Wu Qiong, Zhang Hua, Ramezani Jahandar, Zhang Fei-Fei, Erwin Douglas H, Feng Zhuo, Shao Long-Yi, Cai Yao-Feng, Zhang Shu-Han, Xu Yi-Gang, Shen Shu-Zhong
Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Guangzhou), Guangzhou 511458, China.
State Key Laboratory for Mineral Deposits Research and School of Earth Sciences and Engineering, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China.
Sci Adv. 2024 Feb 2;10(5):eadi7284. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adi7284. Epub 2024 Jan 31.
The end-Permian mass extinction was the most severe ecological event during the Phanerozoic and has long been presumed contemporaneous across terrestrial and marine realms with global environmental deterioration triggered by the Siberian Traps Large Igneous Province. We present high-precision zircon U-Pb geochronology by the chemical abrasion-isotope dilution-thermal ionization mass spectrometry technique on tuffs from terrestrial to transitional coastal settings in Southwest China, which reveals a protracted collapse of the Cathaysian rainforest beginning after the onset of the end-Permian marine extinction. Integrated with high-resolution geochronology from coeval successions, our results suggest that the terrestrial extinction occurred diachronously with latitude, beginning at high latitudes during the late Changhsingian and progressing to the tropics by the early Induan, spanning a duration of nearly 1 million years. This latitudinal age gradient may have been related to variations in surface warming with more degraded environmental conditions at higher latitudes contributing to higher extinction rates.
二叠纪末大灭绝是显生宙最严重的生态事件，长期以来人们一直认为它在陆地和海洋领域是同时发生的，是由西伯利亚地幔柱大火成岩省引发的全球环境恶化所致。我们采用化学磨蚀-同位素稀释-热电离质谱技术，对中国西南部从陆地到过渡性海岸环境的凝灰岩进行了高精度锆石U-Pb年代测定，结果显示华夏雨林在二叠纪末海洋灭绝开始后就出现了长期的崩溃。结合同期地层的高分辨率年代测定，我们的结果表明陆地灭绝随纬度呈穿时性发生，始于长兴期末期的高纬度地区，并在印度期早期向热带地区推进，持续时间近100万年。这种纬度年龄梯度可能与地表变暖的变化有关，高纬度地区环境条件恶化程度更高，导致灭绝率更高。
