Abstract
Life on this planet was almost extinguished some 252 million years ago at the boundary between the Permian and ensuing Triassic periods of geological history. This has long been known as the greatest of all discontinuities in the history of life, more catastrophic by far than extinction of dinosaurs and other creatures some 66 million years ago. Global compilations show that some 86–97% of all species became extinct at the Permian–Triassic boundary, and life has not been the same since.
The greatest mass extinction of all time some 252 million years ago was a time of extreme global warming, when warm-climate soils spread to high latitudes due to high atmospheric carbon dioxide. This fatal atmospheric perturbation due to volcanism was reversed as carbon dioxide was consumed by soil formation.
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Retallack, G.J. (2022). World’s Greatest Midlife Crisis. In: Soil Grown Tall. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88739-1_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88739-1_9
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