Abstract
Carbon isotope ratios in marine carbonate rocks have been shown to shift at some of the time boundaries associated with extinction events; for example, Cretaceous/Tertiary1 and Ordovician/ Silurian2. The Permian/Triassic boundary, the greatest extinction event of the Phanerozoic3, is also marked by a large δ13C depletion4,5. New carbon isotope results from sections in the southern Alps show that this depletion did not actually represent a single event, but was a complex change that spanned perhaps a million years during the late Permian and early Triassic. These results suggest that the Permian/Triassic (P/Tr) extinction may have been in part gradual and in part 'stepwise'6,7, but was not in any case a single catastrophic event.
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Magaritz, M., Bart, R., Baud, A. et al. The carbon-isotope shift at the Permian/Triassic boundary in the southern Alps is gradual. Nature 331, 337–339 (1988). https://doi.org/10.1038/331337a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/331337a0
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