick skin tearing the flesh
For 30 million years these strange creatures ruled the earth
This was a thriving, stable world as complete in its own way as ours is today
Then, around 250 millions years ago, almost every living thing suddenly died
The fossil record shows that the rock beds at the end of the Permian period contained absolutely no fossils
No signs of life at all
This is the dead zone
This zone represents what it was like here after the mass extinction
We have never found anything that represents life in this zone
This is what we would call barren
There's no evidence of plant life there's no evidence of soils - and especially there's no evidence of animals
This is completely dead
We're going from this very rich place to a biological desert
Form a place that's like a rainforest to a place that is composed of a few species eking out an existence
Scientists call this utter destruction of life the Permian mass extinction
Never in the history of the planet was there a catastrophe that was so widespread, so devastating and so all-inclusive
The Permian mass extinction was far more terrible than the later extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs
The dinosaurs extinction that happened 65 million years ago
killed off maybe 60% of most of the species on the planet
There's still plenty of life around
But I get the sense that were one to go back to the Permian extinction right afterward you would see virtually nothing of life
At the end of the Permian era 95% of all life died
It was the biggest reverse in the forward march of evolution ever recorded
Yet, until recently, almost nothing was known about this extraordinary event
Nobody could explain why it had happened
or even whether it would happen again
Scientists have spent years digging in Permian rocks for clues
Yet, wherever they looked they could find no evidence of the cause of death
No footsteps, no finger prints
It seemed as if the killer had arrived and departed without a trace
Then in the early 1990s they stumbled on something
Buried under the frozen wastes of Siberia are thousands of miles of lava
It's an area known as the Siberian Traps
Today the region is covered in snow and vegetation
but below the surface are the ancient remains of the biggest and most destructive volcanic eruptions the world has ever witnessed
250 million years ago hundreds of thousands of square miles of Siberia caught fire
One of the first scientists who looked at it in detail was Vincent Courtillot
I probably would have seen a curtain of red glowing fire rising a mile high up in the atmosphere
extending from end to end of the horizon over a distance of hundreds of kilometers
It's a phenomenon known as a flood basalt eruption
When the earth crusts splits apart and releases curtains of lava across an entire continent
The eruptions can last for millions of years
Nobody is quite sure why they happen
You get a huge eruption and another and another
and maybe a lull and another bunch of 10 and then another
all together over a few hundred thousand years
The earth is almost continuously spewing out lava - until after a million years or so, millions of cubic kilometers have erupted
so this is a truly gigantic volcanic object thousands, tens of thousands of times larger than anything man has ever seen
Courtillot now began to wonder what such a volcanic monster would do to life on earth
Were the Siberian Traps the Permian killer?
Though nobody had ever seen a flood basalt eruption he did have one clue
Just over 200 years ago, in a region of Iceland called Laki
a tiny but similar eruption altered the climate of the Northern Hemisphere
Benjamin Franklin, the America Ambassador in Paris at the time
recorded the effect on Europe's climate
The skies were clogged with volcanic ash
It was a summer when the sun never shone
Snow fell during August
That winter was one of the worst winters in living memory
That winter of 1783/1784 there were strange fogs, brown fogs
snow, unusual amounts of snow fell and actually the winter continued onto the next summer
This was called the year without a summer
There was no grape, no wine, the wheat didn't ripen
and actually that foul weather was observed in North America and in Japan and China
Using the evidence from Laki, Courtillot now built a model of how the Siberian Traps might have destroyed the world
First there would have been eruptions sending thousands of tons of dust and ashes into the sky
Slowly the sun would have been blocked out
and temperatures would have fallen
First we'll enter a winter, a volcanic winter
the dust and the sulphur will cool the atmosphere after each eruption
for years or tens of years
It would have been like a nuclear winter
lasting decades
But that would have been just the beginning
As the sky's cleared vast quantities of gas given off by the burning lava
would have slowly wrapped the earth in a blanket of carbon dioxide
an extremely powerful greenhouse gas
Gradually, over thousands of years there would have been massive global warming
The carbon dioxide will lead to a greenhouse effect and the cold will be replaced by unusual hot time
So you get the double hit, you're cold for a while
and then hot for a longer time
So that altogether after a million years the earth would be different
The climate would be different and a mass extinction would have happened
It seemed as though Courtillot must have found the cause of the extinction
Here was a truly massive destructive event that had happened at exactly the right time
Yet the evidence was not as straight forward as it appeared
In America, geologist Peter Ward was alos looking at the evidence
He knew that to do so much damage the change in world temperatures would have had to have been rapid and dramatic
You have to have a very sudden, but very large increase in temperature
to have done the mayhem and the destruction that is this mass extinction
Ward looked more closely at the data from the Siberian Traps
He estimated the amount of lava they'd produced
and used this to calculate how much carbon dioxide they would have emitted
He then calculated what this would have done to world temperatures
We've looked at the Traps, the Siberian Traps
we've tried to estimate how much gas would have come out of them - and how much warming would that have done
and it turns out that in the worst case scenario, and of course for the world it was a worst case
they may have raised the temperature of the earth about 5 ˇăC
The geological record shows that when world temperatures rise abruptly by 4/5 ˇăC
many species will die
but he could also see there was no evidence that such an increase would wipe out 95% of all life
His calculation showed that to do that would require a much bigger increase in temperature, perhaps double
Well, scientist estimate that a rapid temperature rise of maybe 10 ˇăC is going to be necessary to kill off so many animals and plants and everything else
5 ˇăC, the Siberian Traps with their 5ˇăC, it would have created certainly climate change
but a massive extinction? I don't think so
It seemed there was a flaw in Courtillot's theory
The Siberian eruption would have been deadly but not that deadly
Something even more catastrophic must have been at work
In 1998 the search for clues took American geologist Mike Rampino to the Alps
It's one of the only places in Europe where there are Permian fossils
Rampino had been trying to understand the extinction for some years
and thought one vital piece of information was missing
Nobody knew with any certainty how long the extinction had taken
He believed that if he could find this out he'd have a clue to its identity
Was he looking for a hit-and-run killer or something slower?
One of the things we'd like to know about the Permian mass extinction was how rapid it was
how long did it take for those, all of those organisms to become extinct?
He planed to use a radically new dating system
It's based on the fact that the fossil record charting the end of the Permian era is preserved in a thin layer of rock
If it could work out how long it had taken for this rock to be deposited
he'd know how long the extinction had taken
The Permian rocks lie just below the next geological period
the Triassic
This is the Permian/Triassic boundary,
the boundary between the Permian rocks below us and the Triassic rocks above us
and this is the boundary where the mass extinction takes place
What we're trying to do here is to determine how long it took for the sediments at the boundary in which the mass extinction took place to be deposited
Rampino's system relied on the observation that the earth's orbit round the sun alters minutely every 23,000 years
This produces small changes in the climate
This, in turn, produces distinctive bands in the rock one every 23,000 years
Rampino took photos of the rock bands
and fed them into a laptop
When I digitally enhance the photographs I can manipulate the data to bring out the 23,000 year cycle
and that gives me a time-frame in which to put the mass extinction
It's like a giant tape measure dividing an entire mountain into a series of 23,000 year divisions
Rampino then fitted the layer of rock containing the evidence of the extinction into this pattern of cycles
It covered less than half a cycle, 8,000-10,000 years, far faster than anyone had thought possible
What this tells me is that the mass extinction took place in an astonishingly short period of time
less than 10,000 years and possibly instantaneously
This means that that mass extinction was catastrophic
To have destroyed so much of life so quickly the killer must have been extraordinarily violent
Rampino could think of only one thing it could be
A mass extinction that happens at less than 10,000 years is very abrupt
It fits the picture of a large impact at the end of the Permian
Rampino was now convinced a huge meteor had slammed into the earth 250 million years ago
Shockwaves would have raced around the globe instantly killing everything within hundreds of miles
When an asteroid or comet that large hits the earth it's the equivalent of a billion atomic bombs going off at the same time in the same place
Almost immediately afterwards millions of tons of dust would have shut out of the sun
It would all have happened very rapidly
much faster than the climate changes caused by a flood basalt eruption
Temperatures would have plummeted almost overnight
Makes a huge crater and throws a tremendous amount of dust and debris up into the earth's atmosphere
and you end up with a catastrophic situation for life on the planet
Rampino's calculation suggested this would've been a far bigger, harsher, more rapid nuclear winter than anything the Siberian Traps could have caused
Life would have rapidly become almost impossible
A meteor from outer space sounds like science fiction
but there has been a similar case
Most scientists now accept that 65 million years ago the dinosaurs were wiped out by just such an event
but the Permian meteor would have been even bigger
The asteroid that hit the earth at the time of the dinosaur extinction was at least 10km diameter
The Permian mass extinction is even more severe
so the asteroid that hit it that time must have been even larger, perhaps 15km in diameter
It seemed the perfect answer
A meteor the size of Manhattan had wiped out most of life on earth
Yet something didn't add up
Nothing that size could hit the earth and not leave a trace
The meteor that had wiped out the dinosaurs had left a giant fingerprint in the shape of a crater
just off the coast of Mexico where was the Permian crater
No matter where they looked nobody could find anything dating from the Permian era
but then a scientist from London came up with a totally new idea
Adrian Jones models the effects of impacts on the earth's crust
He now suggested geologists were searching for the wrong thing
In a conventional view of an impact
we have a high speed asteroid which hits the earth's crust
and makes a crater instantaneously which is very deep Immediately after the crater is formed this deep shape the compressed rock
underneath the crater rebounds
and the crater expands to be a much shallower shape
So under normal circumstance there would be a large shallow crater
but Johns believes that when a really massive meteor hits the earth something else happens too
What we think happens is that in addition to the energy from the asteroid itself
an enormous amount of energy is released when the crater here is transforming back to its shallow shape
John's theory is that as the crust rebounds from the impact of the meteor it generates far greater quantities of heat than anybody had thought possible
He built a computer model to see what would happen to a crater if this occurred
The impact causes a deep crater
This rebounds to create a wider, shallower one
but then if the meteor is very large something new happens
It melts the earth's crust and lava is released
And the final part of the model shows that lava has filled the crater and flowed beyond the edges of the crater
and the original crater structure we can see the walls here is completely drowned by the large volume of lava
so that there's no outward shape of the crater visible from the surface
It meant the Permian crater would have entirely filled with lava
The reason nobody had found a crater was because there wasn't one
It was a fascinating idea
but was it also too neat?
When a large meteor hits the earth it leaves more than one fingerprint
It also leaves a trail of shattered rock and dust which are blasted around the globe by the force of the collision
If John was right the Permian meteor should have left similar traces
But despite looking in Permian rocks the length and breadth of the planet
nobody could find a single trace of the meteor
Greg Retallack was one of those involved in the search
He concentrated his efforts in Antarctica
There was definitely a missing piece to this whole thing
and we struggled with, to find out what that was and the clue was in front of us actually for quite some time
In the middle 1990s, he led an expedition to see what was there
It was really the trip of a lifetime and it was something I'd wanted to do for about 15 years before
The team spent weeks exploring the Permian rocks
but one bed of rock in particular attracted his attention
We knew it was the very latest Permian bed and inside that bed there were quartz grains that had some very unusual features
Quartz is the most common crystal on earth
It's most frequently white and translucent
Most of the quartz is just like this grain that I'm on now and it's a very clear grain
Looking through the microscope the light shines through it brightly, it looks white
But some of these crystals weren't white or clear
This quartz had a very strange set of parallel fracture-like fused planes running through it at several angles
Something had shuttered the quartz
Retallack knew that only a force of enormous size could create these patterns
It seemed there must have been a huge meteor
It looks as though he had found the traces everybody had been looking for
Yet again, something didn't fit
As Retallack looked further at the new evidence there was a surprise
The meteor that had wiped out the dinosaurs had left huge quantities of shattered quartz
It had also left traces of a metal mainly found in outer space called iridium
It's a common component of meteors
When a meteor wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago it left abundant evidence of itself
There's a thin deposit of rocks that fell out of the atmosphere after this huge explosion
and it has within it
bits of quarts that are shattered by the pressure and it has iridium which came from the asteroid itself
Yet Retallack's samples contained very little of either of these materials
One would expect if the meteor solution was the whole answer
that we would get a bigger input of shot quartz and iridium at the Permian/Triassic boundary
that at the one where the dinosaurs went extinct and it was the other way around
No traces of iridium dust and not much shattered quartz
It didn't add up
For a meteor to kill 95% of all life on earth it should have been the size of Manhattan
Yet the evidence suggested that if there had been a meteor at the end of the Permian era
it had been far too small to destroy the world
The Permian killer had, once again, eluded scientists
Paul Wignall, a geologist at the University of Leeds, had always been doubtful about the meteor theory
It's a nice theory, it nicely explains the end of the dinosaurs
in the later extinction event, but for this particular extinction I just don't think there's any convincing
Wignall suspected all the explanations for the extinction had been based on insufficient data
He also knew there was one place he might find more
Greenland
It's a country known to contain Permian rock
but always considered too difficult to explore
In the late 1990s he took a gamble and flew out there
Piled all our stuff onto a helicopter, flew out into this wilderness
they dropped us in the middle of nowhere and left us there for several weeks
Their first task was to find the Permian rock
Nobody even knew where it was
Some of us had never been there before and we weren't exactly sure where we needed to look
We had a lot of exploration, a lot of wandering around to do before we knew what we were looking for
But finally they found what they had come for
It exceeded their widest dreams
Instead of the usual narrow band of rock strata
the sediments containing the record of the extinction stretched for meters above and below them
It was one of the best records of the Permian mass extinction ever found
We were astounded by just how much, how much cliff there was to examine
The whole Permian extinction story seemed to be spread through tens of meters of cliff
and the fossils that we could collect were showing us a beautiful
detailed story that was telling us a lot more than we'd known previously about the timing of what was going on at this time
Yeah....
Even to the naked eye, one thing was blindingly obvious
The meteor theorists had got the timing wrong
The Greenland rock showed that the extinction had been a gradual event
In fact, it appeared to drag on for tens of thousand of years
We could see that the extinction wasn't occurring instantaneously, but in fact was spread over several,
a certain amount of rock, so we could see it was being spread over a certain amount of time
Wignall now suspected he was onto something big
The expedition spent a month amassing samples
They shipped back 20 crates of rock to Britain
It seemed at last that the Permian killer might reveal its secret
Back in Leeds, Wignall realized he'd stumbled on a treasure trove of fossils
Buried in the rock samples were thousands of them
Many so small they had to be extracted in an acid bath
His team was overwhelmed by what they'd got
We were so excited with this story that we were working weekends and just buckets and buckets of rocks all being broke down
we, excitingly we were just sieving them through, getting all the fossils out
Wignall's sediments began to reveal the most detailed account of the extinction ever uncovered
There was just a huge range of little tiny fossils in these rocks
which were telling us in fantastic detail just what was going on at this time
and there was no need to guess anymore, we could actually see the order in which things were
going extinct and get the full extinction story right from the beginning all the way through to the end
For the first time he was able to work out exactly what had happened
It was a complete surprise
The extinction had occurred in 3 distinct phases
The extinction crisis first begins on land
and what we see is species of plants, species of animals start disappearing
about 40,000 years this goes on for
This was the first phase
a period when some, but by no means all, land species died
And then what happens next at about 40,000-45,000 years after the crisis has begun is that we see a really quite sharp, abrupt extinction in the seas at this time
so this is the marine extinction event, much shorter and sharper than what we see on land
So the second phase of the extinction was the abrupt death of virtually everything in the sea
Then came the third phase
as the extinction moved back to the land
Following on from that we then see the culmination of the land extinction
so we start losing all our typical plants and all our typical animals as well
and this carries on to a point of about 80,000 years after the extinction began
Three long, slow phases, sprawled over at least 80,000 years
very different from how the meteor theorists had seen it
Yet Wignall was still no closer to understanding why it had happened or what the killer was
but he had found a clue
Analysis of the rock showed that just after the marine extinction but before the final death of everything on the land
there was a mysterious increase in a form of carbon, called carbon 12
This is normally produced by rotting plant and animal matter, but this was a huge increase, too big to be explained by that alone
Wignall realized that here was a fresh piece of evidence, something that, if he could understand it might provide the key to the Permian riddle
The Carbo12 increase is clearly telling us something. It's a clue to the nature of the Permian extinction.
There's something mysterious going on at this time, but exactly what it is not immediately apparent
The key to the puzzle would come from a totally unexpected quarter
Gerry Dickens is a geologist working on new sources of energy
He had no special interest in the Permian extinction
but one evening, sitting in a bar, he ran into a friend
We were just sort of chatting about what we were working on for the summer
and he was telling me that he was working on trying to understand how you could get
massive of 12 carbon quickly because some signatures had been found in the rock records
and it was very difficult to explain, it didn't make any sense
Dickens was curious
Several years earlier he'd spent time on a drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico prospecting for a new source of energy called methane hydrate
It's a gas frozen in huge reservoirs just below the seabed
Dickens knew this methane contained massive quantities of carbon 12
He also knew there were dozens of these methane hydrate reservoirs scattered around the world's coasts
We find 'em for instance along the coast of south America, along central America
all along the western coast of the US and Canada, indications round Australia, Indonesia
essentially anywhere along continental margins where you get a lot of organic matter that decays at the bottom and produces methane
Could these massive reservoirs of methane, he now wondered, be the source of the carbon 12 found in Permian rocks
and if it was, how did it get there?
Dickens started to investigate
Naturally occurring frozen methane is unstable and difficult to extract, so samples were artificially created in a lab
The big question is try to get methane from deep down in the ocean up to the atmosphere
He put blocks of the man-made methane into warmed water
The results were spectacular So it's disassociating deep down
Dickens found that even small pieces of frozen methane released enormous quantities of gas rich in carbon 12
The experiment supported what he'd suspected
the increase in carbon 12 could be the fingerprint of a massive methane release
He found something else as well
It would only take a small increase in water temperatures to melt the methane and release the carbon
To explain the amount of carbon 12 that we see in the geologic record we need to warm up the bottom water by somewhere in the order of about 5 ˇăC
He published his results in 1999
He couldn't have anticipated their effect
5,000 miles away in England, however, Paul Wignall read Dickens's findings with growing interest
Suddenly realized that in fact a lot of his ideas as to how to explain carbon 12 increases may actually apply to the
story we're getting from Greenland. It's a kind of a missing link in the story for the Permian extinction
Wignall now began to speculate
What would be the effect on the world's climate of so much methane?
It's one of the most potent greenhouse gases known to man
Wignall constructed a rough climate model using the carbon 12 as a guide to the quantities of methane
It's not that straightforward to work out just how significant the impact of this methane release would be
but it's possible to work out the volumes emitted using the evidence from the carbon 12 increase
and these certainly suggest that there may have been sufficient methane going into the atmosphere to perhaps increase global temperatures by 4/5 ˇăC
4/5 ˇăC, not enough to kill the world, but then Wignall realized this was only part of the story
For the methane to melt something must already have raised world temperatures 4/5 ˇăC
The methane would then have raised them a further 5 ˇăC more to a total of 10 ˇăC
This would have been more than enough to kill practically every living thing
Wignall slowly realized what the evidence from Greenland was telling him. There had not been one Permian killer, but 2
Paul Wignall now put together the extraordinary story of what might have happened 250 million years ago
It started, as many had thought, with the Siberian Traps
Thousands of miles of lava flows would have burst from cracks deep in the earth's crust
This was the first killer
Imagine the world for dicynodon as he crawls out of his hole in South Africa and looks at the sky
It may be a bit purple, it may be a bit blue or red because of the very distant volcanic eruptions in Russia
He may feel it a bit warmer at first. Year by year progressively this gets worse and worse
There would have been a freezing winter
followed by slow but steady global warming
Gradually the world would have heated up by 4-5 ˇăC
On land some species died
Then the sea must have headed up. Marine life would also have died
Then something new happened
The hotter water would have released the second killer from the deep
the methane
This huge injection of greenhouse gas now pushed world temperatures up a further 5 ˇăC
The world was now 10 ˇăC hotter
A temperature rise of 10 ˇăC may not sound very much
but 10 ˇăC would mean this part of the south of England would turn into the Sahara desert
Almost all life in every shape and form across the surface of the globe would have died
Here at long last was an explanation that tied up all the loose ends and accounted for all the evidence
The cause of the Permian mass extinction may finally have been found
It would take nearly 100,000 years for life on earth to begin to recover
When it did, a new family of creatures ruled the world. This was the birth of the age of the dinosaurs
but geologists have found that one of the strange, half mammal/half reptiles of the Permian world did survive
It was a cow-sized plant eater called lystrosaurus
This strange looking creature is one of the most important animals that ever walked the earth
because lystrosauras was the ancestor of all mammals and so, ultimately, of us
We're only here today because this odd looking creature somehow clung to life during the mother of all distinctions
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