WELL, SHIT

Two New Studies Say Our Planetary Crisis Looks A Lot Like “The Great Dying”

Forecast is hot and muggy with a high chance of mass extinction

Photo by author

Planetary deja vu?

Every day I scour the internet for news that will encourage readers to abandon hope and spend the day drinking and watching Russian dash-cam videos. Today, a particularly on-brand treat.

Some 252 million years ago, something happened, and not a good thing. Over a period of about thirty thousand years — a heartbeat in geological time — an estimated 96 percent of marine species and 70 percent of life on land died off.

Now two separate studies suggest that it’s happening all over again, only faster.

The first paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, used ice cores to confirm what had long been suspected — that the End-Permian Extinction (EPE), aka “the Great Dying”, was caused when volcanic eruptions released enormous amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, heating up the planet and acidifying the oceans.

Sound familiar? Because that’s exactly what humans are doing right now.

The net effect was that “that the massive amount of greenhouse gases may have pushed the Earth system…