A microbial feeding frenzy may have fueled the biggest mass extinction in Earth’s history, new research suggests.
The findings suggest that bacteria, with a little help from massive volcanism, produced large quantities of methane, thereby killing 90 percent of life on the planet.
more at Microbes May Have Fueled Permian Extinction, Earth’s Biggest.
I’ve often wondered if some of the mass extinctions were caused by life itself. Now, it sounds like that might have been true for the Permian Extinction.
If you think about it, the current Holocene Extinction, which we’re currently going through, is the same thing. We’re life, and we’re causing extinctions all over the biosphere. The question is whether we’ll eventually take it to the extent that we wreck our own food chain and go extinct ourselves.
SelfAwarePatterns 