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How quickly can life recover
after a global catastrophe?
Answers may lie in the fossil record
at the top of the world.
Scientists are looking at
the world's biggest extinction event
for clues about which species survived.
It's a huge endeavor.
When we get down this deep,
we get down to the permafrost,
and if you do the calculations,
this is somewhere between 60 and 70 tons
that was dug out by hand in two days.
I think we can do it.
Yeah, we could.
We could do it.
So I have a lot of really, really, good volunteers,
students, and other scientists with me
to do this kind of huge dig in a few days.
Dr. Jorn Hurum is a paleontologist
at the University of Oslo in Norway.
He's pioneering an investigation
into what species survived and emerged
after the largest mass extinction on our planet.
When we're talking about an extinction in paleontology,
it means total extinction,
and it almost wiped the whole blackboard completely.
It happened 252 million years ago.
It was not only a region of disaster,
but it was really the biggest disaster in Earth's history,
and of course there were life on land,
there were life in the ocean at that time,
and most of it got extinct.
Before it happened,
Permian Earth was a rich and diverse place.
Land masses had merged into the super-continent of Pangaea,
and the surrounding Panthalassic Ocean
was teeming with life.
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It's a beautiful environment.
It's warm waters.
You can see reefs, fish, bryozoans, you see trilobites.
You see ammonites swimming around.
It's a beautiful, complete ecosystem and, okay,
the species would be different
but they will feel all the niches
in an ecosystem that will be comparable
to like the Great Barrier Reef today.
So it's a very, very evolved environment
with lots of diversity.
Early amphibians were ruthless hunters.
There was a lot of amphibians at the end of the Permian.
They were large and many of them looked like
really big salamanders.
But some of them had the more pointy heads.
Some of them had round heads
and they could be up to several meters long,
so they were top predators in the environment.
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The Permian was a predator's paradise
farther inland, too.
(roaring)
They are end-of-the-Permian,
mammal-like reptiles on land.
They are synapsid reptiles.
(roaring)
They turn really big, like rhino size
and some people, when you look at them,
you say, okay, this is a dinosaur thing,
but it's not, it's really mammal-like reptiles
that live on land, in this big continent, Pangaea.
Every day was competitive and dangerous.
Then, without warning, a catastrophe
unlike anything our planet had ever experienced before.
Several miles beneath Earth's crust,
a shifting, simmering violence finally exploded.
About 252 million years ago,
on the border between what we call the Permian
and the Triassic time periods,
the biggest volcanic eruptions in Earth's history happened
and an area was covered in Siberia
that was between the size of India and Australia.
And not only it was this big, but it was also thick.
The thickness of this volcanic eruption,
all the things that came up with the volcanoes
was about 2,000 meters, if we average it.
That's over one mile thick.
Molten lava continued to spew for several million years.
But it wasn't just the inferno that was deadly.
The volcanics came in contact with evaporates.
There had been a large sea in the area
that completely dried out, like the Dead Sea today.
So you had big salt layers.
And, of course, if you boil salt,
you get a lot of nasty things
because salt has a lot of chloride
and when you start to boil chloride, you get a gas
that's really poisonous and there's always some sulfur
and if you start to boil the sulfur stuff,
you get poisons and you get acids.
Sulfuric acid.
Everything on land and in the sea was affected.
Suddenly, we see in the rock layers mud.
Just dark, gray mud.
And we can start to dig in it
and we can see that there's almost no life.
It's just covered with dead mud.
(dramatic music)
The dramatic end of the Permian
is known as the Great Dying.
And the oceans suffered the most.
If you're on the conservative side,
you say that 82% of all species in the ocean got extinct.
If you're on the more sensational part of the statistics,
you go for 96%.
But something between 82% and 96% of all species
in the ocean everywhere got extinct.
Even hardy, iconic species,
like trilobites vanished forever.
The disaster was so nearly complete
that in most places it would take 10 million years
for life to recover.
The period that begins just after the Permian extinction,
252 million years ago, is known as the Mesozoic Era.
Through some wonderful work done by Chinese
and English paleontologists for many years,
they see that life slowly appears again,
but the complex ecosystems that you see
for the rest of the Mesozoic,
they only appear after 10 million years.
But Jorn's team
has made a surprising breakthrough
by digging into the same geologic period
on the remote Arctic archipelago of Svalbard.
Svalbard is a great laboratory for
trying to understand the recovery
after this biggest extinction of them all
because you have the layers in the mountainsides
and you have no green, horrible stuff covering it.
You have no recent plants,
you have just these beautiful hillsides
that are blown completely clean every winter
and we have six weeks every summer to go there
and you can go layer by layer by layer up the mountains.
Life here recovered twice as fast.
The uppermost layers are the bone bed.
There's a large concretion here so
I'm trying to remove the bone bed from around it.
We have not published all of this yet,
but really, slowly, it appears to us
that we have quite a different time frame for the recovery.
We are down to at least half the time.
For the scientists, this was a revelation.
So, in China, 10 million years,
in Svalbard, five million years
to a full ecosystem with top predators.
We are trying now to push it down to four million years
after the extinction, so then it's six million year gap
between a large ecosystem close to the equator
and one on the northern end of the Pangaea.
In Svalbard, we see that things are moving
much faster back to a recovery.
The scientists don't yet know
why this is the case,
but they're determined to solve the mystery.
Seeing numerous individuals of the same species
is an important piece of the puzzle.
So we start to see all the disaster taxa as well.
Species that quickly appear
in the fossil record after an extinction event
are called disaster taxa.
One tough, ray-finned fish is found worldwide.
A global survivor of mass extinction.
Over three feet long.
We don't know why or how it survived the catastrophe.
And they spread around the world, they are quite common.
Especially one fish called saurichthys
and it's found almost everywhere after this extinction.
It looks like a gar with a very long beak.
It's found in Madagascar, in China, in Italy,
and on Svalbard, on Greenland.
Quite recent after the extinction.
Other creatures seen in Svalbard's
earliest Triassic layers are more of a surprise.
We see the disaster taxa and the marine amphibians.
Amphibians were the prominent players
in the Arctic ecosystem's earliest recovery.
These marine amphibians,
many of them looked like gharials.
They had long, slender snouts.
But they were more like a salamander body.
So they were swimming with their tail, had small feet.
Others had the shape of a skull more like an alligator.
I don't think you would want to meet them any time.
They will be like sea-living crocodiles,
a little bit smaller but still very fierce,
very aggressive, biting you.
The new world was a hostile and bleak place.
But amphibians liked it.
If you can see the whole thing here,
this here is probably a jaw.
It's one of the largest things we have found here.
This fossil jaw and many other fossils found
may reveal why amphibians moved into the ocean
and conceded the land to reptiles.
This was once at the bottom of the Triassic ocean.
They having their best days in this embayment
that is the ocean bottom that's going to be Svalbard later.
(sinister music)
These disaster survivors
adapted to the new unfriendly environment.
But amphibians didn't rule
early Triassic seas for very long.
Thing quickly turned competitive.
This is just the beginning of it and we see this exchange,
the marine amphibians, there's fewer and fewer of them
in different layers, and then they disappear.
They thrived just after the extinction
but they couldn't compete with something
that was much faster, much better jaws, much bigger teeth.
Within a few million years,
reptiles also left land and quickly became
the dominant predators in the sea.
Jorn and his team are the first to document
this transition in Northern Pangaea,
five million years earlier than researchers thought.
It's extremely fast evolution.
We see the disaster taxa.
We still the bony fishes.
Then we see the marine amphibians.
But then, we also have the first marine reptiles
in the same layer and this is something
that's quite spectacular for us to see that,
actually, we have the mix.
We have the change.
This is when we go from an environment
that's just extremely strange
because it's just after the big extinction
into something that starts to hint towards
a normal, Mesozoic ecosystem.
Determining what species
can survive an extinction event
and how long it takes for ecosystems to develop
is important research for our future.
I've not seeing anything like this before.
Here, we've got our first break.
Four to five million years
is barely a blip on the timeline of Earth history.
But in Svalbard, during that time,
life accelerated from near zero to the fast lane.
This unique window to the past helps Jorn and his team
to decipher evolution's bigger picture.
We have these five huge extinctions in life's history
and we call them bottlenecks
because there's just a few survivors
and, of course, that gives the possibility
for completely different groups
to thrive after an extinction.
Like the most famous one is when the dinosaurs go
and then we are here because of the dinosaurs going extinct.
It took quite a long time, but we are here now.
These big extinctions that wipe out so much of life,
they give different groups a possibility
to evolve into these niches that was occupied before.
It'll take years to clean
and prepare all the bones they've found.
But they have the evidence
of this surprising, rapid recovery.
And their investigation continues.
The Great Dying was also associated
with significant global warming.
As today's world grows increasingly warmer,
will creatures that we take for granted disappear?
And that's quite interesting to think about.
So it's hard to say what
steers things through this extinction.
I think it's a lot about luck.
(light music)