Volcanic Eruption Implicated in Mass Extinction

The so-called K-T extinction event that ended it for the non-avian dinosaurs, including Tyrannosaurus rex, is familiar to most paleo/geology hounds.

But it was the end-Permian extinction some 250 million years ago that was the most devastating of the major extinction events in the history of life on Earth. About 90 percent of all marine life and 70 percent of all land life went extinct at that time.

Volcanoes are implicated in almost all of these events except the K-T event, and some researchers have been advocating for a volcanic role in that one too.

Meanwhile, concrete evidence for the role of volcanic eruptions in a mid-Permian mass extinction event, called the Guadalupian extinction, has been lacking. Now a new study has found it in relics of an eruption more than 260 million years ago in southwest China. A researcher tells Bloomberg News that this event was second-only to the end-Permian event in terms of extinctions.