the.com/great dying
Earth's closest brush with hitting ctrl-alt-delete on all of life.
means The Permian-Triassic mass extinction about 252 million years ago, when roughly 90% of all species on Earth died out.
from Not a word with roots to trace but a scientific nickname — paleontologists and geologists started calling the Permian-Triassic extinction event 'the Great Dying' because it so dwarfs the other mass extinctions, including the one that got the dinosaurs, that plain description felt inadequate. The name itself is modern popular-science shorthand rather than an ancient or technical term, though the event it describes was identified through 20th-century fossil-record studies showing a catastrophic die-off, likely driven by massive volcanic eruptions in what is now Siberia.
- death toll
- wiped out roughly 90% of species on Earth
- the culprit
- Siberian volcanoes erupted for nearly a million years
- oceans choked
- warming seas lost nearly all their oxygen
- recovery time
- took life about 10 million years to bounce back