For this week only the Royal Tyrrell Museum’s Speaker Series has changed from Thursday, to Friday, February 8 at 11 a.m.
Dr. Benoit Beauchamp, professor of geology at the University of Calgary, will present a talk entitled “Permian-Triassic mayhem: lead-up, catastrophe and aftermath of the Earth’s largest mass extinction viewed from Arctic Canada.”
Nearly 245 million years ago at the end of the Permian period, the Earth witnessed the largest mass extinction in its history, where nearly 95 per cent of all species living at the time, both on land and in the seas, disappeared.
Volcanic eruptions, meteoritic impacts, climate change, and a multitude of possible causes have been invoked to explain such a massive extinction event, but clear evidence for a cause has been hard to find until now.
In his talk, Beauchamp will discuss new research based on extraordinary outcrops in the Canadian Arctic that give insight into the causes of the Permo-Triassic mass extinction. He will show how a perfect storm of detrimental conditions that include ocean acidification, massive volcanic eruptions and extreme global warming led to a natural catastrophe that took the Earth nearly 8 million years to recover from.