Extreme weather events lasting more than a decade could have killed off forests 250 million years ago, contributing to Earth's worst ever mass extinction
They also triggered feedback processes that helped make this mass extinction as bad as it was, he says. “There are knock-on effects of this sort of El Niño event becoming stronger and lasting longer.”
Today, El Niño occurs when warm water in the western Pacific spreads eastwards across the surface of the ocean. This creates an area of abnormally warm water that heats the atmosphere andBefore the Permian extinction began, the researchers found, El Niños were probably of a similar intensity and duration as today. That is, the anomalously warm water was about 0.5°C hotter than average and the events lasted for a few months.
In the sea, the temperature variations would have been less severe, and marine animals can more easily migrate to avoid them. This explains why marine extinctions happened later, when global warming got more intense. “The killer extreme global warming that was the cause of marine extinction was worse because of these El Niños taking away the carbon sink,” says Farnsworth.
It isn’t clear if something similar will happen in the future. Computer models vary in their forecasts of how El Niños will change as the planet warms, says Farnsworth. But they are already having a bigger impact because
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Mega El Niños helped kill 90 percent of life on EarthLaura is a science news writer, covering a wide variety of subjects, but she is particularly fascinated by all things aquatic, paleontology, nanotechnology, and exploring how science influences daily life. Laura is a proud former resident of the New Jersey shore, a competitive swimmer, and a fierce defender of the Oxford comma.
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