HELL ON EARTH: The Great Dying

The Effect May Have Been Volcanos

However the cause might have been something else, for example increased gravitational forces or a large body impact.

This is all related to the Deccan Traps in India.

Point the first: One megavolcano kicking off can bring down civilisations - one such was the santorini eruption which wiped out the Minoan state and directly led to the end of Hyksos rule in egypt, not to mention migrations, war, and a top to toes reboot of Greek civilisation. It could be said to be the one event that ended the Greek Heroic Age.

Point the second: The Deccan Traps are volcanic and metamorphic associate deposits of if my memory serves acidic/intermediate volcanics. Think Mount St Helens + Vesuvius + the yellowstone caldera all mixed up and then multiplied a couple of thousand times.

The result of a few thousand years of that is going to result in an atmosphere thats full of fine ash, so there goes the temperature and the green plants, so its bye bye food chain. Then theres the rain thats something along the lines of battery acid. Not to mention the nice friendly pyroclastic clouds and the noxious gas seepage that'll put paid to anything local.

Pretty much anything and everything that could erupt, explode, smoke or barf out hundreds of cubic kilometers of nice baking hot volcanic rock at about 800-1200c all got in on the act all at once.

Point the third: Life is very resiliant, theres a saying that life turns up everywhere it can, the places where it cant just take a little longer. Human society could probably manage to take maybe 2 megavolcano events simultaneously without buckling, by that I dont mean extinction, but fundamental problems with our social frameworks and paradigms.

10 simultaneous or closely sequel megavolcano level events, probably not.

The Deccan Traps and their associated deposits are thousands of years of megavolcanic events numbering 100s to 1000s. Add to that we are apex omnivores... And we are pretty much screwed.

The issue with the Permian event is that its quick and its massive. Life manages usually to deal with one or the other, but not both. Massive and slow = evolution. Quick and localised = repopulation. Both quick & massive together is a terminal combination, because there is nowhere retaining a healthy population.

The problem for us, is while we have worldwide networks and transport, we are still dependant on a food chain, we've no other populations except on this planet, and no way of tapping resources from other planets or bodies. It actually might be an idea that all missions to the space station be mixed male & female - things start to go bad in a short term way, we have a seeding population, albeit a small one.

One poster mentioned that a single volcano has no quantifiable effect. They do, but its usually hidden in the data or something like a small ice age. Its like a person taking codiene for example... 30-90mg stops pain, but you only have to increase that by 100fold to end up with a corpse and some worrying questions. Likewise, 1-3 volcanos kick off, you might get a cold snap, 100 kick off and you're reduced to dwarf bread with a nice long island battery acid.

Maybe it was

Alien intervention, they saw the direction evolution was headed and sent a few fairly large asteroids in the wrong direction, to "keep down the roaches" so to speak.

Just have to hope they don't come back for another round of Whack-A-Mole.

-AC 6EQUJ5 and BTW where the hell is my flying car already?

"Known as The Great Dying and occurring at the end of the Permian period."

I don't suppose anyone called it that at the time, so who, exactly, is throwing this phrase around and what gives them naming rights?

Let's call it "The Great Right-Sizing".

Far too many species cluttering up the place... who needs these dumb dinosaurs anyway?