EGU23-6194
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-6194
EGU General Assembly 2023
© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Early Triassic super-greenhouse climate driven by vegetation collapse

Zhen Xu1,2, Jianxin Yu1, Hongfu Yin1, Andrew Merdith2, Jason Hilton3, Bethany Allen4,5, Khushboo Gurung2, Paul Wignall2, Alexander Dunhill2, Jun Shen6, David Schwartzman7, Yves Goddéris8, Yannick Donnadieu9, Yuxuan Wang2, Yinggang Zhang2, Simon Poulton2,6, and Benjamin Mills2
Zhen Xu et al.
  • 1School of Earth Sciences, State Key Laboratory of Biogeology and Environmental Geology, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, P.R. China
  • 2School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
  • 3School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, UK
  • 4Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering, ETH Zürich, Basel, Switzerland
  • 5Computational Evolution Group, Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Lausanne, Switzerland
  • 6State Key Laboratory of Geological Processes and Mineral Resources, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, P.R. China
  • 7Department of Biology, Howard University, Washington DC, USA
  • 8Géosciences Environnement Toulouse, CNRS-Université de Toulouse III, Toulouse, France
  • 9CEREGE, Aix Marseille Université, CNRS, IRD, INRA, Coll France, Aix-en-Provence, France

The Permian–Triassic Mass Extinction (PTME), life’s most severe crisis1, has been attributed to intense global warming triggered by CO2 emissions from Large Igneous Province volcanism2–8. It remains unclear, however, why super-greenhouse conditions persisted for around five million years after the volcanic episode, when Earth system feedbacks should have returned temperatures to pre-extinction levels within a few hundred thousand years8. Here we reconstruct spatio-temporal maps of plant productivity through the Permian–Triassic and undertake climate-biogeochemical modelling to investigate the unusual longevity and intensity of warming. Our reconstructions show that terrestrial vegetation collapse during the PTME, especially in tropical regions, resulted in an Earth system with low levels of organic carbon sequestration and chemical weathering, leading to limited drawdown of greenhouse gases and protracted period of extremely high surface temperatures.

How to cite: Xu, Z., Yu, J., Yin, H., Merdith, A., Hilton, J., Allen, B., Gurung, K., Wignall, P., Dunhill, A., Shen, J., Schwartzman, D., Goddéris, Y., Donnadieu, Y., Wang, Y., Zhang, Y., Poulton, S., and Mills, B.: Early Triassic super-greenhouse climate driven by vegetation collapse, EGU General Assembly 2023, Vienna, Austria, 24–28 Apr 2023, EGU23-6194, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-6194, 2023.