Earth took 10 million years to recover from mass extinction, says study

Earth took 10 million years to recover from the worst mass extinction, say researchers in a new study.

The review found that life recovered from the end-Permian extinction, which wiped out about three quarters of life on Earth 250 million years ago, about 10 million years later due to the severity of the crisis.

The end-Permian left only one in ten species of plant and animal, making it the most catastrophic extinction that is known, reported Wired.

It is considered the only extinction to have severly affected insects.

The review, by Dr Zhong-Qiang Chen, from the China University of Geosciences in Wuhan, and Professor Michael Benton from the University of Bristol, found the delay to recover from the extinction was due to two factors.

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The first was the severity of the crisis.

The second was the continuing unstable conditions on the planet, including climate change, acid rain and ocean acidification, which are believed to be the causes of the extinction.

 "It is hard to imagine how so much of life could have been killed, but there is no doubt from some of the fantastic rock sections in China and elsewhere round the world that this was the biggest crisis ever faced by life," said Chen in a statement.

"Life seemed to be getting back to normal when another crisis hit and set it back again," said Benton, according to TG Daily.

"The carbon crises were repeated many times, and then finally conditions became normal again after five million years or so."

The findings were published in Nature Geoscience.