Sarah McGrew

International Journal of Marine Science, Aqua Publisher, Richmond, BC, V7A 4Z5, Canada
Author    Correspondence author
International Journal of Marine Science, 2024, Vol. 14, No. 2   doi: 10.5376/ijms.2024.14.0016
Received: 10 Feb., 2024    Accepted: 21 Mar., 2024    Published: 29 Apr., 2024

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

McGrew S., 2024, Land-sea asynchrony: revealing the temporal discrepancy in terrestrial and marine extinctions at the end of the permian, International Journal of Marine Science, 14(2): 130-133 (doi: 10.5376/ijms.2024.14.0016)

On January 31, 2024, Shu Zhong Shen and his research team published an article in the journal Science Advances titled "The terrestrial end Permian mass extraction in the paleotropics postdates the marine extrapolation." The article investigated the temporal shift of the last Permian mass extinction between land and ocean, focusing mainly on the land and transitional coastal strata in southwestern China. By high-precision zircon U-Pb isotope dating of tuff samples from several key strata, it was revealed that the collapse of terrestrial ecosystems actually began after the mass extinction of marine organisms. The analysis results show that the extinction process of this terrestrial ecosystem is not only later than that of marine ecosystems, but also exhibits significant asynchrony at different latitudes. Research has shown that the extinction of terrestrial organisms began in high latitude areas and gradually expanded to low latitude areas, with the entire extinction process spanning nearly one million years. The possible environmental and biological response mechanisms discussed in the article during the extinction process provide a new geological and temporal framework for understanding one of the most serious biological crises in Earth’s history.

Marine ecosystems; The end of the Permian; Tuff samples