Location Taken: Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
Time Taken: October 2012
I’ve been reading about the Permian Extinction today. Such a lovely time in Earth’s history!
Just imagine, a massive flood of lava covering an area the size of the continental United States! It’s the majority of modern-day Siberia, a vast area of layers after layers of basalt! And it erupted for a full million years!
It released so much carbon dioxide that the levels got to three times today’s level, raising the global temperature some 10 degrees. And then it melted all the permafrost at the poles, releasing enough methane to raise the temperature another 10 degrees! The world started outright baking!
Oh, and there was a thick layer of coal under where the volcano erupted. It caught fire! Just imagine, a massive coal fire going on right underneath a massive lava flood! Isn’t it exciting?! And it just added even more pollutants and carbon dioxide to the air, poisoning it further!
The planet got so hot that the oceans evened out in temperature from pole to equator. This meant that the ocean currents, which are powered by cool water moving to the equator and hot water moving to the poles, just kinda up and stopped. Which meant the water stopped circulating and the inhabitants quickly used up all the oxygen in the lower levels!
Now, this didn’t eradicate all life down there. There are some bacteria that prefer to not have all this pesky oxygen around, so they flourished quite happily! Now if only they didn’t produce hordes of hydrogen sulfide that poisoned the rest of the ocean.
Some 96% of all marine species couldn’t deal with the poisoned, oxygen-starved water and up and died on us. As did the majority of land species as well, unable to deal with the large deserts and air filled with poison. Such wimps, really. Our ancestors managed to get through it! And they had a grand time of it once the volcano finally petered out, with all this uninhabited land to expand into!
Oh, and there’s a few people that the whole thing might have been caused by a meteor strike shocking the earth into sending up the volcanic plume! Isn’t that a fun idea!?
