Talk:Permian–Triassic extinction event

Great Dying as a redirect?
The page top says ""Great Dying" redirects here. For the disease epidemics in the Americas brought by Europeans, see Native American disease and epidemics. There's a huge problem with that. If you go to the article Native American disease and epidemics it says nothing about the term "Great Dying." Zip! There should never be a redirect for a term that is not important enough to be mentioned several time in the article you are redirecting towards. It is very misleading to our readers. As it stands right now this redirect to European epidemics should be removed. Fyunck(click) (talk) 09:46, 26 April 2022 (UTC)
 * I agree and have deleted it. Dudley Miles (talk) 12:17, 26 April 2022 (UTC)
 * We'll see if it sticks. I removed it 2 days ago and was scolded by editor Hemiauchenia with them saying "You have obviously done no reading on this topic at all." Fyunck(click) (talk) 02:06, 28 April 2022 (UTC)
 * I note this has now been resolved with a disambiguation page that links to pages on the other meaning of 'Great Dying', with references to use of the term. Personally, I would have assumed the hatnote was there for a reason and any use outside Wikipedia might justify it. I can't see policy to discourage it at DABLINKUG. --Cedderstk 15:15, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Page size
The recent edit by has increased the page size from 11,886 words to 12,799 words. Article size recommends a maximum of 10,000 words. This is not a fixed limit, but the article could probably do with trimming by an expert as it most likely includes old edits covering research which has since been debunked. The page size guidance also suggests hiving off some sections into separate articles to improve readability. Dudley Miles (talk) 10:03, 1 June 2023 (UTC)


 * I don't think hiving off sections would be viable for this article, because all of them are intertwined with one another and having multiple separate articles would be much more confusing. You can't discuss the terrestrial extinction without talking about the effect of organic matter influx on marine extinction, for example, or look at PTME euxinia separately from SLIP volcanism, ocean acidification, or ozone layer degradation.
 * The PTME was the most important and significant event of the Phanerozoic eon, and quite possibly the entire history of life, and it's also one of the most heavily researched, so it exceeding limits designed for a typical page is to be expected. The pages for World War I, the Eastern Front of World War II, and the Pacific Theatre of World War II, for example, are far larger in word count than the PTME page is because their significance is rivalled by few other historical events; the PTME is to geology and palaeontology what those events are to history in terms of exceptional importance.
 * That being said, I think some of the sections can be axed, particularly "Combination of causes", which is redundant since the sections for the various causes already discuss their relationships and intertwining with one another, and "Supercontinent Pangaea", since the formation of Pangaea took place 85 million years before the PTME and was completely irrelevant to it. I plan on trimming the introduction a bit as well to remove redundancy. Anteosaurus magnificus (talk) 23:01, 3 June 2023 (UTC)
 * It's long – I make it over 14 000 words – but I read it without noticing that, and it is proportionate to the over 400 welcome references. It would be some work to split off the main causes section, but it might be worth it.  We could then just describe the dominant hypothesis, as mentioned by the comment below about Stanford page, and list other possible factors without discussion.  --Cedderstk 15:24, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Cause not 'unknown' according to Stanford site
The lead says that the precise cause is unknown, but according to this article from earth.stanford.edu, it "was caused by global warming that left ocean animals unable to breathe". The rest of the article goes into details about it. Mathglot (talk) 21:43, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Inconsistent species magnitudes
According to this article and Extinction event the P-T extinction resulted in
 * the extinction of 57% of biological families, 83% of genera, 81% of marine species[12][13][14] and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species

While it is statistically conceivable for a higher proportion of small genera to disappear than species, it seems extraordinarily unlikely.

I'm guessing the article was edited to include a new estimate of marine species loss from Stanley (2016), which uses a more conservative methodology from widely-cited works from Sepkoski and Raup (88-96%). Stanley in fact provides two estimates for marine species, 85% and after further correction 81%; the 83% for genera is still from Sepkoski; Stanley gives a 'new estimate of ∼62% provided here for terminal Permian extinction at the genus level'. I don't have the older sources [12] and [13] but they were published before Stanley. Even those published since like the Stanford page mentioned above (96%) use the earlier estimates; Corso et al (2022) which cites Stanley only includes its estimate as a lower bound of '81–94%'. 'Raup calculated that 52% of families' went extinct.

So should we a) choose one consistent source, b) like Corso et al acknowledge a range, or c) start with the Raup figures and acknowledge '88-96% of marine species (refs 12,13) ... a newer methodology suggests extinction of only 81% of marine species (ref Stanley)'? I would favour b, adding Corso as a reference, but would of course be interested in an expert view. --Cedderstk 15:03, 14 July 2024 (UTC)