Chinese Coal Formed

A seam of coal formed 250 million years ago during worst extinction event on record appears to be responsible for the anomalously high lung cancer death rates among women in the rural Chinese county of Xuan Wei in Yunnan Province.

It’s long been known that the lung cancer mortality rates in the region were the worst in the world among female nonsmokers and some anomaly in the coal had been suspected. Lung cancer mortality in the region is up to 20 times the Chinese average. But it’s only in recent years that scientists have focused in on silica in the form of very fine quartz as the mineral that makes burning the stuff so deadly.

Now, in a paper published in December in Environmental Science and Technology, Chinese, British, and American researchers have proposed a link between the silica in the coal and the massive event that nearly wiped out life at the Permian-Triassic boundary.

“What we’re saying is that the geologic and climatic events that nearly extinguished life 250 million years ago is still having an impact because its imprint is in the coals that the people are using,” said Bob Finkelman, a geologist at the University of Texas, Dallas. “They are inhaling this material with nanoquartz that was precipitated 250 million years ago and in a sense it’s extinguishing life in the community