{"id":224959,"date":"2025-03-17T06:55:07","date_gmt":"2025-03-17T10:55:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=224959"},"modified":"2025-03-20T16:20:39","modified_gmt":"2025-03-20T20:20:39","slug":"plants-struggled-for-millions-of-years-after-the-worlds-worst-climate-catastrophe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2025\/03\/plants-struggled-for-millions-of-years-after-the-worlds-worst-climate-catastrophe\/","title":{"rendered":"Plants Struggled for Millions of Years After the World\u2019s Worst Climate Catastrophe"},"content":{"rendered":"

A team of scientists from University College Cork (Ireland), the University of Connecticut (USA), and the Natural History Museum of Vienna (Austria) have uncovered how plants responded to catastrophic climate changes 250 million years ago. Their findings, published in GSA Bulletin<\/a>, reveal the long, drawn-out process of ecosystem recovery following one of the most extreme periods of warming in Earth\u2019s history: the “End-Permian Event.”<\/p>\n

UConn Department of Earth Sciences<\/a> Professor and Department Head Tracy Frank<\/a>, Professor Chris Fielding<\/a>, and Associate Professor Michael Hren<\/a> are co-authors on the paper. Frank and Hren performed a series of geochemical analyses through the sedimentary strata recording the event to help tie down ancient climate conditions, and Fielding provided sedimentological data to constrain ancient environmental conditions.<\/p>\n

The End-Permian Extinction, also known as the Great Dying, is the most severe ecological crisis of the past 500 million years.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is believed to have entailed a five-fold increase in atmospheric CO2<\/sub>, global temperature rise of up to 10\u00b0 C or more, ozone depletion, widespread wildfires, and changes in rainfall patterns across the Earth\u2019s surface,\u201d says Fielding.<\/p>\n

With more than 80% of ocean species wiped out, the end-Permian event was the worst mass extinction of all time. But the impacts of this event for life on land have been elusive. By examining fossil plants and rocks from eastern Australia\u2019s Sydney Basin, researchers have pieced together a multi-million-year story of resilience, recovery, and the long-term effects of climate change following the Great Dying.<\/p>\n

The long, unsteady path to ecosystem recovery<\/strong><\/p>\n

The fossils from these Australian rocks show that conifers, like modern pines, were some of the earliest to colonize the land immediately after the End-Permian catastrophe. However, the recovery back to flourishing forests was not smooth sailing.<\/p>\n

The researchers discovered that even higher temperatures during the “Late Smithian Thermal Maximum,” approximately 3 million years after the End-Permian Extinction, caused the collapse of these conifer survivors. In turn, they were replaced by tough, shrubby plants resembling modern clubmosses. This scorching period lasted for about 700,000 years and made life challenging for trees and other large plants.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t until a subsequent significant cooling event\u2014the “Smithian-Spathian Event”\u2014that large, but unusual plants called “seed ferns” began to flourish and establish more stable forests. These plants eventually came to dominate Earth\u2019s landscapes for millions of years, paving the way for the lush forests during the Mesozoic “age of dinosaurs.”<\/p>\n

\u201cThe first post-apocalyptic floras were \u2018opportunistic\u2019 in nature, perhaps the equivalent of what in the modern world are called \u2018weeds.’ These plants were mostly small, and were sparsely distributed. Larger trees and other more complex plant types took considerable time to become established as surface conditions gradually improved,\u201d says Fielding.<\/p>\n

After millions of years, the forest ecosystems of the Mesozoic came to look like those from before the end-Permian collapse. But crucially, the plant species that made up the new forests were completely different. \u201cThe term \u2018recovery\u2019 can be misleading\u201d says Chris Mays, Leader of the Mass Extinction Group<\/a> at University College Cork, \u201cforests recover eventually, but extinction is forever.\u201d<\/p>\n

What does this mean for us?<\/strong><\/p>\n

By understanding how ancient plant ecosystems weathered extreme climate swings, researchers hope to learn valuable lessons about how modern plants and ecosystems might cope with today\u2019s climate crisis. Ecosystems depend on a fragile balance, with plants as the backbone of land food webs and climate regulation.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis research highlights how crucial plants are, not just as the base of land food chains, but also as natural carbon sinks that stabilize Earth\u2019s climate,\u201d explains Ph.D. student Marcos Amores, the study\u2019s lead author, who spent time in the UConn Earth Science Department as a visiting scholar. \u201cThe disruption of these systems can have impacts lasting hundreds of thousands of years, so protecting today\u2019s ecosystems is more important than ever.\u201d<\/p>\n

This deep dive into Earth\u2019s distant past reminds us that plants are unsung heroes of life on Earth\u2014then, now, and in the future.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe protracted and complex path back to \u2018normality\u2019 after the end-Permian crisis tells us that Earth can recover from devastating environmental tipping points, but that recovery may take periods of time beyond the range of human endurance or even existence,\u201d says Fielding.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Can plants reveal the secrets of survival during Earth\u2019s darkest days?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":58,"featured_media":226559,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1805,2226,2624,2648,2076,2387,2235],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[117],"class_list":["post-224959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-climate-change","category-clas","category-blue","category-blue-research","category-research","category-sustainability","category-today-homepage"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-10 07:55:22","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/58"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224959"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224959\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":226904,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224959\/revisions\/226904"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/226559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224959"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=224959"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=224959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}