Arizona State reports the Great Dying coincides with a 252 Mya coal-burn in Siberia. The PDF is free to access: Lindy T. Elkins-Tanton, S.E. Grasby, B.A. Black, R.V. Veselovskiy, O.H. Ardakani and F. Goodarzi.
What killed the planet was a rise in the equatorial ocean temperatures to 40 C, "104 F" for Americans. 96% of ocean species died, including the trilobite. This event coincides with a supervolcano in the Siberian Traps up in Tunguska. But why would a volcano warm the planet? Aerosols are supposed to chill it, nu?
The paper tells us what other researchers have noticed, but which data hadn't got to the rest of us: by 252 Mya this planet - and Tunguska in particular - had already laid down its most iconic fossil-fuel deposits. That's what "the Permian Basin" even means to Texans, not to mention the "Carbon-iferous" before that. Tunguska had a massive coal field right where the magma-chamber was forming.
Elkins-Tanton's team finds proof that this magma did, indeed, ignite this the greatest coal-and-oil field the planet ever had or ever will have. More, burning cinders rained down far from Tunguska, ending up in what's now Canada (admittedly they are closer than they look on a map, it's Arctic today).
Life on Earth was already teetering from the Emeishan Traps' mass-extinction 259 Mya. I wonder if the Emeishan flow had ignited coals of its own.
UPDATE 11/4: Kunio Kaiho, Md. Aftabuzzaman, David S. Jones, and Li Tian.
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