the Great Dying is the colloquial name for the End-Permian mass extinction event, which separates the Permian from the Triassic in the geological record.
and it’s called that for a reason, because the Great Dying killed, no joke, 90% of all animals on planet Earth in the worst mass extinction of all time! the Earth before the Great Dying was an alien land full of crocodile relatives, mammal ancestors, and more weird fish than you could shake a reasonably-sized stick at.
the world after the Great Dying was a blasted hellscape, with few survivors either in the sea or on land.
one of those land-bound survivors was the ancestor of all mammals, and another was the first of the dinosaurs! the next geologic age, the Triassic, would see the rise of dinosaurs and pterosaurs and even seagoing ichthyosaurs to replace the multitude of lineages that fell during the Great Dying.
but what caused this chaotic event?
the death of a supercontinent, no joke.
Pangea was very much a thing at the time, but plate tectonics were starting to literally rip it apart at the seams. and when the seams split, a volcanic hellstorm was unleashed that hurled lava MILES into the air and covered the land in lava beds over a mile thick, releasing gigantic stores of carbon dioxide that dwarf the maximum amount humans could ever release by an order of magnitude! and also poisonous hydrogen sulfide gas. that will be important later.
so what happened next was runaway global warming that rapidly turned the entire planet except for the poles completely uninhabitable. the ocean got so warm that it was as hot as a hot tub at the equator, which made the water unable to hold dissolved gases and sent the breathable oxygen levels in the ocean plummeting worldwide, suffocating basically everything in it. the land was covered in a haze of highly toxic gas and punishing heat that poisoned and baked animals alive, while the hot ocean waters may have fueled hurricanes the size of entire continents that ravaged both earth and sea down to the bedrock!
the whole fucking planet looked more like Venus than anything we’d recognize today.
sobasically, this was the lowest point of animal life on Earth. it took many millions of years for our planet to recover, and we all should be thankful that, whatever humanity unleashes in the future, at least it won’t be as bad as the Great Dying.
