CFE agenda 091117 - Laserfiche WebLink

Browse Search

period is punctuated with mysterious minor extinctions, like one that might have taken out sail - backed proto - mammals— creatures like science museum star Dimetrodon, whose bones are mostly known from neighboring Oklahoma and Texas. As the Permian planet limped to its finale plants and animals would continue to thrive elsewhere and, to the south, coral reefs in Texas would blossom as well, leaving behind the Guadalupe Mountains and a trillion of dollars of oil —but here in Kansas it was hell. Rocks similar to the Gyp Hills extend all the way to North Dakota, indicating that this wasn't some quirk of local geography like Death Valley. "This isn't local," says Knapp. "This is all of central Pangaea." Southern Methodist University geologist Neil Tabor has dubbed these vast lethal expanses that tools over the middle of the planet in the Permian the "wastelands of tropical Pangea." To Knapp the Kansan rocks indicated that much of the world was already getting quite weird in the run -up to the greatest mass extinction ever. One speculation, borne out by modeling, is that supercontinents promote giant and interiors that shut down the processes of rock weathering —the planet's most effective way of drawing down excess carbon dioxide over geological time spans. As a result, the Permian planet might have been less effective at regulating its temperature. "So what I like to talk about is 'the Great Weirding' and not just the Great Dying because the Great Dying seems to have been a relatively quick event at the very end. But if you just talk about the Great Dying you're missing all of this other crazy stuff that led up to it," he said. "The Earth was getting really weird in the Permian. So we're getting these huge lakes with these negative pHs, which is really weird, we don't know why that happened. Another thing is that the whole world turned red. Everything got red. You walk around today and you're like, 'Hey, there's a red bed, I bet it's Permian or Triassic.' The planet started looking like Mars. So that's really weird. We don't know why it turned red. Then you have a supercontinent, which is weird in the first place. Plate tectonics has to be acting strangely when you have all the continents together. Eventually it rifts apart and we go back into normal plate tectonics mode, but during the Permian - Triassic everything's jammed together. So there has to be something strange going on. And then at the end, the Earth opens up and there's all these volcanoes. But we're not talking about normal volcanoes, we're talking about weird volcanoes." As we continued north on Route 287, over the Colorado - Wyoming border, the trappings of society fell away and the sun set again over the pale grasslands. Driving through Carbon County, Wyoming, the unending darkness of the barren plains was pierced by a glittering Oz on the prairie. This was Sinclair, Wyoming, (named after the oil company) and an enormous, illuminated refinery twinkled like a lonely Manhattan, ceaselessly digesting carbon from the ancient seafloor day and night. "If we understood why things got so crazy in the Permian I would be a lot more comfortable," Knapp said, breaking the silence. To some geologists, the extraordinary nature of the end - Permian catastrophe represents a level of environmental chaos so extreme that humanity could never hope to emulate it. But Knapp wasn't so sure. "I see [a few] possibilities. The first is that things just really got that crazy. Shit happened. The second is that we just really don't understand positive feedback loops yet. That's the scary option. The third is that you can't do it without a supercontinent. We need to be studying these time periods when carbon dioxide caused problems, because right now we don't understand them at all. It should be a national priority to study the Permian to figure out what the hell happened." xH NEXT morning we set out from Rawlins, Wyoming, for the extinction boundary. But we couldn't look at the prototypical rock section, first described in the 1960s. "It's on a ranch and they won't let you access it anymore," Knapp said, eyes blearily searching the horizon, pulling from a cup of cheap coffee. "They say it's a liability thing but I think it's because they don't like geology and global warming and think the Earth's 6,000 years old. That's been the most challenging part of my work. I can't get access to any of the outcrops because they're all on ranches." The end - Permian rocks of Wyoming can be seen from space, or (more easily) from Google Maps. They appear as strange little shocks of crimson peeking out from under the faded tans of the prairie. In the northeast corner of the state they fleck the periphery of Devil's Tower. But there aren't many people studying these rocks. When Knapp returns to the same outcrop in central Wyoming every few years he finds his rock hammer on the same rock he left it on. We drove over a ridge that looked out over an empty basin and pulled off the road and into a small canyon of red rocks. At the top of the canyon the rocks gave up their Martian hue at long last, and were etched with the geological traces of tranquil lakes and river channels and even dinosaur footprints. Up in those rocks the Earth was finally recovering, and the reptiles of the Earth's most storied age —the Mesozoic — were making their tentative claims to a world that they would come to rule for more than 100 million years. But down here along the dusty trail was the end of the Permian, and the planet was still fighting for its life. In the huge stacks of red rock Knapp saw an alternating hellscape of sheet floods and red desert soils, and even some piles of bacterial slime that festered in grotesque ephemeral lakes.