Then, suddenly, over a period of maybe sixty thousand years—the blink of an eye in geologic time—everything died. Or nearly everything died. What killed life in the Permian was a bolt of extreme heat, brought on by violent eruptions of volcanoes in Siberia, which dumped billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere very quickly, causing the Earth’s temperature to jump as much as 26 degrees and triggering 140 degree heat waves on the land. In the tropics, the ocean warmed to 104 degrees, which is about the temperature of water in a Jacuzzi. Enough lava erupted from these traps to cover the entire
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