Burning Fossil Fuels Helped Drive Earth’s Most Massive Extinction

Paleontologists call it the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, but it has another name: “the Great Dying.” It happened about 252 million years ago, and, over the course of just tens of thousands of years, 96 percent of all life in the oceans and, perhaps, roughly 70 percent of all land life vanished forever. The smoking gun was ancient volcanism.  But volcanism on its own didn’t cause the extinction. The Great Dying was fueled, two separate teams of scientists report in two recent papers, by extensive oil and coal deposits that the Siberian magma blazed through, leading to combustion that released greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane.
“There was lots of oil, coal and carbonates formed before the extinction underground near the Siberian volcanism,” said Kunio Kaiho, a geochemist at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, and the lead author of one of the studies, published this month in Geology which presented evidence for the burning of ancient fossil fuels by magma. “We discovered two volcanic combustion events coinciding with the end-Permian land extinction and marine extinction.” - NYTimes

In rocks that formed in Northern Italy’s Dolomites and elsewhere around the time of the Permian-Triassic extinction, researchers detected spikes of a molecule formed from fossil fuel combustion.Credit...Renato Posenato, Ferrara University