The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

by Peter Brannen

Like the catastrophic Chinese volcanism earlier in the Permian, the so-called Siberian Traps were an altogether different style of eruption than that with which we’re familiar—and occurred on a scale that beggars the imagination. Unlike today’s postcard-ready stratovolcanoes in places like Mount Fuji, Vesuvius, or Mount Rainier (or the ones that continually exploded throughout the Ordovician), the Siberian Trap eruptions are what’s known as “continental flood basalts.” And they are what they sound like: burbling floods of lava that cover whole continents, stacking up miles thick in frighteningly short periods of time (geologically). They are the single most destructive force in the history of animal life. Luckily they don’t happen very often. At the end of the Permian, Siberia briefly turned inside out as the Traps covered Russia in more than 2 million square miles (5 million square kilometers) of lava.