The Permian-Triassic extinction, nicknamed 'the Great Dying,' erased about 96% of marine species and 70% of land vertebrates — the only mass extinction to nearly wipe out the insects too. The Siberian Traps lit the fuse, superheating the planet, acidifying the seas, and suffocating the deep ocean. Life took around 10 million years to recover, and the survivors eventually became the dinosaurs.
Start here. PBS Eons walks you minute-by-minute through the collapse: the heat, the poisoned air, the dead zones spreading across the oceans — and asks whether anything you'd recognize could have made it through.
The central reference: the body counts, the 60,000-year main pulse, the competing kill mechanisms, and why this one event reset the entire course of life on Earth.
A vivid tour of the Permian world before the catastrophe and the slow-motion apocalypse that followed — a deep-time disaster movie with real geology underneath it.
A geologist goes deep on the evidence in the rocks: the carbon isotope spikes, the extinction pulses, and how scientists actually reconstruct a crime scene that's a quarter-billion years cold.
Rocks from the ancient seafloor preserved a record of the water itself going sour. The chilling kicker from the researchers: modern oceans are acidifying the same way, just faster.
The suffocation hypothesis: climate models suggest a warming, oxygen-starved ocean can explain the exact pattern of who died and where — the tropics emptying while the poles choked.
Zoom out to the long view: how 300 million years of evolution built the rich Permian world, and how quickly the Siberian Traps undid almost all of it.
A short, atmospheric visualization of the extinction and the eerie, nearly empty world that came after — the long silence before the Triassic refilled with life.