Permo-Triassic climate

The climate of Antarctica during the Permo-Triassic was at least partly determined by its proximity to the geographic south pole which affected the average annual temperature and the duration of darkness during the winter. Nevertheless, the geological evidence indicates that sand and mud were deposited by liquid water that flowed freely across alluvial plains. In addition, h flora implies that the sedimentary rocks of the Victoria Group were deposited under temperate climatic conditions. 

Antarctica and was more than 2,800 km from the geographic pole (Stonehouse 2002). However, it is not clear how long the separation of the magnetic pole from the geographic pole can last because the magnetic pole is constrained by the rotation of the Earth to remain in the vicinity of the geographic pole. 

Perhaps we can invoke Uniformitarianism by pointing out that North America and northern Eurasia were in the grip of continental ice sheets only about 10,000-15,000 years ago and that the climate of these areas has warmed up and now supports abundant vegetation without requiring a major change in latitude because the circulation of the oceans and of the atmosphere distribute solar heat and thereby determine the climate in different parts of the Earth. 

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The end of the Permian Period is defined by the extinction of about 90% of all life forms that existed on the Earth at that time. This catastrophe was even more severe than the extinction event that defines the end of the Cretaceous Period which resulted from the profound environmental disturbance caused by the impact of an asteroid at Chicxulub on the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. The cause of the Permo-Triassic extinction could have been a dramatic fluctuation of the global climate, or of sealevel, or the impact of an asteroid or comet, or severe volcanic activity, or all of the above. 

Although we know that birds and flowers evolved much later, Antarctica was a wetter and warmer place in the Permo-Triassic than it is at the present time (Collinson 1997). In addition, the existence of very similar floras in the sedimentary rocks of Permo-Triassic age on all of the southern continents can only be explained by the break-up of Gondwana followed by the displacement of the continental fragments. This aspect of the paleobotany of the southern continents was the theme of a book edited by Taylor and Taylor (1990). In 1962, Doumani and Long could only speculate that the climate change implied by the fossil record required either that the poles had wandered or the continents had drifted. 

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