Earth’s greatest mass extinction 250 million years ago shows what happens when El Niño gets out of control – new study

By Alex Farnsworth, Senior Research Associate in Meteorology, University of Bristol
David Bond, Palaeoenvironmental Scientist, University of Hull
Paul Wignall, Professor of Palaeoenvironments, University of Leeds

Around 252 million years ago, the world suddenly heated up. Over a geologically brief period of tens of thousands of years, 90% of species were wiped out. Even insects, which are rarely touched by such events, suffered catastrophic losses. The Permian-Triassic mass extinction, as it’s known, was the greatest of the “big five” mass extinctions in Earth’s history.

Scientists have generally blamed the mass extinction on greenhouse gases released from a vast network of volcanoes which covered much of modern day Siberia in lava. But the volcanic explanation was incomplete. In our

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