Around 252 million years ago, volcanoes across what is now Siberia erupted repeatedly for more than a million years, releasing perhaps 100,000 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide and helping wipe out rou
Researchers have identified that the end-Permian mass extinction was likely triggered by magma intrusions into carbon-rich sediments rather than just surface volcanic eruptions. This process released massive amounts of greenhouse gases, causing rapid climate change and biological collapse.
Why it matters
Understanding the specific geological triggers of past mass extinctions provides critical context for how rapid carbon release impacts modern climate stability.
The end-Permian extinction was not a single volcano exploding on one bad day. It was a long volcanic province, a changing climate system, and a marine biosphere pushed past several limits at once.
By Space Daily Editorial Team · Editorial process
Researchers usually place the crisis close to 252 million years ago, at the boundary between the Permian and Triassic periods. A 2015 Science Advances paper by Seth Burgess and Samuel Bowring used high-precision uranium-lead dating to connect the Siberian Traps large igneous province with Earth’s most severe known extinction, while showing that the magmatism began before the main biological collapse and continued after it.
The simple version is that huge eruptions released carbon dioxide and other gases. The more useful version is that the most damaging gases may not have come only from lava reaching the surface.
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