250 million years ago, volcanoes erased the entire Earth Forest

Massive volcanic eruptions have wiped out all the forests on Earth 250 million years ago, leaving a planet with only wood-eating mushrooms - new research says.

The results confirm that even the most resilient plants cannot survive the Permian mass extinction event, one of the biggest loss events of Earth life to date. .

During the Great Dooms, more than 95% of marine life and 70% of shallow organisms disappeared, most of them were victims of toxic gas eruptions from the long, special volcanic eruption. is in Siberia today.

The eruption has caused acid rain on a global scale and destroyed the ozone layer, causing the ultraviolet rays from the sun to destroy the Earth's surface more.

Until now, researchers have not found much material evidence of what happened to plants in the mass extinction event. Therefore, some assume that Permian forests are relatively intact.

But the new study confirms that plants have also suffered tremendous destruction.

Trees are devastated by acid rain in a heavily polluted area called the "Black Triangle" in Northern Czechoslovakia in 1991. (Photo: Tom Stoddart / Getty Images)

Research author Mark Sephton, a geochemist working at Imperial College London, said: "After the eruption process, " the world became a strange green field, with all kinds of simple plants like pineal (a moss plant), and a lot of dead bodies'.

And woody plants are almost rare during the next 4 million years. But fungi, plants that are able to withstand acid conditions, already exist.

Mushroom growth

Fossil fungal spores found in rocks dating back to the Permian extinction event show the development of a group of ancient organisms called Reduviasporonites. Scientists have argued around the question of whether these organisms are photosynthetic algae or wood-eating fungi.

To answer this question, Sephton and his colleagues analyzed the different types of carbon and nitrogen found in Reduviasporonites and obtained the same results as modern fungi. The team found that ancient organisms have a similar chemical composition to fungi that live on dead trees.

Consequently, the booming development of Reduviasporonites means that many species of trees have died in the extinction event and facilitated fungal growth . Sephton said today, the same dominant mushroom phenomenon is also found in the Czech Republic. The cause of this phenomenon is that acid rain produced by burning a large amount of brown coal killed large areas of forest, enabling wood-eating mushrooms to proliferate.

On a global scale, human activity is disrupting the equilibrium of atmospheric gases with the speed 'fastest ever seen in geological history,' Sephton added.

In addition, declining herd diversity now has many similarities to the first phase of the Permian extinction event.

'This is a great experience of humanity, and we cannot know where things will go.'

Detailed results of the study are published in Geology.