Known fittingly as the ‘Great Dying’, the End-Permian mass extinction is the third of Earth’s ‘Big Five’ and - in terms of how many species were wiped out as a result - the most destructive.
This era-defining event almost ended life on Earth entirely and by some estimations may have consigned as many as 90% of species to extinction!
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The impacts of this event were destructive on land, but they were truly cataclysmic in the oceans where entire ecosystems collapsed, never to be seen again. Some of the most diverse groups in preceding periods, such as eurypterids, trilobites, and blastoids, were completely eradicated during this event. Others lost more than 95% of their species (e.g. brachiopods, crinoids, and ammonites) and only narrowly made it through to the following period, the Triassic.
The ‘Great Dying’ is widely considered to have been caused by the eruption of a huge volcanic system that lay under what is now Siberia, Russia. This eruption released huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which elevated global temperatures and acidified the planet’s oceans. This injection of greenhouse gases raised levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere from 400 ppm to 2,500 ppm. To put that into perspective, current CO₂ levels measure ~430 ppm.
The ‘Great Dying’ didn’t happen overnight like the extinction event that claimed the lives of the dinosaurs; instead it lasted for nearly 50,000 years and may have taken place in several distinct pulses. Staying alive during this time would have been particularly difficult, though it wasn’t impossible and our existence today is proof that some resilient animals made it through.
