Around two and a half billion years ago, some groups evolved to use photosynthesis instead of chemistry to acquire energy at the fringes of thriving microbial communities. These new photosynthesizers could colonize everything the light touched. But the gift of photosynthesis came with an unwanted by-product: oxygen. Oxygen in the archaean Ocean was as lethal as mustard gas. It had filled the oceans and then the air. The great oxygen extinction laid the foundation for the emergence of eukaryotes.
The reactive element poisoned everything in its path. Then it transformed the atmosphere stripping it off its insulating blanket of methane and plunging the planet into an ice age for 300 million years. Through this process, thick ice extended from the pole to the equator, and photosynthesizers died in their droves along the shallow shorelines.
Indeed the vast majority of ecosystems today rely on the photosynthesis that brought about such destruction life clung on by the thinnest of threads. Just one percent of all life in arcane oceans persisted into the next age, the proterozoic. Also, from this one percent, the living world was rebuilt.
How plants caused the first mass extinction? (Plants Evolution)
About 500 million years ago, In the middle of the Cambrian Period, the face of the Earth looked completely different. There was land, but no plants or animals lived on it anywhere. Instead, the dry land was rocky and barren, with no shrubs, trees, or grasses. But, clinging to the rocks and thin ancient soils was life, a paper-thin film of microbes. These microbes were most likely the only terrestrial life around. They had been for several billion years.
Timing: The first mass extinction, the Ordovician-Silurian extinction, occurred approximately 443 million years ago.
Climate Change: The primary cause of the extinction event was changes in the Earth’s climate, particularly a significant drop in global temperatures that led to an ice age.
Sea Level Changes: The cooling climate caused a drop in sea levels, leading to the loss of shallow marine environments where many organisms lived.
Limited Plant Impact: During the Ordovician-Silurian period, plants were in their early stages of development and limited to small, non-vascular species such as mosses and liverworts. They had not yet evolved complex root systems or reproductive structures.
Minor Role of Plants: Plants played a relatively minor role in causing the mass extinction. The main factors were climate change and its impacts on marine life.
Geological Processes: Mass extinctions are complex events influenced by various factors. Other factors involved in the Ordovician-Silurian extinction include geological processes, asteroid impacts, volcanic activity, and biological interactions.
Subsequent Influence: While plants did not significantly contribute to the first mass extinction, they have influenced ecosystems and subsequent mass extinctions throughout Earth’s history.
Scientists think these ancient microbial films were made of cyanobacteria and some of the first fungi. Each bacterium sent out tiny filaments of cells from the leading bacterial mat to start new colonies. For a good chunk of Earth’s history, cyanobacteria monopolized the terrestrial environment. Those newcomers would end up changing the world.
Their arrival would make the world colder and fast. It would drain much of the oxygen out of the world’s oceans. Eventually, it would help cause a massive extinction event. Around 85% of animal species, including a quarter of marine animal families, disappeared from the planet forever. This environmental catastrophe is known today as the End-Ordovician Extinction Event. It was the first of the Big Five mass extinctions in history.
So, what could’ve caused such a massive global calamity? Scientists think it may have been kicked off by the world’s first tiny terrestrial plants. Unlike animals, plants tend to leave behind a terrible fossil record. The earliest fossil record of land plants isn’t parts of their bodies. It’s their spores, the particles that ancient plants used to reproduce. Pollen didn’t exist when plants first made a move onto land.
Aquatic plants effect
In the 1990s, scientists found many plant spores in rocks from Saudi Arabia and the Czech Republic. These spores were dated 462 million years ago during that cooling event in the Ordovician Period. They came from land plants, not aquatic plants, because they had a thick covering that all land plant spores have today. This covering protects the spores from environmental stressors, like wind or flowing water.
Aquatic plants don’t have that because they don’t need it in their environment, which tends to be less harsh. This covering is also what allows spores to fossilize. They are produced in huge quantities in a variety of habitats. In 2010, even older spores were found in Argentina and dated 470 million years ago. But paleontologists think that the arrival of plants on land happened even earlier. It is based on dates produced by the method known as the molecular clock.
- By looking at the average number of changes in DNA over time, scientists can calculate when a type of organism evolved on Earth.
This method put plants on land at least 515 million years ago, in the middle of the Cambrian Period. Land plants started diversifying almost as soon as they left the oceans. The fossil spores in Argentina weren’t from one plant but at least five different kinds: a little community of Ordovician plants.
It’s hard to know what those plants were based on spores. But scientists can tell that they were non-vascular. It means they didn’t have the system of roots and tubes that many modern plants use to move water and nutrients around. Paleobotanists are still debating what exactly the first type of land plant was. But they agree it was small and moss-like, probably some green algae or liverwort. These were pioneering little plants, venturing from the water into conditions where they were at risk of drying out.
Scientists think that these early plants probably clung to rocks near the water. There, they released their spores, taking advantage of the tide to disperse them, as their ancestors had done for generations, and gradually transitioning from aquatic to terrestrial life.
- Over time, through natural selection, they acquired adaptations for life on land, like hard-walled spores and waxy coverings called cuticles. That allowed them to become more fully terrestrial.
It looks like their tendency to cling to rocks is what would have spelled disaster for life in the oceans. Today, the cryptogamic cover is the scientific name for living material that clings to rocks. It interacts with rocks, wearing them down over time and releasing minerals like phosphorus, potassium, and iron. Scientists have used modern cryptogamic covers to see how the first plants might have worn rocks down 500 million years ago.
- By growing moss on rocks and measuring the minerals released, they found that moss-covered rocks released 60 times more phosphorus than rocks without moss.
Once it’s freed from the rocks, the phosphorus gets washed away by rainfall, traveling over landscapes and eventually flowing into the oceans. Geologists have found evidence of this very phenomenon in the deep past. In modern-day New Mexico and Texas rock formations, they found phosphorus in deposits dating to the Late Ordovician Period. The American Southwest was underwater at this time, as plants were getting a foothold on land.
Those ancient deposits spelled doom for ocean animal life. That’s because phosphorus is one of the nutrients plants need for growth. But it’s usually in short supply. Plants can only get it from the breaking down of rocks. So a significant influx of phosphorus into the oceans would have caused an explosion of marine plants in the form of huge algal blooms.
After algae bloom, they eventually die and are broken down by bacteria. This process uses up a lot of the oxygen in the water. As a result, the ocean becomes oxygen-poor, hypoxic, or even anoxic, with no oxygen left. Since marine animals need oxygen, they can’t survive. But that’s not the only change caused by the phosphorus runoff.
A hypoxic ocean can also cool the climate. Carbon must bind with oxygen to cycle out of the ocean and into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. But when ocean water is hypoxic, the carbon gets buried in sediments and stays there. Buried organic carbon with no oxygen shows black shales in the geologic record—extensive black shale deposits in China and northern Africa, dating to the Late Ordovician. So, a cooler climate and an oxygen-poor ocean could undoubtedly have been behind the major extinction of ocean life.
Massive tectonic activity
Experts know that other things likely contributed to the extinction event similar to the plants. Namely, it was also a time of massive tectonic activity. New mountains were forming, like the Appalachians, and huge volcanic eruptions took place as the tectonic plates of the supercontinent Gondwana moved and folded against each other.
Some researchers even suspect that the gases spewed out by those volcanoes cooled the Earth, causing “volcanic winters.” Plus, acid rain likely caused rock weathering of the new mountains. It removed even more carbon from the atmosphere and drove even more global cooling. But, what stands out in the geologic record is how sudden this cold snap was.
Around 488 million years ago, the planet began to cool. The temperature continued to drop over the next 44 million years, which is pretty fast in geologic terms. Something else must have been at work to cause that amount of cooling in such a short timeframe. Based on the evidence and modern experimental work, that trigger might’ve been planted moving onto land. There’s no need to hate on plants because of all the downstream effects of their big terrestrial transition.
Conclusion
The first land plants were the spark that wreaked havoc on ocean biodiversity, but they also paved the way for all the terrestrial life that came after. Because those tiny plants set up the conditions for more sophisticated terrestrial life to evolve, they built up a rich soil base through death and decomposition. Also, they gradually flooded the atmosphere with oxygen.
Over time, the plants themselves took over the land. Their roots became longer to tap deeper for nutrients. Vascular tissue began to carry water and minerals around the plants, supporting the growth of much bigger plants. Later, massive changes, like the evolution of flowering plants, transformed the vegetation on Earth into the ancestors of the plants.
If it weren’t for the pioneering little plants that got a foothold on land half a billion years ago, the Earth might still be barren, rocky, and populated by microbial films.
More Articles:
How Plants Became Carnivorous?
How To Bring Back Extinct Animals?
Extinction History Of Dinosaurs
Top 20 Exoplanets That Can Support Life
How Sloths Went From The Seas To The Trees?
References:
Nee, S, “Extinction, slime, and bottoms.”
Plait, Phil, “Poisoned Planet.” Slate.
Ward, Peter D, “Impact from the Deep.”
Kluger, Jeffrey, “The Sixth Great Extinction Is Underway – and We’re to Blame.”
Kaplan, Sarah, “Earth is on the brink of a sixth mass extinction, scientists say, and it’s humans’ fault.”
Hance, Jeremy, “How humans drive the sixth mass extinction.”
“Vanishing: The Earth’s 6th mass extinction”.
Mason, Rosemary, “The sixth mass extinction and chemicals in the environment: our environmental deficit is now beyond nature’s ability to regenerate.”
Butterfield, “Macroevolution and macroecology through deep time.”
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