Fossil fuels don’t exactly have a good reputation as it is – they’re incredibly environmentally destructive, and bear the brunt of the blame for our current situation with global warming. Now, experts are saying that “a frenzy of hydrocarbon burning” millions of years ago might have caused the most dramatic, devastating mass extinction the Earth has ever seen.
From the New Scientist:
Around 250 million years ago, the so-called “Great Dying” saw 70 per cent of species wiped out on land and 95 per cent in the oceans. A clue to what may have triggered this disaster lies in solidified magma from this time, which is widespread in an area of Siberia where coal is also abundant.
One suggestion is that the heat of the magma could have baked many billions of tonnes of CO2 out of the coal over a geologically brief …
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