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

by Peter Brannen

“In the latest Triassic, reefs do really well, and the classic case is the Austrian and German Alps,” says Martindale. Martindale did her PhD work in these fairy-tale mountains, which are largely constructed from coral reefs that formed in the days when Europe huddled around the tropical Tethys Sea on the east coast of Pangaea. The hills surrounding Salzburg might be alive with the sound of music, but they’re also dead with the eventual victims of the End-Triassic mass extinction. “You hit the Triassic-Jurassic boundary, and for about 300,000 years there’s no reefs and no corals in the rock record whatsoever,” said Martindale. Though it was 200 million years ago, the obliteration of reefs at the end of the Triassic is grimly resonant for the twenty-first century. “The cool thing about the Triassic-Jurassic event is that it’s the biggest hit ever to modern corals,” Martindale said. “So that’s why it’s a big deal.”