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Mass Extinction Events Can Turn Freshwater Into Toxic Soup, And It's Already Happening - ScienceAlert
Sep 19, 2021 1 min, 8 secs

After the Permian extinction event 252 million years ago – the largest mass extinction event in Earth's history – there appears to have been a burst in bacterial and algal blooms, lasting for hundreds of thousands of years.

According to the geologic record in Australia, the damaging impacts of climate change and climate-driven deforestation during the Permian extinction event most likely caused a toxic soup to sprout in the Sydney Basin, one of the oldest known freshwater ecosystems in the world.

"We're seeing more and more toxic algae blooms in lakes and in shallow marine environments that's related to increases in temperature and changes in plant communities which are leading to increases in nutrient contributions to freshwater environments," says geologist Tracy Frank from the University of Connecticut.

Other deep-time records around the world have also found microbial blooms are common after warming-driven extinction events. The exception seems to be the very large asteroid event that caused the mass extinction of dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

This major episode caused vast amounts of dust and sulfate aerosols to rise into the atmosphere, but compared to volcanic activity, the meteorite only caused a modest increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature, not a sustained one. As such, freshwater microbes only seemed to undergo a short-lived burst after the extinction event.

"The end-Permian mass extinction event took four million years to recover from," Fielding says

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