By Erin Wayman
The Permian period was hot, hot, hot: Around 270 million years ago, air temperatures near the equator may have soared to almost 74º Celsius or 165º Fahrenheit, scientists report March 18 in Geology. That’s far hotter than anywhere on Earth today.
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“I can’t even imagine what it would have been like,” says Neil Tabor, a sedimentary geochemist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, who wasn’t involved in the research. The intense heat may explain why plants and animals vanished from parts of the tropics at this time, he says, a disappearance that preceded the mass extinction that ended the Permian period 252 million years ago. Only microbes that thrive under extreme conditions could have survived such temperatures.
Evidence for the sweltering heat comes from Kansas, which was near the equator during the Permian, when the continents fused to form Pangaea. Previous work showed that, in the middle Permian, western Kansas was a desert where lakes of brine repeatedly formed, evaporated and left behind salt deposits. Geologist Kathleen Benison of West Virginia University in Morgantown and a colleague had determined that air temperatures there reached 50º C, no hotter than California’s Death Valley today.